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The big reveal at the end of The Dark Knight Rises was Christopher Nolan’s last little joke for fans. It wasn’t meant to set up future Batman movies. It was meant put an ironic cap on Nolan’s trilogy. Anyone who saw visions of sequels starring Gordon-Levitt taking wing either missed the irony or is too high on Gordon-Levitt (which is hard to be, I think. I’m very high on him myself.) or really doesn’t get Batman. He is not Tony Stark in black Kevlar. Stark needs the armor to be Iron Man. Take that away and what is he? All the things he tells Cap he is, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist…but not a superhero. Not even a hero. But Bruce Wayne doesn’t need the bat suit. Frank Miller introduced the idea of the bat suit as armor in order to allow a fifty-something Wayne to go about acting like his twenty-something self. Tim Burton borrowed it for his movies to sell the idea that short, scrawny, unathletic Michael Keaton stood a chance against even the weakest and most cowardly thug. Nolan used it, well modified, to deal with the fact that in his more realistic Gotham City criminals carry guns that work. But Bruce Wayne is a scary proposition in his own self. The suit’s nothing. He can and often does go out on patrol in mufti, for all it matters to what happens when he shows up at a crime scene. Suit or no suit, cape or no cape, bodies are going to fly. Basically, he’s a human superman with issues.
Ideally, then, the actor you want to cast as your Batman is the guy you almost cast as your Superman. Or maybe it’d be better the other way round.
I can’t see Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Superman.
I can see him as Nightwing, though. And if you see him as Nightwing then it’s possible to see the ending of The Dark Knight Rises as something more than a joke. John Blake would be the guy to take over Batman’s job, but he’d do it on his own terms, as his own person. Nightwing is Batman without a homicidal rage to keep suppressed. But he’s also more of a cop at heart.
But Nightwing doesn’t belong in the Justice League.
Doesn’t mean Gordon-Leavitt couldn’t be in the movie.
He’d make a pretty good Barry Allen or a Hal Jordan or, even better, a Kyle Rayner, although I think the Justice League movie needs John Stewart’s Green Lantern, for diversity and so as not to remind the audience of the melted crayon and spilled poster paint mess that was Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern movie.
The Atom? Gordon-Levitt would make a good Ray Palmer too.
I think you have to have Hawkgirl to avoid the Smurfette problem you’d have with Wonder Woman as the only girl. But do you have to bring in Hawkman along with her?
In the best of all worlds, you’d include all of them. (Green Arrow’s expendable, I’m sorry to say.) You can get by without the Atom and Hawkman. Maybe without J’onn J’onzz as well. Even Aquaman can go. But that’s it. It’s the Justice League, after all, not the Justice Team. You need a crowd. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkgirl. That’s six leads to cast before you’re even ready to cast the villains. And at the moment the producers don’t even have one hero on hand, unless this new Superman is meant to lead into The Justice League, and that’s not certain. Zack Snyder’s being cagey about that.
I don’t have a lot of hope for Man of Steel but Henry Cavill might be ok. It’s likely he’s no Robert Downey Jr, however, and it was Downey who made Marvel’s The Avengers possible. There are only three core Avengers anyway, and if Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth hadn’t worked out as well as they did as Captain America and Thor, The Avengers might still have worked as Iron Man 3. Even with Evans and Hemsworth doing their respective fine jobs and Mark Ruffalo’s pleasant surprise turn as Bruce Banner, Downey is the film’s star and Stark its protagonist.
I don’t have much of a point to make here, beyond Joseph Gordon-Leavitt being too short to play Batman, which, to be honest, is what I mean when by saying I can’t see him in the part. But it turns out not to matter because Gordon-Leavitt’s people are already denying that he’ll be doing it.
Oh well. Warner Brothers has given itself three years to work on this. Maybe something will gel. Meanwhile, The Dark Knight Rises is coming out on DVD next week. So I’ll just refer you to something I wrote when it was in the theaters last summer and pretend that was my point all along.
Justice League illustration courtesy of DC Comics.
I’m not mad at Wallace. The article itself is pretty good. But Wallace starts out looking at how trendy it’s become to use the word Asperger’s to describe all sorts of obnoxious behaviors, either to excuse them or to pathologize them. This is happening because there’s a general conception that Asperger’s is basically a form of clinical nerdiness complicated by reflexive jerkiness. Long-time readers know why that idea makes my blood boil.
What most people seem to know about Asperger’s, vaguely or explicitly, is that kids with Asperger’s lack empathy. It’s in the diagnosis. Which makes them sound like little sociopaths, another trendy word used indiscriminately and unmoored from its psychiatric definition---liberals in the blogosphere like to use it as a synonym for Evil Villain.
But Asperger’s kids don’t lack empathy, except for those who are in fact also sociopaths---people with Asperger’s aren’t defined by their Asperger’s traits. They have those traits along with lots of other personality traits. You haven’t said anything more insightful or really descriptive about a person by noting he has Asperger’s than you have by noting he is short or likes buttermilk pancakes. People with Asperger’s don’t lack empathy. They lack the ability to detect what they should empathize with. Blind people know not to walk out into traffic. They can’t see the stoplights. A person with Asperger’s knows there are things you shouldn’t say in polite conversation but he can’t see the traffic lights.
The person with Asperger’s I know best has mass quantities of empathy. And sympathy. And all sorts of fellow feeling. He has a big heart and wants to do right by everybody and he usually does. But he has had to learn a lot of things over time that most of us picked up quickly and easily when we were very young.
There’s a new novel for young adults I’m looking forward to reading. Colin Fischer. It’s about a high school student who sets himself up as a detective. Colin is an Aspie. Well, of course he is, someone who knows Asperger’s only from what they’ve learned from watching TV might say, Aspies are natural born detectives because they see everything, like Monk and Sherlock Holmes. Well…no. Monk is OCD and Holmes is just a scientist with bad manners. Someone with Asperger’s, like Colin, has to compensate for his Asperger’s not rely on it. Try interviewing a witness or a suspect when the first thing you have to detect is their mood and you can’t read their facial expressions. Colin carries drawings of faces with a range of expressions he refers to when baffled. Our house’s Asperger’s kid studied charts like that when he was in the early days of therapy.
Mostly with ours son it’s been a problem of his seeing too much and not being able to sort it out in time.
That’s the way it is with many of those with Asperger’s. They see too much and don’t sort it out until it’s too late to not only stop themselves from saying the wrong thing but move themselves to say the right thing.
On TV and in the movies a character with Asperger’s will invariably respond to something another character has done or said by saying or doing the absolutely inappropriate thing. In real life, Aspies are just as likely---more likely---to respond by not responding. They’ll give you a baffled stare or continue on as if you haven’t said or done what you said or did.
This is because they’ve either failed to see the flashing stop light of someone’s facial expression or body language and so they plunge on ahead into the path of oncoming emotional traffic or they know they’ve missed something or fear they’ve missed something and for safety’s sake cling to the curb.
And knowing they’ve likely missed a signal, they will often try to guess at what that signal might have been and then guess at the appropriate response and they guess wrong often enough to get a reputation for guessing wrong. People start ignoring when they’ve guessed right and focusing on all their wrong and goofy guesses. They expect the wrong and the goofy to the point of hearing everything an Aspie says as wrong and goofy, even when what they’ve said is actually right and sensible.
From this many Aspies learn that the best thing to say is nothing or as little as possible. Someone with Asperger’s is as likely to talk too little as talk too much. The best defense is a canned response that sounds polite but gives nothing away.
