Category: On Movies

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Mr. Ebert, ten years gone

Roger Ebert died ten years ago today. I’m more of a mind to honor the anniversary of someone’s entering the world rather than their leaving it, but Ebert was such a force in the back of my mind almost all the time I knew of him, constantly shaping not just my love of movies but also my way of thinking about movies and relating to movies. And it’s not just movies: it’s the way he related to art.

Here is what I wrote on the day he died:

—

I was trying to figure out something to write on the passing today of Roger Ebert, but nothing was leaping to mind, so I figured I’d just repost my original thoughts, from January 2012, on his book, Life Itself. I have loved and admired Ebert since I was nine, and his output of thoughtful writing even in the face of debilitating disease the last few years has been truly astonishing. It’s something of the ultimate motivator: When I think “I don’t really wanna write today”, I then thing, “Roger Ebert’s writing today, and that guy’s got some hardcore difficulties. So get in the chair and write.”

When I saw the news today — my first report came via Sheila O’Malley on Facebook, and she is frankly the exact person I would have wanted to hear this from — I commented thusly:

Amazing how something you totally expect and don’t find a surprise can still hit you between the eyes and make the world a little less shiny

Farewell, Mr. Ebert. If there is some realm beyond this one…well, whatever. At least on this side we’ll have your years and years and years of writings. I’ve come to see you as being to film what Carl Sagan was to science, and I mourn and salute you in the same manner. Congratulations on a life well-lived!

I was nine years old, and I wandered into the living room to find my mother watching some show on PBS. It was a show about movies – there would be a clip of a new movie that was out, and these two guys would then talk a bit about whether the movie was any good or not. One of these guys was a thin, lanky guy. The other was a squat, fat guy. The thin guy was named Gene. The fat guy was named Roger.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s called Sneak Previews,” my mother answered. “Those two men are film critics. They tell us if movies are good or not.”

“Oh.”

And I watched the thing. I didn’t know anything about movies, but these two guys were interesting to watch. Another year or two later, their show was off PBS, which struck me as a bummer…but they turned up again, in a syndicated show that was on, like many syndicated shows, at whatever time some station or other felt like putting it on. No matter, it was fun seeing these two guys, Gene and Roger – who worked for newspapers in Chicago – talk about movies.

So I watched Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert for years, off and on, right up until Siskel’s deeply saddening death in 1998. Then I watched Ebert and Richard Roeper (a good enough fellow, but no substitute for Siskel) for a few more years, until we no longer had cable and thus the show was beyond my grasp. And then, a few years after that, Ebert himself started to have health issues, which eventually resulted in unsuccessful surgeries that have famously left him unable to speak or eat (he takes meals through a G-tube, which is something I understand all too well, thanks to Little Quinn).

Siskel and Ebert were, in my view, one of the great duos in the history of anything. Those two had such astonishing chemistry together, that it was a joy to watch them agree positively on a movie, an even bigger joy to see them agree negatively on a movie (seriously, watching the two of them tag-team on a bad movie was always great), and the biggest joy of all when they disagreed. Then you could see some fireworks. I remember Ebert being astonished at Siskel’s thumbs-down review of Scorsese’s Casino; “Thumbs down?!” Ebert yelped. And there was another time – I can’t remember the movie – where Ebert liked it and Siskel did not, and Ebert said something like “I don’t think you wanted to like this movie”, a suggestion that seemed to physically hurt the usually more acerbic Siskel. “I love to like pictures!” he protested.

One time on Late Night with David Letterman, there was a segment that had Mujibur and Sirajul, the two Indian owners of a local store, reporting to Dave from somewhere in the country. And Dave says, “If you two are out there, who’s watching the store? Can we send a cameraman to see who’s in charge at the store?” So a cameraman goes into the store, to reveal a very stern-looking Siskel and Ebert. OK, I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, Ebert has been writing about the movies for decades now, and he is, by nearly any measure, the critic whose work I find the most illuminating and the most evocative. I’ve been reading him nearly almost as long as I’ve been watching him on teevee, and for a number of years, his annual review collections were required book purchasing of mine. Now he has produced a memoir, which he has titled Life Itself.

Ebert’s health struggles in recent years are well-known, and it’s been truly fascinating to watch him take to blogging in the wake of the loss of his physical voice, a medium he had initially viewed with suspicion but which allowed his authorial voice to finally blossom to its greatest strength. Ebert has always been a fine writer, but oddly, his disability-due-to-cancer has, for many, made him even better. Maybe it’s similar to that old saw about how when you lose one sense, the others somehow make substantial gains in acuity.

Reading his blog, I’ve mostly been struck by Ebert’s ongoing zest for life, even when there were occasional posts that took an especially elegiac tone that made me wonder if he was preparing for his own departure from this world. Ebert is still with us, though, and now we have Life Itself.

The book is more a series of vignettes than a straight telling of Ebert’s life. The vignettes are more or less in chronological order, but Ebert seems to be more exploring various themes in his life than the chronology of events. The book is something of a memory album that gives an impression of a life, which seems to me a good way to structure a biography. Sometimes when I read biographies, I get a sense of “plot” that couldn’t possibly be there. Ebert is well aware that life is plotless, and that many of the things that shape the paths of our lives for good or ill are often accidental, a function of our coming into the circle of this person instead of that person, or even something so prosaic as taking this flight instead of that one.

It’s telling that the book gives more of a sense of his development as a writer than as a critic; I suspect that Ebert believes that he would have been a writer no matter what, and it was just an accident of various circumstances that led to him writing about movies for the last forty years. There’s no “Through all my life the cinema has grounded my being” or anything like that; Ebert grew up as a talented kid who liked going to movies with his buddies on Saturdays. I love when he recounts his first reviews of avant garde films; finding himself in confusion as to what the films were about, he took the approach of simply recounting his experience in watching the film. This is an approach that has gone on to inform his entire approach to movie reviewing and film criticism.

Sometimes, in the course of his blogging over the last few years, a tone has crept into Ebert’s writing – that he seems to deny whenever it is pointed out, but it is there – that he is, in long form, saying goodbye to his life. I deeply hope that this is not the case. Ebert is, for me, to film as Carl Sagan is to science, and he’ll be missed by me in equal measure when he is gone.

Here are some excerpts from Life Itself.

On Mike Royko:

At about six p.m. On New Year’s Day of 1967, only two lights on the fourth floor were burning – mine and Mike Royko’s. It was too early for the graveyard shift to come in. Royko walked over to the Sun-Times to see who else was working. A historic snowstorm was beginning. He asked me how I was getting home. I said I’d take the train. He said he had his old man’s Checker car and would drop me at the L station. He had to make a stop at a twenty-four hour drug store right where the L crossed North Avenue.

Royko at thirty-five was already the city’s most famous newspaperman, known for complex emotions evoked with unadorned prose in short paragraphs. Growing up as the son of a saloon keeper, he knew how the city worked from the precinct level up, and had first attracted attention while covering city hall. He was ten years older than me and had started at the old City News Bureau, the cooperative supported by all the dailies that provided front-line coverage of the police and fire departments. Underpaid and overworked kids worked under the hand of its editor, Arnold Dornfeld, who sat beneath a sign reading: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. When I met him he’d been writing his Daily News column for two years. It was his writing about Mayor Richard J. Daley that took the city hall word clout and made it national. He chainsmoked Pall Malls and spoke in a gravelly poker player’s voice. He drank too much, which to me was an accomplishment.