Typically Aspies aren’t mean or insulting or rude or obnoxious or goofy. They are boring. They rely on stock phrases, generic conversation starters, clichés, and obvious and shallow small talk. Fantastic and wonderful and beautiful things may be going on in their heads---those who are inclined to have fantastic and wonderful and beautiful things going on in their heads. Some are. Others aren’t and are just as dull-minded as neurotypical bores you’re forced to sit next to on long airplane flights.---they may be the most interesting people in the world, but they’ve taught themselves not to let it show because they’ve learned that they’re somehow annoying when they do.
Another thing about Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s a syndrome. Aspies share certain traits but not every Aspie has all the traits or exhibits them in the same combinations or to the same degree.
And they tend to have other disabilities to deal with as well. Slow gross and small motor skill development. Speech impediments. ADD. Learning disabilities. The idea that all Aspies are geniuses and savants is another TV trope and not the way it is in real life. Our son Ken has a serious problem with numbers. He has a sensory integration dysfunction that may be a trait of his Asperger’s or may be something on top of it. Fantastic and wonderful and beautiful things are going on inside his head, but because he is mildly ADD he has trouble organizing his thoughts and will often let them out in whatever jumbled order they’ve occurred to him. He has difficulty following instructions because his mind jumps ahead and, instead of taking things step by step, he’ll try to see his way to the end of a task all at one go. This leads him quickly into running into mental walls and leaves him frustrated, anxious, angry at himself, and feeling dumb.
That’s him. It’s not every Aspie. But you can see how a kid who has trouble making sense of the world on the whole would be excited to discover some little part of it that he can make sense of and then keep coming back there, again and again and again, for comfort and a feeling of competence, and hence the obsessions with topics no one else seems to care about and the endless listmaking. This doesn’t mean every stamp collector has Asperger’s.
You can also see how a child who has trouble reading the adult world and following the maturation of his peers might have emotional developmental issues. But some children with Asperger’s have emotional developmental issues in addition to all their other problems and issues and, as we call them around here, blocks.
Now, and this is key. A person can have all those problems and issues and blocks, can have trouble reading faces, be dyslexic or innumerate, be emotionally troubled or immature or slow to mature, he can even be obsessed with recondite subjects and be a maker of lists, he can talk too much or too little, say all the “wrong” things, be a jerk, be a pest, be a goof, be a genius, be peculiar in a dozen ways and still not be a person with Asperger’s. He might just be himself.
Which, it turns out, is what Apsies are too, themselves.
So you can imagine why it steams me when people use the word carelessly to explain or explain away someone’s failure to watch his mouth, his inconsideration, his chronic rudeness, his self-absorption, his general obnoxiousness.
It’s why I was glad to read in Wallace’s article that the TV show House explicitly and emphatically rejected that TV trope:
“You’re not autistic,” a doctor tells Hugh Laurie’s abrasive character in an episode of House. “You don’t even have Asperger’s. You wish you did; it would exempt you from the rules, give you freedom, absolve you of responsibility, let you date 17-year-olds. But, most important, it would mean that you’re not just a jerk.”
Ken Mannion is in his second year of college. He’s doing pretty well. Taking it slow but taking it very seriously. I don’t remember if I mentioned it here but, despite his math problems, he managed to pass his math Regents exam last year and earn his New York State High School Regents diploma, and this past spring he passed his school’s required math class. He was able to do this thanks to the help he started receiving in fifth grade and that was thanks to his being diagnosed as having Asperger’s.
(Updated with the latest news from school: He got a 98.9 on his second biology exam. He got an 89 on the first one. Next up is the final.)
Which brings me to the other way Wallace’s article infuriated me. Towards the end he reports that for no good reason Wallace seems to have discovered the American Psychological Association is planning to do away with Asperger’s as a condition apart from autism.
Next May, the fifth edition of the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]is to be published, and the APA has proposed to eliminate the Asperger’s diagnosis, folding it, as well as PDD-NOS, into the broader new all-purpose bucket of autism spectrum disorder. The thinking is that Asperger’s isn’t scientifically distinguishable from autism, and that a single diagnosis may help to combat the epidemic that is more diagnostic than real. But the debate has been fractious. Fred Volkmar, who’d headed the committee for DSM-IV, quit the DSM-5 committee, and has been vocal about the likelihood that the redrawn map of who’s on the spectrum will cause a lot of people who currently have diagnoses to lose them. A report previewed in January suggested that as few as 45 percent of people who currently have Asperger’s or PDD-NOS diagnoses will retain them, though a study in The American Journal of Psychiatry, published earlier this month, put the number closer to 90 percent.
Ninety per cent?Even forty-five is a nightmare to contemplate. [Editor’s note: This needs correction. See Sarah TX’s comment.] I think Ken will be ok. At school these days all he needs extra is some accommodations for testing---a little additional time, a quiet room in the disabilities office---and I’m pretty sure that will continue to be covered by his IEP because of his sensory integration disorder, ADD, and anxiety diagnoses. He’s still on our insurance---Thank you, Obamacare!---but I don’t know if his counseling will still be covered if he no longer “has” Asperger’s.
Wallace reports “that the New York State Assembly is considering passing a law to exempt the state from the DSM-5.” But he doesn’t confirm this, something I intend to do myself this afternoon with calls to my assemblyman and state senator.
Like I said, I think Ken will be ok. But what about all the kids who need help and all the parents for whom the diagnosis of Asperger’s is not only their best and only hope but their salvation?
I can’t tell you what a relief it was when the neuro-psychiatrist who diagnosed Ken said to us, “Here’s what you can do to help him and here’s what his school has to do to help him and you!”
That question? Which figure from history would you most like to meet?
Him.
I wouldn't take up much of his time. I'd just like to shake his hand and say thank you. Maybe, maybe, if he didn’t my asking, hear him tell one of his favorite jokes.
I wonder what these folks’ electric bill is like at the end of the season. Somebody’s holly-jolly front lawn, somewhere near Valley Forge, PA. Around 9 o’clock tonight, Saturday, November 24, 2012.
Note the California plates. And the skis. And the surfboard. You can’t see it here, but the decal in the back window is for a tattoo parlor. Snow, surf, ink. All things that go better with Coca-Cola. Outside Starbucks. King of Prussia, PA. Saturday morning, November 24, 2012.
Uncle Merlin spent Thanksgiving down at the Cape. He worked off his third helping of apple pie by painting the porch ceiling. Chatham, Massachusetts. Friday, November 23, 2012.
This is a story about death. Not Death with a capital “D”, that bony guy with the scythe and the sparkling blue eyes who shows up in nearly every one of Pratchett’s 30-plus novels in the Discworld series, swearing and smiling ineffably and being kind to cats. This is a story about death with a small “d” – the inconvenient little fact, the “embuggerance” that has been an implicit feature of Pratchett’s life and work since the author was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, in 2007.
This is not a sad story though. There’s good news and bad news. The bad enough news isn’t news to us Terry Pratchett fans. He’s dying. The bad news is that his Discworld series will continue on without him. His daughter Rhianna Pratchett is already in the process of taking over. Not doubting Rhianna’s abilities or talents. Just can’t imagine how Discworld can exist outside Terry Pratchett’s imagination. The Oz books continued without L. Frank Baum, but generally the track record for attempts to carry on the work of a literary genius after the literary genius is no more is not good. The good news is that, at least to start, the continuation will be in the form of a TV show, The Watch, which will continue the adventures of Commander Sam Vimes, Captain Carrot, Sergeants Angua, the werewolf, and Detritus, the troll, forensic dwarf detective Cherrie Littlebottom, Fred Colon and Knobby Nobbs, and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork police. The bad news in that no news isn’t always good news is there’s been no announcement of a cast or even if the show will include those characters. The really good news is that Pratchett isn’t done writing. There are more books to pull out of his imagination.