That snowy night the all-night drugstore was crowded. “Come on, kid,” he said. “Let’s have a drink at the eye-opener place.” He told me what an eye-opener was. “This place opens early. The working guys around here, they stop in for a quick shot on their way to the L.” It was a bar under the tracks so tiny that the bartender could serve everyone without leaving his stool. “Two blackberry brandies and short beers,” he said. He told me, “Blackberry brandy is good for hangovers. You never get charged for a beer chaser.” I sipped the brandy, and a warm glow filled my stomach. It may have been the first straight shot of anything I’d ever tasted. I’d been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in the eye-opener place. I was a newspaperman. A blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.

“Jeez, they’re scoring like crazy!” I said, after the third goal in less than a minute.

“Where you from, kid?”

“Urbana,” I said.

“Ever seen a hockey game?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights.”

On books:

Chaz [Ebert’s wife] and I have lived for twenty years in a commodious Chicago town house. This house is not empty. Chaz and I have added, I dunno, maybe three or four thousand books, untold numbers of movies and albums, lots of art, rows of photographs, rooms full of comfortable furniture, a Buddha from Thailand, exercise equipment, carved elephants from India, African chairs and statues, and who knows what else. Of course I cannot do without a single one of these possessions, including more or less every book I have owned since I was seven, starting with Huckleberry Finn. I still have all the Penrod books, and every time I look at them, I’m reminded of Tarkington’s inventory of Penrod’s pants pockets. After reading it a third time, as a boy, I jammed my pockets with a pocketknife, a Yo-Yo, marbles, a compass, a stapler, an oddly-shaped rock, a hardball, a ball of rubber bands, and three jawbreakers. These, in an ostensible search for a nickel, I emptied out on the counter of Henry Rusk’s grocery, so that Harry Rusk could see that I was a Real Boy.

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs, and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may nee to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, forty-seven novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 bestseller by James Gould Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year’s list of fiction bestsellers and surface with a scowl. I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was fourteen, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.

I cannot throw out these books. Some are enchanted because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word. They’re shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most were used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady bookstore on the Left Bank in 1965 (two dollars, today ninety-one). The Shaw plays from Cranford’s on Long Street in Cape Twon, where Irving Freeman claimed he had half a million books. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used bookstore. Other books I can’t throw away because, well, they’re books, and you can’t throw away a book. Not even a cookbook from which we have prepared only a single recipe, for it is a meal preserved, in printed form. The very sight of Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking by Kenneth H.C. Lo quickens my pulse. Its pages are stained by broth, sherry, soy sauce, and chicken fat, and so thoroughly did I master it that I once sought out Ken Lo’s Memories of China on Ebury Street in London and laid eyes on the great man himself, dining alone in a little room near the entrance. A book like that, you’re not gonna throw away.

On his wife:

I sense from the first that Chaz was the woman I would marry, and I know after twenty years that my feelings were true. She had been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.

On Siskel:

One of the things I miss about Gene Siskel is that he’s not around to make jokes about my current condition. He would instinctively know that at this point I wouldn’t be sensitive, having accepted and grown comfortable with my maimed appearance. He wouldn’t have started joking too soon. His jokes would have the saving grace of being funny. Here’s one I’m pretty sure he would have come up with: “Well, there’s one good thing about Roger’s surgery. At least he no longer needs a bookmark to find his chin.”

On movies:

I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind. There is no such thing as an old film. There is a sense in which old movies are cut free from time. I look at silent movies sometimes and do not feel I am looking at old films; I feel I am looking at a Now that has been captured. Time in a bottle. When I first looked at silent films, the performers seemed quaint and dated. Now they seem more contemporary. The main thing wrong with a movie that is ten years old is that it isn’t thirty years old. After the hairstyles and the costumes stop being dated and start being history, we can tell if the movie itself is timeless.

What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn’t matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn’t matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we’re supposed to be happy. But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we’re supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren’t about what happens to the characters. They’re about the example that they set.

Casablanca is about people who do the right thing. The Third Man is about two people who do the right thing and can never speak to each other as a result. The secret of The Silence of the Lambs is buried so deeply that you may have to give this some thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.

…

What I miss, though, is the wonder. People my age can remember walking into a movie palace where the ceiling was far overhead, and balconies and mezzanines reached away into the shadows. We remember the sound of a thousand people laughing all at once. And screens the size of billboards, so every seat in the house was a good seat. “I lost it at the movies,” Pauline Kael said, and we all knew just what she meant.

When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skilfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous, and on your way out you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.

May Ebert’s spot in the balcony remain reserved for years to come.

 

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March on Teevee!

So, what did we watch in March?

::  We went to see Casablanca on the big screen, which makes it by definition the best thing we saw or watched in March. As Casablanca is my second-favorite movie of all time, the only way it could be bested for a month’s viewing is if we watched Star Wars in the same month, which we did not. I wrote about it on my Substack. (And I have got to stop letting so much time pass between viewings of this movie. It was about a year-and-a-half between viewings. Too long, man. Too long!)

::  Your Place Or Mine is a rom-com. Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon play best friends of twenty years who hooked up one time in college…and then settled into platonic bestie-status. They live on opposite sides of the country, and for the purposes of this plot, they agree to switch houses for a week. Then the movie has each become involved in the other’s life, and as the movie goes on, even though they spend the entire film apart, in the end they have to admit that they’re not platonic besties at all. It’s a diverting enough piece of fluff, but if you want the rom-com between two “lovers” who don’t actually show up in the same place until the very last scene, you’re better off with Sleepless in Seattle.

::  Then there’s R.I.P.D., which stands for “Rest In Peace Division”. I cannot lie: we watched this because it has Ryan Reynolds in it, and nothing with Reynolds is ever unwatchable, even if he has made the occasional not-so-great movie…like this one. Oh well, it happens. This movie coulda-woulda-shoulda been better! It’s not bad, but it has some cool ideas that sadly fall flat in the execution. Reynolds is a cop who is killed in the line of duty, but rather than go to the afterlife, he ends up with the Rest In Peace Division — R.I.P.D., get it?–where he teams up with Jeff Bridges, doing his best growly-angry version of The Dude, to track down dead souls who have gone on the run rather than report to their date with, well, the Bad Place. This is a riff of sorts on the Men In Black idea, with dead people instead of aliens, and with the talent on screen I kept thinking that it should be as good as M.I.B., and yet…it’s not. It’s not bad, exactly…but it’s not great, either. Frustrating, really.

::  I remember when Cameron Crowe’s movie Aloha came out, and it got roasted for being bad and uninteresting and also for whitewashing Hawaiian culture by casting white actress Emma Stone as a character who is “one-quarter Hawaiian”. Still, I wanted to see it anyway, because honestly, I’ve loved just about everything I’ve seen by Crowe. I mean, he’s given us Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous, all of which are terrific. I am even a fan of Elizabethtown, which is not a highly-regarded movie, and We Bought a Zoo, which isn’t exactly poorly-regarded but isn’t considered in the class of his earlier work, either. So, what about Aloha? Well…I didn’t hate it, but it never really clicks, either, and no, Stone is not terribly convincing as someone keyed in by blood to the concerns of the native Hawaiian population. I didn’t hate it, but it’s not a Crowe movie that I’ll be revisiting any time soon. It doesn’t even offer much by way of Hawaiian travelogue goodness. After the movie, it hit me that the most interesting couple in aren’t the leads (Stone and Bradley Cooper), but the secondary couple, the military couple fallen on marital struggle, played by John Krasinki and Rachel McAdams. It’s never a good sign when the writer-director doesn’t realize who the most interesting people in the movie are, is it?

::  Last Seen Alive is…well, let’s just say that it was the perfect movie to watch while armed with a pitcher of Rum Punch. (Have I posted about the Rum Punch yet? No? Huh….) Gerard Butler and Jaimie Alexander are a married couple who are about to “take a break”, after they visit her parents, when they stop at a truck-stop/convenience store for gas. She disappears, and he proceeds to set out to track her down. If you ever want to watch a movie where the hero makes exactly the wrong decision at nearly every juncture along the way, this is it. Also, if you want to watch a guy sweat, watch Butler in this movie, because he sweats a lot. As Carla from Cheers once quipped when Norm said that he’s been known to sweat a bit, “We could grow rice!” It’s a taut thriller, sure–so taut that the movie doesn’t really take time to make me, you know, care about the characters. Three glasses of Rum Punch really helped this goofy movie go down.

Teevee thoughts:

Actually, not a whole lot! We’re still watching the same shows, really. Next Level Chef is still grinding along, and it’s a fun watch, even with its somewhat strange concept. (Why, I continue to wonder, are all the contestants made to dress the same? I don’t get this.) We also started a cooking show on Netflix called Snack Versus Chef, in which chef contestants are tasked with recreating junk-food snack items like Oreos, Lays Chips, and so on. Kind of fun, though it usually leaves me with the munchies.

We also started watching Wednesday, of which I will only say for now that we’re really enjoying. We watched the first episode as a family, and then The Wife and I continued watching, all the way up to the finale…when The Daughter saw us getting ready to watch that very finale and said, “Awwww, I wanted to watch that show with you!” We’re like, “Sheesh, it’s not like we binged it!” We took two to three weeks to get to the finale, and there are only like 8 or 9 episodes…but as of now, we’re rewatching it with her. And honestly? Watching stuff as a family on occasion is still a delight.

What are you all watching these days?

 

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“Sungmanitutonka ob waci”: Thoughts on DANCES WITH WOLVES (a repost)

It’s Oscar Night, which barely registers on my radar anymore…but I still notice that every year around this time the “Worst Movies To Win Best Picture!” listicles start making the rounds again, so once again I present my thoughts on one of the “poster child” movies for the “rightful” Best Picture getting robbed by a lesser movie, Dances With Wolves, which is always cited as having won over the real Best Picture, Goodfellas. I’m never going to win this argument, but I will speak for Dances every year.

By the way, I thought I had written this relatively recently. It turns out that this post is nearly 20 years old. Where does that time go, I wonder?

I was looking on my shelves for a movie to watch the other night, and on the bottom shelf I found a movie I hadn’t watched in at least five years, this despite the fact that this same movie completely floored me when I saw it in its initial release. The movie was Dances With Wolves, and it’s been so long that my pan-and-scan VHS copy of it is now showing the telltale signs of decay — bad tracking in spots, sound that muffles in places, et cetera. After watching it almost anew, having forgotten a large number of the smaller plot details, the film has shot to very near the top of my “Get the DVD” list (along with that two-disc Casablanca set and The Adventures of Robin Hood).

When you get a discussion of the Oscars going with people who see a lot of movies, one of the most common examples of a year in which the wrong film was purportedly given Best Picture is 1991. That was the year that first-time director Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves took the big prize over Martin Scorcese’s GoodFellas, in an eerie repeat of ten years earlier when first-time director Robert Redford’s Ordinary People beat out Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull. (Now there is an example of the Academy getting it staggeringly wrong. Does anybody watch, or read, Ordinary People any more?) I can sort-of see the complaint: I remember GoodFellas being a very good film. Although I haven’t seen it in at least ten years, I remember it being pretty absorbing, and I’m one who has very little interest in stories about the Mafia or organized crime. I have yet to see any of the Godfather movies all the way through, for example.

UPDATE: I have, in fact, seen The Godfather since I wrote this piece.

I know that Dances With Wolves has fallen pretty seriously out of favor, much like Titanic and Forrest Gump have, but so help me, to this day I think it’s still a better movie than GoodFellas. (Keeping in mind, of course, my constant belief that there is no such thing, really, as “best”.) This does pose an interesting question: should I rank a film that engages me despite my complete lack of interest in its genre higher than a film that engages me much more, but in a genre to which I’m more sympathetic? I’ll leave that for another time — for now, suffice it to say that while I admired GoodFellas, I really don’t have much desire to ever see it again.

So, about Dances With Wolves. There is a lot to praise in the film on a technical basis, of course. The cinematography is amazing: I don’t recall any movie, except this one, ever making me think, “Damn, I gotta go see South Dakota one of these days!” (If you get off I-90, there are some very beautiful spots in South Dakota. It’s not all flatlands punctuated by billboards for Wall Drug.) John Barry’s score is just gorgeous. (An expanded edition of the CD is apparently in the works.) The build-up to the buffalo hunt is still a great sequence, accelerating the tempo until we’re in the midst of a full-fledged stampede.

The film is, to my way of thinking, a clinic on pacing: even in the four-hour director’s cut, I was never conscious of the passage of time. And while I wasn’t moved to tears quite so often this time as I was when I first saw the movie (when I started blubbering when Cisco, the horse, was shot and never really stopped), I did still weep at the end when, as Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist are leaving the camp, Wind In His Hair goes to a high clifftop and shouts his hard-won friendship with Dances With Wolves for all to hear.

What impressed me most about the film this time was the fact that none of the characters are wasted; the film is full of small moments of character development and many of the minor players who only appear in a handful of scenes have arcs of their own — a young Sioux named Smiles A Lot, for instance, comes of age over the course of the film, although it’s easy to miss: the first time we see him, he is too young to be taken with war parties, but at the film’s end he accompanies his first war party to rescue Dances With Wolves from the American soldiers. And even those soldiers’ commanding officer is shown to be somewhat honorable, and after he is killed in the fight at the river, Dances With Wolves stops Wind In His Hair from scalping him.

The film’s director’s cut plays down the “noble savage” aspects of the story (which I never found all that overt in the first place). People who have only seen the theatrical version will remember a shot in which the tribe comes upon a field littered with skinned buffalo carcasses, and wagon-wheel tracks leading away from the scene; but in the director’s cut, after that scene the tribe sends a band of warriors out to kill those white hunters, and Lt. Dunbar, appalled at the joy with which the tribe celebrates these deaths, refuses to sleep amongst them. And much later, Dances With Wolves — John Dunbar, no more — feels the same desire to kill some whites who have intruded upon the tribe’s sacred grounds. This change is depicted, but left unremarked.

I also found a certain subtext to the film of how much might have been different if one thing, along the way, had been different. What if the Union General hadn’t been there to see John Dunbar’s suicide attempt? What if the commanding officer of Fort Hayes had not been insane? Perhaps, then, he would not have allowed Fort Sedgwick to go unsupplied for so long, and thus perhaps Captain Cargill and his men would still have been there when Dunbar arrived. What if Stands With A Fist’s husband had not been killed? Would Dunbar have become so deeply entwined with the tribe had there not been the added factor of his falling in love with her? What if that honorable officer at the end — the one whose body Dances With Wolves insists be allowed to lay unmolested — had recognized Dances With Wolves as the Army officer who had passed him in the hall at Fort Hayes a year before? I admire the way a lot of the story developments in Dances With Wolves hinge upon circumstances of which the characters are often completely unaware, in the way that our lives are often affected or even shaped by the actions of people we never meet and whose existence we never know.