Other day, while I was tooling about on some errands, I passed a pickup pulling a small, open, fence-sided trailer. The truck’s bed and the trailer were piled high with loaves and loaves and loaves of bread.
Wonder Bread!
And not stacked on trays. Piled. In great heaping mounds of brightly wrapped bread.
The pickup turned off quickly and I couldn’t have veered off after it without cutting off a lane of oncoming traffic. But I wanted to. I wanted to chase him down and ask the driver, what gives?
Was he hoarding?
Was he planning to sell his stash on ebay?
What I was hoping---still am hoping---is he was coming from a supermarket or outlet store, that the loaves were day old and had been donated, and he was on his way to a shelter or a soup kitchen where all that bread was going to be torn up into Wonder croutons for stuffing a hundred Thanksgiving turkeys twice as big as Tiny Tim.
At Mother and Father Blonde’s for Thanksgiving. As per usual, I’ve slipped out to Barnes and Noble for a late night cup of coffee. Nothing going on in the cafe tonight. Two Thanksgiving visits ago I was here and reported in with this post, Generations talking past each other, about a couple of middle-aged men I spied on who seemed determined to make a young woman feel bad about her new job. I was back the following night and eavesdropped on another conversation between some young women that was not interrupted by any middle-aged men raining on their parades.
November 27, 2010. Back at B&N tonight.
Yes, I enjoy my relatives’ company. Why do you ask?
Back at Barnes and Noble, another table full of college women nearby.
I was here first, by the way. I just attract them. It’s my animal magnetism or the fact that at this rolling time of year every other table is crowded with college students home from the holidays.
Four college women at this nearby table. No middle-aged men around to rain on their parade, unless you count me, but I’m being invisible. Four women, four separate colleges, and they haven’t seen each other since school started, so there’s lots of news to be exchanged. News being exchanged at the moment is of professors they have crushes on.
I think one of the crushes is serious.
She makes a point of referring to him as “Jim.” There are instructors, grad assistants, and plenty of professors who encourage their students to call them by their first names. I don’t think many of them imagine their names crop up so frequently or emphatically in their students’ conversations with friends. Jim’s name is cropping up a lot, as in:
“Jim says…”
And:
“Jim thinks…”
And…
“Jim has…”.
I hope “Jim isn’t”, as in “Jim isn’t married.”
I also hope “Jim doesn’t,” as in “Jim doesn’t look like Wallace Shawn.”
Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein is worried you might get to retire.
BLANKFEIN (In an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS News): You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.
PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?
BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. …
Exactly! The world is full of 45 year old retirees planning to loaf about until they’re 75!
Let’s deal with this quickly. Most people start working at least part-time in their teens. A great many of us are on the job full time by the time we’re 20, and those are the ones of us most likely to need every penny of Social Security we can get when we finally do stop working in our late 60s, after 40 or more years of not being the CEOs of federally bailed out financial corporations. And last I checked, average life expectancy in the United States hasn’t reached 95. So we’re talking about, at the lucky outside, 15 years of retirement after, for many of us, spending close to our whole adult lifetime kicking into the fund.
Some of those 15 years are not going to be spent in the best of health.
Blankfein would like to see it whittled down to, well, probably, 0. He’s a Work Until You Drop advocate if I ever heard one.
I get a kick out of people who would have screamed Socialism! till they were hoarse at the time talking about what Social Security was originally designed to do as if they know what FDR intended and think we need to honor those intentions.
What Social Security was originally designed to do was get itself passed by Congress.
Ostensibly and initially it was intended to keep little old widder ladies from starving to death.
Even that modest goal was opposed by the Lloyd Blankfeins of the day.
But the larger plan was to put a program in place to be built on and expanded so that---and here was the crazy idea---nobody would have to work until they dropped or else face a cold and hungry and penurious old age.
The idea was that none of us should have to ask permission from the likes of Lloyd Blankfein to live past the age when we can push a mop or swing a shovel or load a truck, sew a stitch, drive a rivet, sweat pipe, bag groceries, flip burgers, gut fish, make beds, haul trash, dig coal, pick lettuce, or clean other people’s houses and raise their kids.
The idea was that it wasn’t the natural order of things that most people should break their backs, break their hearts, and have their spirits broken working all their lives to make a few people rich.
The idea was that there ought to be more to life than toil and sorrow and that at some point everybody should be able to lay down their tools and enjoy a few years of rest in comfort and security before they die.
When plutocrats like Blankfein say we can’t afford a system like Social Security was really designed to become, they mean:
I don’t want to pay for other people’s comfort and security. I don’t want to pay for it! I don’t want to see it! In fact, I don’t really want them to have either!
They should be grateful they have work to do until they drop.
Life is about winning and losing, and the winners should enjoy feeling like winners, and an important part of that feeling is knowing that the losers know they have lost!
Use it and you immediately give yourself the job of defining it and explaining why you think you have a mandate or why the other guy doesn’t have a mandate and then what you have a mandate to do or what the other guy doesn’t have a mandate to do.
But, second, and here’s my real point: It doesn’t matter that the President won ~51 percent of the popular vote to Mitt’s ~48 or that he won with a landslide in the electoral college. He has a mandate and he’d have had the same mandate if he’d won by a lot less or a lot more. Mandates don’t depend on the size of a victory. When you’re elected to office you automatically have a mandate to do what you said you were going to do during the campaign whether you won by one vote or three million.
This is one of the ground rules of our democratic republic. We all agree going in to an election of any kind that the winner gets the keys to the car until the next election.
So…the duly elected driver climbs behind the wheel and sets out for a destination he marked with an X at the end of a route he mapped out during the campaign with all the passengers (that’s us), knowing what’s ahead, agreeing to shut up and let the driver drive…unless and until we see the car’s headed for a ditch or into the path of an oncoming semi or we notice the driver’s got a lead foot and is burning too much gas or he’s crawling along with his blinker on although there’s no turn coming up or he isn’t actually headed where he’d promised to take us.
Basically, backseat driving is part of the agreement.
But we also accept that there will bumps and detours. Bridges will turn out to have been washed out. Roads will turn out not lead where the GPS says they do. We’ll have to slow down for construction or the weather. Occasionally the car will break down and need to go into the shop. Side trips we’d hoped to make will have to be skipped or saved for another day.
It’s not going to be an easy ride.
It’d be a lot less easy if the driver has to stop and ask for permission at every turn from the people who didn’t want him as their driver.
But here’s the thing.
He sort of does.
Part of the agreement is that takes responsibility for all the passengers in the car. He respects their interests and concerns and takes them in consideration as he makes decisions about where to go next and how to get there.
He is, to paraphrase the current driver, the driver for all the people.
There’s something else.
Whatever a mandate is and however strong or weak one is, the President isn’t the only one who gets one.
Every candidate elected to Congress has their own mandate, including lunatics like Michele Bachmann, moral midgets like Paul Ryan, and clowns like Ted Cruz. And in many cases they’ve been given their mandates by the same people who gave one to President Obama, who carried Paul Ryan’s district handily, meaning many people up there voted to both repeal and save Obamacare, let the Bush tax cuts expire and make them permanent, protect women’s right to choose and ban abortion completely, and expand rights for gays and lesbians and take them all away.
Go figure.
So, this is the agreement. All the winners have mandates, no matter how much he or she won by, but that mandate is conditional and somewhat compromised from the beginning by the winners’ agreeing not to ignore the people who didn’t vote for them.
Nationwide, the President received almost 64 million votes.
That’s a lot of votes.
But Mitt Romney collected close to 60 million votes.
That’s also a lot of votes.
It would be wrong, not to mention destructive, to govern as if all those 58 and a half million people’s opinions, wishes, and interests didn’t matter.
It would also be very Republican.
The Republican Right has rejected the agreement.
As far as they’ve been concerned, going back before Clinton, to Kennedy and to Truman and FDR, the winner isn’t a winner when the winner is a Democrat, so no Democratic President has a mandate, ever. Meanwhile, Republicans always have a mandate even if they’ve won by only one vote, because no other votes count except their own.
What it gets down to is that Republicans believe in the tyranny of the majority and that they are always the majority.
Oh, that’s right, there was an election a couple weeks back, wasn’t there?
Our guy win?
Yeah, I crack myself up.
Naturally, Republicans have been casting around desperately for a reason for their loss, looking to blame anybody or anything but themselves and their message. They seem to be settling on Mitt himself. God forbid they consider that the President just out campaigned them or, gasp, that more people in the country just liked him better. Better instead to blame God Himself or, at any rate, an act of God.
Sandy.
Before he decided it was that the President bought voters off with “gifts,” Mitt liked this one best.
It boils down to his claiming it was unfair that the country got to see the President being the President so close to the election.
Of course the possibility that the President would have to be the President at some point during the campaign should have figured in Mitt Corp’s thinking and planning from the start. Apparently it didn’t, and probably because, since they never let themselves see the President as the President themselves, it didn’t occur to them that anybody else would ever see him as the President either even when he was busy being the President.
Scratch that. It wasn’t that they could never see the President as the President. It was when they did see him as the President, they saw him as a particular President who wasn’t Barack Obama.
Jimmy Carter.
But it was also the case that Mitt never saw the President as the President because he never saw himself as the President. I’ve said this before. He apparently never thought about what it means to be President.
And it’s why he was lucky people weren’t paying attention to him during Sandy. If they had been, they’d have seen him making a fool of himself again by not acting Presidential. His stunt collecting canned goods the Red Cross told him it did not want was a cheap gimmick that, if voters had noticed, made him look like a small time huckster trying to cash in on a tragedy.
Which is what he was.
Not. A. President.
This guy is a President.
The President being the President. Photo courtesy WhiteHouse.gov: “President Barack Obama listens to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood speak during a briefing on the response to Hurricane Sandy at FEMA headquarters in Washington, D.C., Oct. 31, 2012. Pictured, from left, are Secretary LaHood; Energy Secretary Steven Chu; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)”
Peter Parker learns that with great power comes great…pain, along with various cuts, bumps, bruises, strains, sprains, and the occasional broken bone and odd scratch. What it doesn’t come with is a great deal of fun, at least not in The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield as Peter and now out on DVD.
Didn't write a formal review when we saw The Amazing Spider-Man in the theater back in July, but I posted a few thoughts, Spidey Thoughts, and in Spidey Thought Number 4 I noted that the movie begins with Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker already Spider-Man in every important way except for the minor detail of not having spider powers.
He's brave, he's cocky, he's a wiseguy, he's a genius scientist---this is very important because, as I noted in Spidey Thought Number 3, most of his major enemies are mad scientists and/or victims of science experiments gone tragically awry---he's a natural born detective, and he's a hero. Heroic, at at any rate. This Peter Parker is only a target for bullies when he deliberately gets between the bullies and their first targets. He stands up for---and gets knocked down for---the weak against the strong.
It's not the case with Peter as it is for Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger that his powers are the expression of his innate goodness and strength of heart. For one thing, Peter’s spider powers appear as temptations. Rogers goes right to work at being Captain America. In The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter starts off in a less than heroic direction. But like Rogers, he doesn't need superpowers to be a hero. Only to become a super-hero.
What this means is that, essentially, at first, there is no Spider-Man. There is only Peter Parker wearing a disguise he calls Spider-Man.
His challenge is to make Spider-Man into something more and greater than an alter-ego: his job and his vocation. He has to turn that disguise into the uniform of his new chosen profession. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
This is a key point, thematically, as far as it goes, which turns out to be not far enough.
The first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man was about Peter learning how to be Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man (the first half of the movie, at least) is about Andrew Garfield’s Peter learning to be Spider-Man and what it means to be Spider-Man.
As I mentioned, Peter is not in a heroic frame of mind, nor a particularly friendly one, when he starts webslinging. He’s not in the mood to use his powers for good and not for evil. He’s in the mood to use them for revenge.
He’s out to get the thug who murdered his Uncle Ben. Any crooks he captures along the way are---what’s the opposite of collateral damage? Collateral success?
He’s not even the vigilante Captain Stacey calls him. Vigilantes are at least nominally interested in justice. Peter is only interested in assuaging his own emotional pain. He’s using his powers to work out his guilt. What he has to learn is that he didn’t fail by not stopping the robbery that led to Uncle Ben’s getting killed. He failed by not doing the right thing for the simple sake of doing the right thing.
He has to learn that he has an obligation to help people, because with great power…
But he has to learn something else. This.
He has to learn that being Spider-Man is fun!
You’d think there’d be joy and a thrill in being a superhero who has the proportional strength of spider, can climb walls, spin webs any size, and catch thieves just like flies. And it should feel good to have the power to do good and then go out and do it.
Plus, it’d be really cool.
Peter learns this. Or he says he does. He has an epiphany after his first fight with the Lizard---in a scene on a bridge unfortunately reminiscent of the much better staged and much more suspenseful bridge scene in Maguire’s first Spider-Man. “Who are you?” asks the father of the little boy he’s just saved, his first truly good deed as Spider-Man, the deed that in fact makes him Spider-Man. And that’s his answer. “I’m Spider-Man.”
He should say something else. The guy knows he’s talking to Spider-Man. J. Jonah Jameson (not seen in this movie because the producers had the good sense to know it’s too soon to ask any actor to try to follow J.K. Simmons in the part, but he makes his presence felt) has already been at work making sure the whole city knows he’s Spider-Man. What Peter should say is “I’m your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” which would be a way of claiming the name Spider-Man for himself and announcing what his job is now. He’s a public servant. Every neighborhood has one, right? Along with the cop on the beat, the letter carrier delivering the mail, the firefighters in the station down the block? And he ought to say it with delight and with a great big grin that we should sense through his mask. And then we should see him go off and have some fun in a series of scenes like the ones that make up Superman’s first night in the Christopher Reeve’s first Superman, capturing jewel thieves and bank robbers for the pure, unselfish rightness of it.
It doesn’t happen.
Instead he swings over to his girlfriend Gwen’s apartment to tell her in the mopish way she inexplicably finds endearing that that’s what he’s going to do from here on out.
Which is a letdown, as endearing as it is to watch Emma Stone acting as if Garfield’s moping is endearing, but it would be something to shrug off if the movie had let him to follow through on his promise.