Is Dances With Wolves sentimental? Yes, probably, but I never found it too thick — in fact, it is understated, in many places — and in any case, I rather enjoy sentiment now and then. I like raw emotion in my stories.

(The title of this post is, of course, the name “Dances With Wolves” in Lakota. I found it here. Some linguistic speculation can be found in this PDF document.)

The image above is from this more recent article about the film.

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Viewing Diary: February

Here are some random notes and thoughts on things we watched in February:

Teevee:

If you’re not watching Abbott Elementary, I really don’t know what you’re doing with your life. I was getting kind of tired of the whole “workplace documentary” sitcom subgenre that The Office blew up, spawning a dozen imitators, but the characters in Abbott Elementary are just so fun and compelling that all the usual “workplace documentary” stuff–the knowing glances at the camera, the “stealth shots” of characters’ hidden reactions to things other people are saying or doing–don’t feel at all forced. If you’re unfamiliar, Abbott Elementary takes place in an inner city elementary school in Philadelphia, where talented and well-meaning teachers work with too little resources and too little money to teach their overstuffed classrooms. Yes, there is a slow-burn romance subplot a la Jim-and-Pam from The Office, and yes, the boss figure, Principal Ava Coleman, is portrayed in the grand Michael Scott tradition as an often-inept obstacle that the teachers have to overcome. But where The Office would occasionally try to portray Michael as a guy who was actually a much better boss than he was usually depicted (and as many funny moments as there were with Michael Scott, this was not an angle the show was terribly successful), Principal Coleman actually does have more than a few moments where you see that she’s good at her job–or really would be if she was actually invested in it.

::  Our other sitcom candy of the moment is Home Economics, a show about three siblings and their families. The original notion is that the three siblings are all at different levels of financial success: the millionaire techbro, the middle-class brother who is a writer, and the social-worker sister who is in a constant financial struggle. Now in its third season all of those lines have been blurred a bit and the show is mainly about the quirky goings-on of this family with all their extended things going on, but it’s a fun and mostly positive show where nobody is unlikeable. Honestly, that goes a long way. (I think the show may have ended for the season! Apparently it had a 13-episode order, which does not leave me terribly optimistic for a fourth season.)

::  Then there’s American Auto, another mockumentary workplace sitcom that somehow works despite everybody being fairly unlikeable. This show is a strange case. It focuses on the upper management team of a car maker company. I suppose the pleasure here is mostly on watching upper management look like a bunch of rubes on a regular basis. The second season is unfolding now, and it’s full of a lot of madcap antics that don’t portray American management in too flattering of a light. The show does have a kind-of slow-burn romance subplot going on, but so far it’s really a slow burn, and I do find the show entertaining in its skewering way. It was created by the guy who previously created Superstore, which was also a terrific workplace comedy, so all of this tracks. Plus, alumni of Superstore show up on American Auto regularly.

::  The latest season of Hell’s Kitchen wrapped up recently, and wow, has that show become a robotic paint-by-numbers exercise. We’re watching more out of habit now than anything else. Gordon Ramsay is always fun to watch, but the challenges are almost always the same, and the punishments are just goofy (“All of our peppercorns are being delivered today, but they screwed up and mixed them all together, so you have to manually separate the black peppercorns from the white peppercorns!”), and honestly, at this point I’m not sure how much shelf life Hell’s Kitchen still has, if it doesn’t do something to mix itself up a bit. Twenty-one seasons in, watching new cooks screw up the scallops and the Beef Wellington isn’t nearly as interesting as it used to be…and with every individual cooking challenge being a 45-minute cook, watching every dish served be a “protein on top of a root vegetable puree” isn’t all that exciting, either. (But yes, we’ll watch Season 22. It’s a show that can be on in the background while I read.)

::  Then there was Pressure Cooker, a cooking competition show that actually added a Survivor/Big Brother wrinkle. A bunch of chefs are brought to live in a house that’s outfitted with a killer kitchen, and they are submitted to cooking challenges that result in elimination challenges. So in addition to cooking, this show adds the subterfuge and “alliance forming” that informs the Survivor genres. One particular chef, a young woman named Jeana, was depicted as one of the bigger “villains” in the show, as she did a lot of scheming and at one point her strategizing and, well, outright lying managed to get one of the strongest competitors eliminated. Now, I know that this woman is the villain and we’re not supposed to like her, but I don’t know…there was just something about her….

I dunno, it’s a mystery.

::  Next Level Chef has started a second season. It’s a strange concept: the set is three kitchens, stacked on top of one another, with the top level being a state-of-the-art kitchen with the very best stuff, the middle being a standard commercial kitchen that’s decent but not as good as the top level, and the basement being where old equipment, pans with loose handles, uncalibrated gas burners, and the like reside. There are three teams of cooks, and based on the results each week the teams are slotted into one of the kitchens, and each week someone is eliminated. It’s a fun concept, though the “basement level” is still good enough that we don’t really see those cooks struggle all that much. I was thinking in terms of the sabotages from Cutthroat Kitchen here, but no dice. I like the show mainly because it has a relatively fresh concept, unlike Hell’s Kitchen which is honestly just pure formula at this point.

Finally: Andor is the latest Star Wars show on DisneyPlus. I was looking forward to it after a whole bunch of people opined that it’s the best Star Wars show yet and it might even be one of the best pieces of Star Wars filmed entertainment of all, including all of the movies. So imagine my shock when I found myself bored and unengaged with the characters, to the point that my enthusiasm petered out completely and we stopped watching it after the 8th episode. (There are 12.) Andor tells the backstory of Rebel spy Cassian Andor, who was one of the leads in Rogue One. In so doing, we also get a lot of background on the earliest days of the Rebel Alliance and some citizen’s-eye-view of life under the Galactic Empire. The show is crafted as a political thriller with some heist action along the way, but the pacing was incredibly slow for me to the point of tedium, and the characters were nearly impossible for me to connect with. Andor didn’t work for me at all, being too disjointed and having too many concurrent subplots for me to invest fully in any of them. (After giving up, I learned that there’s a post-credits scene on the last episode, so I tracked it down and watched it…and it turns out that when Andor is sent to an Imperial prison-labor planet, the electronic parts he and others are forced to make are components for the super-laser for the still-under-construction Death Star. My eyes rolled at this revelation, if I’m being honest; at this point I am so tired of everything in Star Wars being tied back to the same story.)

Movies:

::  The Age of Adaline is a deeply affecting fantasy about a woman who was born in 1908 and who, when she is 29 years old, is in an accident that arrests her body’s natural aging process, basically making her forever 29. The events of the the film unfold in the present day, when Adaline’s daughter–born before Adaline’s husband’s death in 1937, just ten months before the accident–is an old woman herself, and Adaline is getting ready to push the “reset” button on her life yet again, something that became necessary when she realized people were starting to ask questions about the woman who never seems to get older. Over the course of the movie Adaline meets a man who somehow manages to slip through the defense mechanisms she’s set up for herself over the years, and then more complications develop when the new guy’s past intersects Adaline’s past in ways she couldn’t have seen coming. The story is like a kind-of Back to the Future in reverse, and it’s a beautifully made film, wonderfully shot and acted with Blake Lively in the lead as Adaline and a frankly amazing supporting role played by Harrison Ford.