He doesn’t get the chance. He has to go back to being plain old Peter Parker on a personal mission. The Lizard’s on the loose and it’s his---Peter’s not Spidey’s---responsibility to stop him.
When asked why it’s his responsibility, Peter replies, “I created him,” making it all about him and between him and the Lizard.
Spider-Man isn’t really part of it and goes back to being the name for the disguise Peter doesn’t really need at this point.
Never mind the stampeding crowds, exploding cars, and massive destruction of private and public property that has become the signature of too many Marvel Comics-based movies---both Iron Man movies, both Fantastic Four movies, Spider-Man 3, The Incredible Hulk, and The Avengers all end with the same insurance agent’s nightmare in the city streets---the final battle in The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a fight to save New York City. It’s a struggle to save Curt Connors from himself. Spider-Man can’t do it. But Peter Parker can…by using SCIENCE! Spider-Man is just there as a distraction to keep the Lizard away from the Oscorp lab while Gwen concocts the serum that will cure Connors based on a formula devised by Peter.
In the end, The Amazing Spider-Man turns out to be a personal drama about a philosophical disagreement between two scientists.
The Lizard is one of Spidey’s least interesting enemies. (Not as uninteresting as the Rhino, but that’s a very low bar.) Curt Connors is interesting because he might give in to the temptation to become the Lizard any frame now. His struggle to resist the temptation and his fear that he won’t be able to and then his self-loathing and remorse after he turns back are what make him a sympathetic anti-hero. Essentially, he’s the Wolf Man, and, like Larry Talbot’s, his is a very personal horror story. Which makes him the wrong choice of villains to build an epic public battle around.
Another way Connors is interesting is as Peter’s nightmare of himself as monster come to life. Connors is Peter’s double. By virtue of his scientific genius, Connor has great power but he’s always in danger of forgetting the responsibility that comes with it. The movie could have made that a subplot, with Peter coming to realize how he and Connors are alike and that he faces the same temptation to use his powers if not for evil then for personal satisfaction and not for the public good. They’re also alike in that as both freaks and geeks they’re outsiders and misfits who can only fit in by not being themselves.
It’s understandable that outsiders and misfits of all sorts dream of a world where the definition of “normal” and the rules that decide popularity are expansive enough to include them. The intellectual temptation, though, is to insist that “normal” and “popular” ought to be redefined to mean them and it’s up to everybody else to conform. In real life, giving in to this temptation is usually only self-destructive because it leads to anger, resentment, bitterness, and further alienation and isolation. But Connors has the power to make others conform to his idea of “normal.” And that’s the motivation director Marc Webb and and his team of screenwriters have given him.
This is an apt theme for a movie based on a comic book that became famous for having a teenage hero who had to deal with the typical problems of an ordinary high school kid while saving the City from the likes of the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. Almost every teenager, even some of the popular ones, feels as freaky and geeky as Peter Parker at some point. One of the things I liked about this movie (and it probably sounds as though I didn’t like much. I’ll deal with that in a minute.) is that it lets us see that the popular jock Flash Thompson, Peter’s high school nemesis but future good friend, feels like an outsider and a misfit.
But it turns out the movie isn’t really interested in that theme. Connor’s crackpot scheme for world domination is just an excuse for the preview of the video game that’s the final confrontation between cgi Spidey and the cgi Lizard.
So, here’s the progress of Peter Parker through the three acts of The Amazing Spider-Man:
I. Peter Parker, budding boy hero but ordinary mortal, struggling with his sense of identity.
II. Peter Parker, spider-powered angel of vengeance, using his new abilities selfishly.
III. Peter Parker, super-scientist.
Peter Parker, the actually amazing Spider-Man? Pretty much offstage throughout.
Now, onto what I liked.
The cast.
I enjoyed The Amazing Spider-Man more than I thought I would when we saw it in the theater. I enjoyed it even more watching it again on DVD. It's not as good a movie as either of the first two Maguires. (I think we all can agree to pretend Spider-Man 3 never happened.) But it's different enough to have earned the right to be judged on its own merits. And one of the very good ways it's different is in having a heroine who is not just a damsel in distress.
Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson spent a lot of time in all three of her Spider-Man movies literally hanging around screaming for Spider-Man to come to her rescue. When she wasn’t doing that, she didn’t seem to have much else to occupy her time except fretting over her relationship with Peter.
Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy is never in distress. The script doesn’t put her in need of rescuing at any point, but if it had, we’d know she’d figure her own way out of her fix without wasting time screaming for Spider-Man to come save her.
Of course Emma Stone is adorable in the part. But she’s also very smart. The filmmakers have made Gwen a budding scientist herself, which means we know she and Peter have more to talk about than his problems being a superhero. But Stone makes her a different type of science nerd from either Peter or her boss Dr Connors. We can’t see her holing up in a lab pursuing her research in private like them. She’d have her own lab, surround herself with brilliant grad students, and earn her reputation as a teacher and administrator. She’s not a freak or a geek. She’s who is she is and happy and secure with that. She’s a people person who sees the best in everyone, including Flash Thompson, and insists on dealing only with that side of them. The only way to respond to someone like her is to be as good as she knows you to be.
This isn’t naiveté. It’s insight. It’s how she handles her demanding and irascible father. She’s not defiant. She’s not rebellious. She just won’t to talk to him as if there’s any other side to him except the loving, considerate, and understanding side. And she won’t let Peter keep secrets. He has to confess to her he’s Spider-Man because she already knows he is---that is, she knows he’s a hero and won’t talk to him as if he’s not. I wish the director had given her a scene with Connors in which she did this with him. It would have been heartbreaking to watch both of them realize that that side of him she admires is on its way to being lost.
As Gwen's irascible father, police Captain George Stacy, Denis Leary is as convincingly upright, noble, reliable, professional, public-spirited, and incorruptible as he is convincingly all the opposites as Tommy Gavin in Rescue Me. Stacy is always stern and earnest, but Leary gives him an underlying sense of humor and sense of proportion to make us believe that despite his present antipathy he is the character we know from the comic books (the originals not the Ultimates) will eventually get and appreciate what Spider-Man is about. It's too bad the next movie won't be bringing Leary and J.K. Simmons together so we can have the fun of watching Stacy and J. Jonah Jameson go at it over the Bugle's treatment of Spider-Man.
Rhys Ifans plays Curt Connors as a self-absorbed but basically high-minded scientist who keeps trying to convince himself he's motivated by nobler things than vanity and wounded pride. If Garfield's Peter Parker is already Spider-Man before he gets his powers, Ifans' Connors is already on his way to becoming the Lizard in that he sees himself as repulsive and something less than human.
Sally Field is more distracted than dotty as Peter's easily flustered and apparently easily fooled Aunt May. But as Field plays her, May isn't clueless. She's just learned that it's easier for her to get done what she needs to get done if she's willfully blind to what the men in her life are up to. Which explains how she doesn't " know" Peter is Spider-Man, but it also makes you wonder what secrets Uncle Ben has buried in his past.
Martin Sheen’s Uncle Ben doesn’t seem to be a man keeping secrets, only a man trying not to show how he’s weighed down by longstanding regrets and probably unjustified guilt and self-recrimination. Sheen has built his characterization of Uncle Ben around the idea of Peter’s budding greatness. Ben, even more than Gwen, senses the hero within Peter, and as proud as it makes him, it also scares him. He knows that with great power---by which he means talent, brains, and the ambition to put them to work, the webslinging and the wallcrawling haven’t started yet, and when they do, he won’t know about it---comes more than great responsibility. It comes with the potential for all kinds of trouble and heartbreak that he wants protect Peter from but knows he can’t. This worries and saddens him but it also makes him feel like something a failure. He believes Peter deserves a surrogate father up to the job of helping a hero. He’s at a loss. It’s a little more complicated than the sense of loss all parents of teenagers on the brink of outgrowing their ability to protect them feel, but he deals with it in a familiar way, by being inconsistent in his approach, alternating between indulgence, humor, over-asserting his authority, and just plain asking the child he wants to help for advice on how to help him. This Uncle Ben never says the iconic line but in the two speeches that boil down to “With great power…” there’s more than a hint of apology. He feels judged by Peter, one of the few ways in which he underestimates his nephew.
Of course the movie depends on Andrew Garfield making Peter the hero Uncle Ben and Gwen expect him to be while still making him the awkward, angst-ridden, insecure, self-absorbed typical teenager he can’t help being. Garfield works this balancing act just fine. He overdoes the mumbling, mopey act sometimes, and seems a little too taken with this as one of Peter’s charms. But he is charming. As for how he compares to Tobey Maguire, it’s not a matter if he’s as good, it matters that he’s different. And he is. He’s more inward, to start. More of a jerk. Even when he’s doing good, his cockiness crosses the line into jerkiness. Which is in keeping with the idea that this Peter needs to learn more personal lessons than Maguire’s Peter did. He’s more romantic than Maguire, and sexier. Maguire’s Peter needed to be Spider-Man in order to approach Mary Jane. Garfield’s Peter lacks for poise but not confidence and Gwen and he are well on their way to hooking up before he gets bitten. And he’s smarter. Maguire’s Peter was no dope. But Garfield’s is undoubtedly a genius.
Garfield doesn’t seem to be having as much fun as Maguire did. Some of that is due to what I was trying to get at above, his Peter isn’t allowed to have much fun. That could change in the next movie, but I wouldn’t count on it.
The producers have made it plain they’re doing a trilogy. The movies are going to tell one complete story and, given that the heroine is Gwen, fans already know where that’s going.
The Amazing Spider-Man, directed by Marc Webb, screenplay by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves. Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Denis Leary, and Rhys Ifans. Rated PG-13. Now available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.
“She sent you after me, knowing you’re not ready, knowing you would likely die. Mommy was very bad.” James Bond (Daniel Craig) and M (Judi Dench) attempt to repair their friendship while on the run from the madman out to get revenge on M as 007 returns to Ian Flemingesque form by way of John le Carre in the newest and maybe the best Bond movie, Skyfall.
Skyfall is the only Bond film I can think of that presents us with a character besides Bond who isn’t a villain or a love interest that we’re meant to care about as a character.
M.
Skyfall is Judi Dench’s movie almost as much as it’s Daniel Craig’s. In fact, their relationship, M and Bond’s, is what Skyfall is about. The spectacular opening chase, Javier Bardem’s beautifully weird turn as the villain, the sneaky build-up of in-jokes towards the best in-joke of all, the re-introduction of Q in the form of Ben Wishlaw auditioning to be the next Doctor Who, the stunts, crashes, chases, fights, and Peckinpagh-esque gun battle at the end, and the delicious Naomie Harris as Eve (last name withheld, but it’s not a double-entendre), the most all-around competent Bond Girl since Honor Blackman---Not quite as good as Bond but better than the average 00- at whatever she puts her hand to, Eve is an expert stunt driver, field agent, bureaucrat and office politician, barber, and wearer of gold-lame dresses as in-joke. She’s not the crack shot she needs to be at one point, but in her defense, she’s being rushed.---all that’s for fun and show, giftwrapping on a story about a pair of good friends whose unusual occupation is destroying their friendship.
Fans of the Craig Bonds who like Craig’s more realistic 007 will take note that what’s real about his Bond in Skyfall is that he has things on his mind besides sex, violence, his mission, and how to get from Plot Point A to Plot Point B alive. It’s more than that he hurts and suffers and emotes. He feels. And he thinks. And he thinks about what he feels and feels things in reaction to what he thinks. He has an inner life.
He has a life.
But what grounds Craig’s Bond in reality is Bond’s relationship with M (and Craig’s work with Dench. They make a good team.). M is real. And she makes Bond real. Dench’s performance is realistic enough that she could take it as it is, walk it into a very different sort of spy movie, and it would fit right in Her M would get along well with George Smiley.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Dame.
In Bond’s relationship with M, when can see glimmers of what it would have been like between Control and “scalp-hunter” Jim Prideaux or Smiley and Ricky Tarr, the original jumped-up thug Craig’s Bond appears to be at the beginning of Casino Royale, if John le Carre had gone in for conventional spy stories, just as before Skyfall we could see glimmers in those relationships of a more realistic Bond.
Skyfall, more than any other Bond, is about how spies are people before and while they are busy being spies. And not particularly interesting people, at that. At least not any more interesting than lawyers or chartered accountants and therefore they are subject to the same kind of novelistic treatment. In other words, Skyfall is the first Bond to acknowledge the alternative universe of espionage created by le Carre, whose writing career began as a critique of Ian Fleming’s, and concede he may have a point.
Director Sam Mendes doesn’t take us into the world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. M’s people aren’t Smiley’s people. But he’s scouted the territory and is reporting back that things there are similar to how they are here. The spy game is grubby, soul-deadening work when it’s not boring and routine. Espionage is on the whole a bureaucratic and political endeavor. And spies have feelings about what they do and about each other that aren’t always high-minded or noble but aren’t necessarily the opposites. Spies (with one exception, and he’s less an exception than he’s been previously shown to be) are basically ordinary men and women, and like other ordinary men and women their professional relationships are often, sadly and messily, personal, as well.
At the beginning of Skyfall, M is losing on the political and bureaucratic side and is failing right before our eyes on the professional and personal levels. She’s in trouble with the Prime Minister for overseeing a bungled mission that got several agents killed, including (apparently) MI6’s very best agent, without achieving its intended result. And that best agent is angry at her for making the decision that would have gotten him killed if he wasn’t James Bond and not blessed with a supernatural amount of luck. He’s punishing her by pretending to be as dead as he should be, leaving her hurt, guilty, and afraid, with no one to turn to for help.
And she needs help.
Not just to save her career.
To save her life.
She’s been targeted. A former agent (Bardem) from her field days as head of the Hong Kong bureau, one who in his time may have been as good as Bond is in his, and like Bond something of a personal favorite of M’s, has returned from his apparent death, which, like Bond’s, was caused by her decision to sacrifice him for the sake of a mission. The agent, who now goes by the name of Silva, intends to get revenge on M for leaving him to die in despair in a Chinese prison.
M can be ruthless.
We’ve seen this side of her before, when she burned Bond in the guise of Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, doing to him when he was captured by the North Koreans what she did to Silva when he was captured by the Chinese, leaving him in prison to rot. That was in a different universe and in that universe M’s ruthlessness was official. Bond had to be sacrificed for Queen and Country. Her coldness was her strength. In this universe, it’s a sign of weakness. Under intense pressure with the clock ticking down, she’s prone to flinching at the last second. She opts for the ruthless decision as the easier decision, knowing she can rationalize it to herself and to her superiors and her agents later. She does it right at the top of Skyfall to Bond and another agent.