::  Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t a movie that interested me in the slightest when I learned they were making it. I was never a fan of the original movie, which I found to be really predictable and kind of boring, as great as the fighter-pilot flying sequences were in that picture. I never really cared about the characters in that movie, so I wasn’t going to watch this new one…except that the buzz on it has been exceptionally strong, and curiosity got the better of me. Wouldn’t you know it: the new one is a terrific movie, that somehow makes Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” character somebody I can actually relate to, and he’s surrounded by interesting characters of their own, as well. The movie’s story is every bit as predictable as the first film, but a story’s strength does not always lie in its surprises and its twists and turns. I enjoyed this movie immensely. (For The Wife, Tom Cruise’s perfectly brown hair without a hint of salt-and-pepper was a point of contention. I’m not sure why that particular item was what tripped off her Plausibility Meter, but there it is.)

::  Like Father is an insightful story about a young woman and her troubled reconnection with her estranged father…trapped inside a dumb sitcom. The bad parts are a shame, because they drag down the good parts; but the good parts are good enough to lift the bad parts, so much so that I’m not sure where I even come down on this movie. Kristen Bell plays a young professional who is so work-obsessed that she is late to walk down the aisle at her own wedding because she took a work call as she was waiting outside the venue. This enrages her fiance, who leaves her on the altar when her phone falls out of her bouquet (because, in the movie’s first sitcom moment, she realizes she has no place to put her phone so she stuffs it down in the bouquet). As she stands on the altar not even sure what’s just happened, she recognizes her estranged father (Kelsey Grammer), whom she has not seen in years, ducking out the back. Tracking him down, they go out and get ripping drunk to the point that they don’t even remember getting on the cruise ship that was already booked for her honeymoon; thus, trapped together for the length of the cruise, they start to wear each other down and figure out where they stand, where they went wrong, and where they can go from here.

Like I said, there’s a lot of good stuff in here, mostly when the two of them put aside all the shenanigans that the movie forces upon them and just talk. When the conversation finally comes as to just why it is that now, of all times, Dad has re-emerged into the picture, it’s a welcome scene indeed and Bell and Grammer do it justice. In fact, they both sell the idea of their relationship very well, even through obnoxious stuff like their participation in the cruise ship’s lip-sync contest or other episodes that are pure sitcom. We’re talking Three’s Company-level stuff here, folks. It’s a maddening movie, honestly, because there’s enough of a really good relationship study here to make me wonder throughout, “Then why are we watching all this other goofy shit for?”

::  Finally, I randomly found Foul Play on YouTube (right here, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see it gone for copyright violation at some point). This is a movie I saw as a kid when it came out, featuring Goldie Hawn as the adorkable librarian who finds herself in the middle of some kind of criminal conspiracy that keeps ending up with dead bodies in her presence…but when she goes to notify someone about the dead bodies, the bad guys have whisked them away. It’s the classic “Normal person caught in a conspiracy but nobody believes her” story, until a cop played by Chevy Chase comes along and starts to think that maybe she has stumbled on to something. Which she has: a plot to assassinate the Pope. It’s kind of a love letter to the kind of Hitchcockian screwball mystery flick, and it still holds up pretty well. Chase is especially noteworthy here because he actually gives a performance; aside from exactly two pratfalls, none of his SNL antics are on display here, and he’s nowhere near the full-on gonzo work he’d later do for the Vacation movies and whatever else he did. Chase has had a long and productive career, even with his reputation for being enormously difficult to work with, so I guess he’s done fine, but it’s interesting to look at Foul Play and wonder what he might have done if he’d followed this line of work instead of creating Clark Griswold.

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Recent Watching….

I’ve drifted away from tracking things we’ve watched in recent years here, so I’m going to start getting back to it.

Teevee:

Kaleidoscope (Netflix): This is a heist show that tells a pretty standard heist story: a guy wants to rob another guy, but stealing his stuff is going to be very difficult, so he puts together a crew to help him. The crew consists of career criminals each with a different skill set, and they all have trust issues. All that, and there’s backstory between the main thief and the planned victim. It’s all pretty standard, as heist stories go, but the twist here is that the show is designed for the episodes to be literally watched in any order. This works kinda OK. The show is slick and well-made, with terrific acting, but once you get past the “shuffle it up!” nature of the story, you see that when taken from point A to point B, it’s a completely standard heist story.

Andor (Disney+): As I write this we’re only up to the 7th episode, and there are 12 overall. Many folks have told me how incredibly well-written this show is, and there’s some of that, but so far I’m finding the pacing really off. The first few episodes are basically a three-hour slow burn and it’s hard to get terribly interested in the characters. Things do improve by around the fourth or fifth episode, but “best Star Wars writing yet”? I’m not seeing it yet. Maybe the last five episodes get there, though.

Hell’s Kitchen (FOX): As of this writing, the show is down to probably the last three or four episodes of the season. At this point it’s pretty much something to put on the teevee. I’m glad that it airs Thursdays, which makes it a perfect brainless watch on Hulu on Friday night. After this many seasons the show is just paint-by-numbers with a new group of chefs each year; there has been no significant change to the show’s formula in years, and not even dumping nasty stuff on the chef’s heads makes the “Blind Taste Test” interesting at this point.

Blown Away (Netflix): This was Season Three of Netflix’s competition show about glass blowing. And yes, it’s a delight to watch, because it’s shot beautifully in a giant glass hot-shop in Hamilton, ON; there’s none of that personality-clash, alliance-building crap that is so often the rule in “One goes home each week” competition shows; and the episodes are only about half an hour long. There’s a lot to learn here about glass-blowing, and it’s joyous to watch artists doing art. (Watching the first two seasons partially informed our visit last year to the Corning Museum of Glass, a residency at which is part of this show’s prize for the final winner.)

Movies:

Glass Onion: This sequel to Knives Out isn’t actually a sequel at all; it’s simply another mystery story featuring the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc as he unknots a crime that’s been committed by one from a number of narcissistic rich people. Glass Onion doesn’t follow the Knives Out formula much at all, and it looks very different from the first film, which is encouraging; writer-director Rian Johnson isn’t just ticking off the boxes as he makes these. Lots of fun.

The Gentlemen: Adventures in the London underworld, told by unreliable narrators and involving people none of whom seems to have the slightest expectation of longevity. Marijuana cultivation and smuggling, blackmail, and double-crossing give way to violence and murder, much of it committed by criminals who aren’t always the most competent batch out there. It’s an entertaining movie, and it actually gets really good about halfway through, when the viewer realizes that the story is too complicated and is being told to us by people who may be lying, so it’s best to sit back and enjoy the blood-soaked ride.

The Pale Blue Eye: I really enjoyed this and it’s an utterly beautiful film, a murder mystery set at West Point and the Hudson Rivel Valley in the early 1800s; one of our heroes is a young West Point cadet named Edgar Allan Poe, who assists a detective (Christian Bale) in tracking down whoever is brutally murdering cadets. The movie gets its atmosphere completely right, including tavern scenes wherein a movie finally manages to convey how dark a place really gets when it’s lit by candlelight alone. The film suffers in its last act; there aren’t enough characters to make the mystery’s solution a satisfying surprise, and then there’s the fact that the mystery is apparently resolved while 25 minutes of runtime remains, so…well, if you’re an experienced viewer of these kinds of stories, you know what that means.

Hugo: This filmed adaptation of Brian Selznick’s wonderful book The Invention of Hugo Cabret–which I have only recently read, after having owned it for years–is one of the most delightful things I’ve ever seen. The book is a delightful blend of novel and graphic novel, and the story blends an almost steampunk-ish initial story in which a young boy is living in the secret tunnels of Paris’s biggest train station in 1918 or so, secretly tending to the station’s many clocks and trying to complete the repairs he and his father began on an “automaton”, a steel clockwork figure in the shape of a man with a pen, before the story eventually shifts to being a love letter to early cinema. Martin Scorsese directed this film, and every second of it is a delight, between the main story, the wonderful characters in the periphery, and the entire world the film inhabits–and that’s before you even get to the “love letter to early cinema” part, which is where Scorsese really shines. Though the film was nominated for many awards, it was apparently a flop in 2011 when it came out; why word-of-mouth didn’t propel this movie to being a hit, I’ll never know. I’m very happy we watched this.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: One of the things I’ve always admired about Love Actually is that a few of its characters are assholes, and the movie doesn’t shy away from looking at what happens when assholes get involved in a love story. This Woody Allen movie takes that concept all the way: it’s basically Love Actually but entirely about assholes. It’s oddly amusing and even entertaining, but everybody in it is a huge asshole.

Stay the Night: Oooooh, I loved this movie. Sheila O’Malley recommended it last year, and as her recommendations are almost always good enough for me, I watched in on that basis alone. It’s similar to Before Sunrise in that it unites a young man and a young woman for one single night in one city, and it lets us follow their emotional gamut for just that one single night. In this case the young woman is a professional who has just been passed over for promotion, and the young man is a hockey player who is being sent down to the minors. They’re both reeling and wounded when they meet each other in downtown Toronto, and they roam about the city (I always love how movies in this mini-genre make cities look so magical) sharing more and more about their lives, before the morning brings them to their required parting. Do they ever get back together? Who knows? That’s not the point.

What have you been watching of late?

 

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If you know, you know.

Happy birthday, Cary Grant.

To this day, people say, “Oh so-and-so’s the new Cary Grant.” Cary Grant was acting in 1930. We’re talking 70 years ago. Almost 80 years ago, and we’re still referring to people as the “new Cary Grant”. Well, guess what, there’s no such thing. If 80 years later, you’re still trying to find someone to be the next so-and-so, there is nobody. It’s only him.

 

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Stayin’ Alive!!!

Oy, I don’t want to talk about snow. Let’s talk about the opening of Saturday Night Fever!

And yes, I’m serious, because it’s one of the best movie openings ever, and not just because it has a few famous shots or it uses one of the greatest songs by The Bee Gees. It establishes the film’s setting and a key facet of the lead character’s personality, all in the space of just a couple of minutes as the opening credits roll.

Here’s that opening:

Now, most people remember this for John Travolta’s cocky, almost arrogant strut down that sidewalk. His hair is perfectly coifed, and his outfit–leather jacket with red open-collared shirt and matching shoes with perfect shine–combine to create that image, don’t they? This is a guy you don’t mess with. The song’s lyrics seem almost to be describing this specific man, don’t they?

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walkI’m a woman’s man, no time to talk

But digging a little deeper…the movie doesn’t open right on Travolta walking. No, we get a shot of Manhattan, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge…and then the camera pulls back. Manhattan recedes, as if to tell us no, we’re not going there, that place is a dream. There’s a fade and suddenly we’re seeing another bridge, the Varrazano Narrows. We’re still in NYC, but Manhattan is world’s away, we’re being told. The camera drops us into one of those neighborhoods all the way on the other side of the city, with all of Brooklyn between our movie’s setting and the place where NYC dreams come true. An elevated train stops, and then do we finally cut down to street level, where our man, Tony Manero, is walking.

But we don’t even see him walking, first! He’s stopped to check out the shoes in the front window of a shoe store. So before anybody has said a single word, we know that we’re far away from Manhattan, and our main character is serious about his appearance. Then we see him walking: first that famous shot of his feet, walking in step with the music playing, and then the camera pans up to show us Tony Manero.

And for all the confidence of his strut and it’s mirroring in the music, his face is anything but super confident. Travolta’s eyes dart back and forth, in the self-conscious way of someone who is wondering if people are looking or laughing at him. The expression Travolta wears here is not the expression of someone walking as if he owns the sidewalk. (There’s also the fact that he’s walking that way, dressed this way, while carrying a can of paint.)

Then we get the movie’s first dialogue: cut to a pizzeria where a worker is pulling a pie from the oven as Tony waits at the carry-out window. She doesn’t address him like he’s a big-wheeling hot-shot guy; she smiles and says a friendly, “Hiya, Tony, two or three?” Because he’s a regular. And when he orders, he doesn’t give a confident “Two!” or a silent holding-up of two fingers. Travolta gives the order quickly, but repeats himself: “Uh, two. Two, yeah, two. Two’s good.” Cut to Tony, walking again, paint can in one hand and his two slices, stacked together in the other.

So now we know that Tony’s world is just a few miles from Manhattan but might as well be worlds away, and that the outward appearance that Tony obviously cultivates very specifically and very carefully is something of an act, a veneer he has put on a more tender inner life. Both of these facts will become key thematic elements in the movie to come.

That, folks, is a great movie opening.

 

 

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STAR TREK and Me (a repost)

I first wrote this on the old blog six years ago, on the 50th anniversary of STAR TREK’s first airing. Today that anniversary rolls around again, now the 56th, and all these words still apply, so here they are!

And you people, you’re all astronauts on…some kind of star trek?

–Zefram Cochrane, Star Trek First Contact

Wow. Star Trek made its official US debut fifty years ago today. That’s…amazing. (The show aired for the first time anywhere on September 6, 1966, in Canada.)

Star Trek came and went and was already in syndication when I was born, but my sister loved it, so I quite literally do not remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a thing. One of my earliest teevee memories is, in fact, the brief bit at the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”, when Dr. McCoy is saying “Oochie woochie coochie coo” to a newborn baby, to Spock’s great confusion.

It’s often taken as an article of faith in the geek universe that one is either a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, and I can kind of see why. It’s a Yankees-Red Sox kind of thing, I suppose. Or Bears-Packers. But for me, it’s complicated. I have to be honest: push me to answer, hold a gun to my head, and I will almost certainly choose Star Wars. But the margin of victory is not large, and in truth, there’s no way I’m the writer I am now without both of them.

“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over “I love you.”

–James T. Kirk, “The City on the Edge of Forever”

Star Trek shaped my view, in a lot of ways, of what the future can and should be. It should be a time when humans are not afraid to explore the universe and, in fact, do so with enthusiasm. It should be a time when the diversity of humanity should be celebrated and not resisted. It should be a time when beautiful ships fly the stars, instead of rusting dingy hulks. It should be a time of wonderful cities, not dystopic nightmares. It should not be a time of universal peace without conflict, because that’s almost certainly impossible, but it should be a time when we approach conflict from a much more mature standpoint than we do now.

Of course, when I was a kid, Star Trek was none of that. It was just a show about nifty adventures in space, a way for me to scratch that particular itch in the years between releases of Star Wars movies. It didn’t ever occur to me back then that I was supposed to like one over the other; they were different things, and I liked ‘em both. If Star Wars hit me like a bolt from the blue, Star Trek was the thing that was there, day in and day out. Star Trek was what was on during the afternoon hours after school. I’d get home and watch it and thrill to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew on the black-and-white teevee set I had in my room. This was before the Internet, obviously, and I didn’t have any access to an episode guide, so the only way to learn the episodes was to watch and watch and rewatch them as they came. I got pretty good at recognizing the episodes by sight, usually within seconds. (Often I had to wait until the first shot after the obligatory opening shot of the Enterprise.)