This is a good place to stop for a reminder that the move to reboot the Bond franchise in a more serious vein began with the Timothy Dalton Bonds, The Living Daylights and License to Kill, and it was meant to accelerate in the Pierce Brosnan years. It got untracked because the producers kept losing their nerve and retreating into Roger Moore territory and because, until Halle Berry showed up in Die Another Day, Brosnan was never given a real actress to work with as a leading lady and, after Sean Bean in GoldenEye, all his villains were just cackling madmen so obsessed with their schemes for world domination they hardly seemed to notice Bond even while monologuing at him. Even the good actors, Jonathan Pryce in Tomorrow Never Dies and Robert Carlyle in The World is Not Enough, were too wrapped up in their characters’ megalomania to give Brosnan anything to work with. So he was usually left standing in his own bubble of reality alone, except when he was joined in there by Judi Dench.
Carrying Dench over into the Craig films was one of the best decisions the producers made and she, as much as Craig, has been responsible for what’s real in these realistic Bonds.
But Casino Royale didn’t succeed at making a more serious Bond just by changing the tone. It succeeded by taking itself seriously as a movie as opposed to the entertainments, spectacles, and amusement park rides so many past Bond films had been.
Quantum of Solace almost threw all this good work away. It wasn’t a good movie. It wasn’t even a good Bond movie. It was a routine revenge thriller not as compelling as either of the first two Bourne movies or half as much fun as Taken with tired and uninspired stunts and routine special effects that made me nostalgic for the days when John Glen was directing the Bonds.
Skyfall will wipe away any lingering memories you may have of Quantum of Solace. It’s a better Bond and a better movie than Casino Royale. Mendes even stakes his claim that it’s as good a movie as or at least deserves to be judged alongside highly regarded films of very different sorts by alluding to or quoting directly from: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (of course), The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, The Thomas Crown Affair (Pierce Brosnan Edition), Silence of the Lambs, No Country for Old Men, Rear Window, Blade Runner, Straw Dogs (I think), and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The reference to Harry Potter I thought I caught might just have been my fevered imagination at work.
But there are probably others I’ll pick up on when I see it again.
Mendes has also included tributes to the other Bonds, mainly Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, but Sean Connery above all.
And…
I’m pretty sure Mendes was being deliberately cheeky risking self-parody with nods to Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English movies.
Think I’m stretching?
Ask yourself what’s with Bardem’s ridiculous hair and fey, bordering on camp performance?
Here’s Bardem as Silva in Skyfall.
And here’s John Malkovich as the villain in Johnny English.
Coincidence?
Ok. Skyfall’s screenplay is by John Logan and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.
Johnny English was written by William Davies and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.
I even think Purvis and Wade, with Mendes’ help, were getting some of their own back from Atkinson. If you haven’t seen Johnny English Reborn you should if only for Atkinson’s send up of the literally over the top (and under and around and through everything else) parkour chase at the beginning of Casino Royale. The chase that opens Skyfall is a challenge to Atkinson if he makes a third Johnny English, Mendes, Purvis, and Wade saying: “Ok, wiseguy. Let’s see how you handle this one.”
By the way, both Johnny English and Johnny English Reborn are very good Bond movies the way Galaxy Quest is a very good Star Trek movie. Which figures. Purvis and Wade know their Bond, having written or had a hand in all the Bonds going back to the Pierce Brosnan days and The World is not Enough.
There are also borrowings from some TV shows, like Leverage and Sherlock, and it appears Purvis and Wade familiar with Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
So…is it a good movie? Yes. How good? Pretty darn good. Is it a good Bond? Definitely. One of the best. Is it the best? That depends.
It depends on when and how you got to know Bond and became a fan.
Anyone answering the question What’s the best Bond? is probably actually answering two other questions: Who’s your favorite Bond and Which is your favorite of his movies?
Seems most people prefer Sean Connery’s Bond. But I have a soft spot for Roger Moore because he was the first Bond I got to know and Live and Let Die was the first Bond movie I saw on a big screen. I saw the Connery Bonds after that, cut up for TV. It’s hard to take Moore seriously anymore because we look back at his Bond through his later outings, the execrable View to a Kill and the ridiculous Octopussy and the wacky Moonraker, all three made when Moore was too for Bond, too boot. (For Your Eyes Only isn’t so bad, but it actually shows Moore’s age more than the others.) But his first three are good, and The Spy Who Loved Me still has the best opening gambit of all time, and if Moore had started with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, which almost happened, and quit while he was ahead after The Spy Who Loved Me, then I think, although he may not have been the best Bond, he’d have made the best series of Bond movies to date.
Timothy Dalton didn’t make enough Bonds to establish himself in my mind, but if he had started when he might have, with Diamonds Are Forever or Live and Let Die, and continued through GoldenEye, he might have rivaled Connery.
I’m a Pierce Brosnan fan and enjoyed his Bond, but except for GoldenEye and the first third of Die Another Day, his series of movies were kind of dull. And he always seemed to be Pierce Brosnan doing Bond. His best Bondian turns were actually in The Tailor of Panama and The Thomas Crown Affair. But suppose he had started where he almost did with The Living Daylights and License to Kill.
I like Craig’s Bond, but he’s not yet my favorite. My sense is that he’s the favorite Bond of fans who really wish Sean Connery was still young and toupeed and of people who never cared much for Bond in any incarnation before Casino Royale. If either’s the case with you, then the fun or the joke is on you in Skyfall. One of the themes of Skyfall is that in the years since we last saw him at the end of Quantum of Solace (or at the end of Casino Royale, if you prefer to pretend Quantum Solace never happened), this Bond has grown more like the Bond we know of old and he’s only going to grow more so over the coming movies. He’s more suave now, more relaxed in a tux, more amused by himself and by what’s going on around him, and more cold. More callous towards women too, more likely to treat the death of a bad girl Bond Girl as he treats the death of anyone out to kill him or get him killed, as the occasion for a cruel joke.
The point is driven home by something appearing at the end that’s conspicuously missing at the beginning. Leading up to it are those in-jokes and some surprises that you’ll probably see coming if you call yourself a true fan. But taken together they add up to this. The reboot is over. Now, Bond, James Bond, is back in business.
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As usual, a title card appears in the closing credits announcing that James Bond Will Return. But it doesn’t say what the name of the next movie will be. The producers haven’t decided yet. There are only three authentic Ian Fleming titles left and all resound with a thud. But I know what the title should be.
I won’t say it here because it’s something of a spoiler. But I proud of the joke and can’t resist, so I’m putting it in the comments.
Reminder: Although I hope people will be considerate, the comment section is not a spoiler-free zone.
And, from January, here’s my review of the movie (not the novel or the TV series) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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The Blonde’s Bond Blurb: “Very English, and I don’t mean Johnny.”
Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Berenice Marlohe, Ben Wishaw, Rory Kincaid, Helen McCory, and Albert Finney. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.
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This week’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night is the Mannion Guys’ introduction to Sean Connery’s Bond, You Only Live Twice, which Tony Dayoub says, “is instructive in explaining why Connery was getting fed up with the series and how the Bond movies would eventually stray quite far from their source material before its triumphant reboot decades later.” In other words, it’s the movie in which things began to go a little nutty. But, hey, it’s got the volcano hide-out and ninjas!
Whip surveys the wreckage: Denzel Washington is very good as a hero pilot who saves the passengers on his broken airliner but in the process exposes himself as an alcoholic and drug addict in Robert Zemeckis’ earnest and at times preachy melodrama, Flight.