I don’t know if the station had some kind of plan for airing the episodes in any particular order, but I recall that you could go upwards of a year without seeing “Mirror, Mirror” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”, but other episodes – “The Return of the Archons”, “Errand of Mercy” – would show up more frequently. A certain “This one again?!” factor crept in at times, especially with some of the crappier episodes. (I can live the rest of my life to a rich old age and never watch “The Alternative Factor” again.) But the great episodes? Those live on forever. I still laugh at “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and I live for a moment when someone near me uses the phrase “storage compartments”, so I can respond as Kirk does: “STORAGE compartments? STORAGE compartments?!” And I still feel that sense of doom slowly unfolding as “The City on the Edge of Forever” spins its tale, toward the awful moment when, in order to fix history after it has been changed, James Kirk must stand and watch as a 20th century woman with whom he has fallen in love is killed.

MCCOY: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?

SPOCK: He knows, Doctor. He knows.

–”The City on the Edge of Forever”

As a kid, I attended two Star Trek conventions with my older sister – or at least, one Trek convention and one general sci-fi convention. At the latter, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was aired, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were fun. George Takei was the guest of honor at the first one, in 1977 or 1978. I was in first grade at the time. I remember Takei wearing a gleaming white suit. (Peter Mayhew was guest at the next one.)

I eventually lost track of daily Star Trek reruns by the mid-1980s, but also by this point, the movies were a thing. I remember being terribly excited for The Motion Picture, and even though I didn’t quite understand all of the plot, I have never – not once – disliked that often-maligned film. I recall being mildly disappointed that the Enterprise never fires its phasers once in that film, and in fact it only dispatches a single photon torpedo, and that’s at an errant asteroid that’s about to collide with the Great Bird. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think The Motion Picture is the first real science fiction story I saw on the big screen that wasn’t about a galactic war or some other action-based adventure. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but yes, the movie primed that particular pump.

I liked all of the movies that came, and I saw every one in the theater over the next decade. This was an odd time for Trek, when a movie every couple of years was all there was. Sure, every once in a while there would be a tidbit in Starlog (the late, great SF fandom magazine) about how somebody somewhere wanted to make a new Trek teevee series, but it never amounted to much until we learned that we were finally getting The Next Generation. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that Paramount wanted to keep making money off Trek but the original cast was starting to show its age.

Through the 1980s, as Star Wars seemed to fade away, Trek was still there, churning out a movie every couple of years and then a new teevee show. That’s what Trek always was for me. It didn’t fuel my imagination in quite the same way that Star Wars has always moved me at a very basic level of storytelling taste, but Trek has always been around. Always, always there. In fact, it was always there to such an extent that in the late 1990s, I started letting Trek go…but I’m getting ahead. During this time I read a number of Trek novels, and there was a fanzine called Trek that would annually publish a paperback book filled with its best articles. These I read with zeal, and I’ve lately started regathering them all via eBay. Maybe this winter I’ll spend some time reliving some fine old fan writing.

I loved The Next Generation, and watching it religiously formed a tradition in college among my mates and I. TNG aired reruns every weeknight, and the new episodes ran every Sunday night after the 10:00 news. That station even went so far, as TNG’s popularity grew, of including a very brief astronomy segment in its 10:00 Sunday newscast – “Tonight you can see Mars in the eastern sky!”, that sort of thing – complete with an Enterprise fly-by animation. And then, in our senior year, the next show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, arrived. That premiere was an event, and I still think that premiere was an amazing episode.

Never trust ale from a god-fearing people, or a Starfleet Commander that has one of your relatives in jail.

–Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

It took a little while for TNG to really get going, but once the writers had the chemistry down, the show was more than ready to carry on the Trek tradition, with many a fine and thought-provoking story, about love and loss and what it means to be human even as we take to the stars.

If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.

–Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation

And still the movies came. The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, which I saw with school friends. The Voyage Home, with its goofy and infectious joy. Even the much-maligned (and mostly deservedly so) The Final Frontier had its charms for me. That poor movie may have failed, but I really give it credit for trying to be about something.

The Undiscovered Country came along in 1991, when TNG had hit its stride. We saw it in the theater the night it opened, which happened to be the same night as our annual Christmas concert performance at a big church in Cedar Falls, IA. We did the concert, quickly changed clothes, and bolted down the street to catch the show. I loved that movie, and in fact, to this day Star Trek VI is my favorite Trek film. I remember a lump in my throat at the closing scene, which boiled down to just the classic crew onscreen (minus Sulu, who finally got his promotion to Captain and got to fly away on his own ship, the Excelsior), followed by the animated signatures of the original cast. Their time was done. (Although, in classic Trek and science fiction fashion, not quite.)

CHEKOV: Course heading, Captain?

KIRK: (smiles) Second star to the right…and straight on ‘til morning.

—Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

College ended and the real world began, and there was still Star Trek, even as Star Wars started making rumblings again. The TNG crew graduated to movies, and DS9 soared in quality. Another series began, Voyager…which is when I started to lose a bit of energy with respect to Trek. For one thing, I had a lot of other interests by this time, but for another, it was pretty clear as Voyager got going that the creative folks behind Trek were starting to lose steam. I stopped watching Voyager about the fourth season, and the next series? Well, to this day, I have never watched a single episode of Enterprise.

But now Trek is coming back. Three new movies, with varying degrees of success. A new series on the way, reimagined to seasons of thirteen episodes each. The Trek continues. (I haven’t seen Star Trek Beyond yet. It came and went from the theaters too quickly this summer, and it came out during our busiest time of the summer as well, so I simply was never able to squeeze it in. Beyond and Nemesis are, to date, the only Trek films I did not see in the theaters.) Will Trek eventually reach similar heights again? Are there more stories in the offing to match tales like “The Devil in the Dark,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “A Piece of the Action,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Tapestry,” “The Visitor”? Who knows…but I look forward to finding out.

 

Star Trek is, was, and has been many things. It will continue to be many things, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same old investment in it that I did in the late 70s and through the 80s. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that same enthusiasm for Star Wars either, so the two tentpoles of my science fiction life have that much in common, don’t they? But I’ll always owe a debt to Star Trek. It shone a bright light on a future that doesn’t have to be awful, and it showed beautiful space ships. It put a new light on the idea of space adventure, and it showed a military organization that was devoted truly to peace. Star Trek did time travel better than just about anybody else. Star Trek gave us amazing characters, and it let those characters do amazing things.

They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this, but I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities – the potential for knowledge and advancement – is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.

–James T. Kirk, “Return to Tomorrow”

Star Trek is fifty. Amazing. Long live Star Trek.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.

 

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“An awful waste of space”: CONTACT at 25

The movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s one and only one novel, came out this month in 1997. Almost ten years ago I posted the following piece about the movie, a film that I’ve always liked and admired but not quite crossed over into loving. I’m not sure I totally agree anymore with what I write below, but thinking does shift and evolve, and I appreciate Contact more now than I used to; it remains one of the few major pop culture artifacts that endorses the Saganesque view that science should be our guiding philosophy as humans, and not spirituality. But I still think the movie hedges its bets too much, it drives its points home with too little subtlety (a fault often found in Robert Zemeckis films), and I think it undermines the feminist subplots by surrounding its main character with men without whose help and influence she would not succeed.

And yet…Contact is still a movie that says the right things about science and about the universe. It’s a movie that confirms that the proper response to this universe is curiosity and wonder, and my favorite moment is when Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is discussing the voyage into the Cosmos that is at the heart of the movie’s narrative and she describes the required quality as “a sense of adventure”.

(Oh, Contact‘s score, by Alan Silvestri, is really good–for all the film’s lack of subtlety, Silvestri brings the goods here. Here’s one cue, called “The Primer”, scoring a scene in which the secret of an alien transmission is revealed. This is really good stuff, excellent suspense music, and it shows why Silvestri ended up being the composer for the recent sequels to the original Cosmos series.)

Here is my old post:

As much as I love Carl Sagan, I have to admit that I never warmed to his one and only novel, a science-fiction first contact story he called Contact. I tried reading it a couple of times, and each time I only got about a hundred pages in before I stopped. I just don’t think that Sagan was really cut out for novel writing, no matter how great his gifts may have been for science writing. But in 1997, a movie adaptation of the book arrived in theaters, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey and directed by Robert Zemeckis. The movie was six months too late for Sagan to have seen it, alas.

I’ve had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Contact ever since it came out. On balance I like it a lot…but I don’t love it, and in truth, I never really have. I’ve never been entirely successful in putting my finger on what it is about Contact that vexes me, but after recently watching the film again on NetFlix, I think I have it: the movie is too unfocused. When the film is concentrated on telling its story and attending to that central story, it is a fine, fine piece of work. But too often I get the impression that Robert Zemeckis got distracted, often by something shiny, and there are way too many times in the movie that the story gets lost so we can follow something shiny.

Contact tells the story of Ellie Arroway, an astronomer whom we meet as a young child, operating her HAM radio under the guidance of her father. They have a wall map of the United States, on which she marks her radio contacts with push pins; after talking to someone in Pensacola, Dad comments that it’s her farthest contact yet. Ellie asks if a radio could talk to the Moon, or to Mars…or to her mother, who is apparently dead. Dad responds, “I don’t think they’ll ever make a radio that can reach that far.”

Grown-up Ellie (Jodie Foster) turns out to be an astronomer, as noted, who is using her research time at the Arecibo Radio Telescope to look for, as she says, “little green men”: she is dedicating her career and scientific energies to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). This leads to her meeting a former priest (Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConnaughey), who despite being religious and spiritual where she is not, attracts her on a number of levels, and it also leads to run-ins with an older male scientist named David Drumlin (Tom Skeritt) who is snide and condescending to Ellie as he regards her chosen field of specialty as an utter waste of time. After a number of obstacles to her career – mostly owing to funding difficulties, as convincing people to part with money for something like SETI tends to be difficult – Ellie finally has a breakthrough when, while working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, her radio telescopes detect an unmistakable alien signal. The rest of the film follows the implications of such a discovery.

Or, rather, the rest of the film should do that, and when it does, it’s incredibly effective and thought-provoking and loaded with the grand “sensawunda” of all the best science fiction. The problem with the movie is that it too often wanders into less interesting stuff, or its steps away from subtlety to drive its points home with a jackhammer, or it does things that forcibly eject me from the world of the film.

Taking the less interesting stuff first: Ellie Arroway is too often portrayed in the film as the feminine voice of reason in a crowd of over-bearing, pompous, or downright dim men. Science and engineering are male-dominated fields, and it’s a well-established fact that women in those fields tend to have a tougher going just to overcome gender biases. The problem with Contact‘s approach isn’t so much that it points this out, but that it’s about other things, and thus it can’t really delve too intelligently into those topics which really do deserve higher scrutiny. Thus we have Ellie being treated like an outsider on her own project, or Drumlin stepping up to claim ownership over a project he’s derided consistently up until the moment it proved fruitful. Ellie is constantly on the defensive in the movie, and I think it hurts the narrative because the film can’t just gear up and take us where it wants to go. Instead we have to keep talking about God.

And God is where subtlety just isn’t something that interests Robert Zemeckis. Contact is full of discussions of religion versus science, but the feeling is never that anything is really being debated; what happens is that opposite sides’ viewpoints are stated, and restated, and stated again. Ellie goes to a reception in Washington, where her first order of business upon approaching Palmer Joss is to immediately launch into a discussion on religion, without any preamble or preliminary; more than that, though, the script treats all such conversations – and many that aren’t on the topic of religion at all – as though Ellie has a sizable axe to grind, while everyone else (just about all of whom are male) is calm and collected in their disagreement. Coupling that with the several instances in the film where Ellie is betrayed by men – Drumlin’s taking of the credit, Joss’s posing of a question at the hearings when he knows that the answer is going to doom Ellie’s chances of being the one selected to go in ‘the machine’ – and the film seems to depict Ellie as someone who doesn’t so much achieve a lot but whom is given things, table-scrap like, by the men in her life. It’s an odd kind of feeling.

It also bothers me that the film ends right when it gets most interesting, and it feels to me like it takes the easy way out. To me, the most interesting thing is, What would human society be like once we know that we are not alone in this Universe? We may know next to nothing about who is out there, but surely knowing once and for all, without speculation, that there is someone or something living out there would be a staggering revelation for the human species. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with this notion – in fact, it backs away from it. We get lots of intrigue involving the contents of the message that is received from space, and then the construction of the transport “machine”, and so on. And this is all very compelling and entertaining…but at the end, the film gives us the old “Did it really happen?” gambit, reducing a momentous scientific discovery to something that will appeal to some people and not to others. Not unlike, say, the belief in God.

(Again, I don’t know to what degree the film’s story tracks that of the novel.)

I always find that the film deflates in its last fifteen minutes or so, after Ellie returns from her journey only to learn that, so far as anyone here knows, she never went anywhere. This leads to a Congressional hearing (which really drives home the film’s theme of “one woman versus a whole bunch of mean men”), at the end of which one Representative says, “Are we supposed to take your story…on faith?” And yes, he really pauses and puts big emphasis on those last two words, just in case we missed the irony of a scientist committed to objective observation being forced to admit the necessity of faith. Again, subtle, this is not. The movie does try to have it both ways by showing two government folks discussion the fact that the machine’s video recorder recorded eighteen hours of static (had nothing happened at all, there would have been about two seconds’ worth). But this is to be kept secret, apparently. They might as well seal all this information in a crate and store it in the warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

And the movie ends, on this state of affairs. What happens now, though? Does some kind of new religion start to accrete around Ellie and her scientific beliefs? Does Ellie somehow become an evangelist for a new blossoming of a scientific worldview? Does her experience have any effect on the human tension between science and religion? We never get any suggestions or speculations. All we get is the rolling of the credits. Contact tells a good story, but it stops just as its important story is just beginning.

Finally, I just have to note that all the cameos in the movie annoy the crap out of me. This was when Robert Zemeckis had just discovered that he could put people into lots of interesting situations, digitally; remember, he’d had Forrest Gump consorting with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. So here we get loads of real-life CNN personalities, and even President Bill Clinton, with the film taking quotes from actual Clinton newscasts and editing them so that it sounds like he’s discussing the events of the movie. It’s incredibly distracting. Instead of being drawn further into the story, I find myself trying to think of what event Clinton was actually discussing in the speeches that were repurposed for this movie. Things like having Rob Lowe play a Christian conservative leader named “Richard Rank” are incredibly distracting, because of course it makes me think of Ralph Reed. Shoehorning in mention of the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which had happened just months before the movie came out, is another example. Zemeckis seems to want his movie to seem ‘real’ and relevant, but all this stuff has the exact opposite effect on me: it forces me to keep the story at arm’s length.

Ultimately, I want to love Contact, because of my love and admiration for Carl Sagan, for the subject matter of the story, and for the view of the Universe as a place of wonder and of science as humanity’s greatest achievement. And there really is a lot to love about Contact. But the movie spends so much time getting in its own way that I inevitably end up just admiring it a lot.

 

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