John Goodman bursts onto the screen, shaded, goateed, trailing a long, braided ponytail, the even longer cord on the earjack of his iPod, the improbable name of Harling Mays, and the promise of some comic relief, which we sorely need after the harrowing plane crash that opens Robert Zemeckis’ overly earnest, over-long, and over-done drama Flight, starring Denzel Washington as a hero pilot with six Jack Lemmons’, three Ray Millands’, and at least one Nicolas Cage’s worth of an Oscar-baiting drinking problem that he balances out with a Michael J. Fox level of an addiction to coke and pills.
As Washington’s drug and booze connection and personal anti-nutritionist and unfitness guru, Goodman arrives as if blown in from another movie, patly accompanied on the soundtrack by Sympathy for the Devil, raising hopes (my hopes, at any rate) that he is the devil or at least one of the devil’s human avatars and he’s about to turn Flight into a very different sort of movie. A satire on the media and the nature of heroism, maybe, which is what I was expecting, because, really, who needs another earnest morality tale about the fall, recovery, and redemption of a drunk?
It turns out Goodman might as well be in another movie for all his character and his performance have to do with what Zemeckis is up to in Flight. Washington and the actress playing his nurse in the hospital where he's recuperating from the crash seem not to know what to make of Goodman either, as if they weren't expecting him ---Goodman not Mayes---to show up, at least not like this. I can't recall ever seeing actors in a movie just stop acting and stare in complete bewilderment at a co-star's performance. It's almost as if Goodman had said to himself, Screw this! and thrown away his script just before the camera started to roll. (I know. Cameras don't roll anymore. Give me time. I'll catch up.) what I suspect was actually going on is that Zemeckis couldn't reconcile what he had them doing with what he had Goodman doing, which is a general weakness throughout flight.
Goodman isn't the only one who seems to be in a different movie from the one---the ones---everyone else is in.
Kelly Reilly is in a gender-switched version of The Basketball Diaries cleaned up and made more family-friendly for a showing on Lifetime. Don Cheadle's starring in a courtroom drama a la A Civil Action. Washington's acting up a storm in an update of The Lost Weekend. And Zemeckis hasn't found a way to blend them all tonally, structurally, thematically, or stylistically. He leaves it up to Washington to pull it all together with the magnetism of his charisma and the binding force of his performance.
It's one heck of a performance. As Whip Whitaker a commercial airline pilot who hasn't lost the swagger or the the recklessness of his days as a Navy fighter pilot and who just to keep himself sharp flies his jetliner as if he was still in the cockpit of an F-14, when he's not so hungover or drunk or high he has to leave all the work to his co-pilot and take a nap in the cockpit, Washington is very good. He's very good a lot. John Gatins’ screenplay makes sure that he doesn’t lack for opportunities to be very good. The script will give him a chance to be very good in a scene and one scene later he'll be called on to be very good again. Sometimes he gets to be very good twice in the same scene.
You're getting the picture, right?
Flight is a showcase for Denzel Washington to the point that his being very good becomes the point of the movie.
What Flight isn't is a coherent story about a pilot who happens to be an alcoholic becoming a hero despite himself and having his sudden fame threatening to expose his secrets and many flaws to the world. Instead it's the story of an alcoholic who incidentally is a pilot but might as well be a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or an insurance agent for all it really matters to who he is as a character or to the story he's in. The crash and the investigation that follows are plot devices that drive him towards choosing between confronting the truth about his drinking problem or continuing along his current path of self-destruction.
Now here’s where a critic like me can get himself in trouble. And by “a critic like me” I mean me. When I start to review the movie I wish the director had made instead of the one he did make. And clearly I wish Zemeckis had made a different kind of movie. One more like Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe or Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero or Hero, a lost little gem from 1992 directed by Stephen Frears and starring Dustin Hoffman as an obnoxious and selfish little nudnik who despite himself acts heroically to save the lives of passengers of an airplane that has crashed in an icy river only to have the credit for the rescue go to a more conventionally heroic sort played by Andy Garcia. Flight sets up the same questions as those films---What happens when the public’s perception of a hero is very different from the hero’s own perception of himself? What happens if the hero is in fact not a hero? What if the hero doesn’t deserve the acclaim and the love and the rewards being bestowed on him?---but Zemeckis and Gatins not only don’t try to answer them, they don’t even address them. A pilot who pulled off in real life what Whip pulls off in the movie would be revered by the public and worshiped by the media. Ask Captain Sully Sullenberger.
But while we’re told Whip’s a national hero, we never see or hear anybody treating him as one. As soon as Whip’s recovered enough to leave the hospital, he retreats to his family farm way out in the country to hide and from there on out nobody seems much interested in him as a hero. Whip has reasons to feel as guilty about what happened as proud and of course he has an excellent reason not to want the public get to know who and what he is in addition to being the best goddamn pilot in the world. But it turns out that everybody he comes in contact with---and Whip keeps forgetting he’s trying to hide and wandering away from the farm, usually to go buy more beer and booze (Why he doesn’t call on Harling Mays to bring it to him, I don’t know.)---seems privy to his secrets and dedicated to making him feel more guilty while the reporters and TV crews on his trail seem intent not on exploiting his heroism for ratings and page views but exposing him as a fraud, which if they were part of the Washington political press corps and Whip was a Democrat running for office might happen, but in the case of hero pilot who saved ninety-six people with his skill and derring-do? Not likely. It’s as if Zemeckis and Gatins have never seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Melodramas about characters confronting their demons in the form of various addictions belong to a venerable and even illustrious tradition. They’re not my favorite sort of movies and I was disappointed that Flight turned out to be one of those. But if Zemeckis had wanted to make one of those, the crash wouldn’t have been necessary. The possibility of a crash would have been enough. It doesn’t matter that this one time Whip has the skill and the courage to save his broken plane even while drunk. It matters that one of these days when he climbs into the cockpit drunk or high he will make a mistake he can’t recover from and rack up the plane. By including the crash, which makes for spectacular cinema, by the way, although, as I’ve been saying, the by-the-wayness of it is a problem, Zemeckis raises questions and expectations that that he spends the rest of the movie ignoring. That’s not a good thing for a director to do.
Beyond that, though, there’s Zemeckis’ failure to bring together the different types of movies his characters are in.
Cheadle never gets to show off the impressive legal skills his character boasts of. Reilly follows her own road to redemption right out of the movie. Nothing really gets going with Goodman. All these separate subplots do is add length to a movie that clocking in at two hours and eighteen minutes is half an hour too long. But Zemeckis also draws things out through a lack of economy. He rarely does with one shot what he can do with three or lets a character say with a look or a gesture what they can say with a long speech. He repeats himself. He lets his actors repeat themselves.
And never mind that Flight isn’t the satire I’d have preferred. Except for the scenes with Goodman, this a movie strikingly low on humor or wit or any sense of irony.
Also, it’s preachy. In fact, at times, it borders on the out and out Christian. Not quite in the way of redemptive, uplifting, and overtly religious movies like Soul Surfer, Fireproof, and Facing the Giants. More in the tradition of old-fashioned, homiletic Hollywood tearjerkers, just without any kindly priests of the Pat O’Brien/Spencer Tracy mold and no late night, lonely visits to church, although Whip is dragged to an AA meeting at one point.
Most damaging of all is that Flight is a realistic movie that never feels real. It’s not just that the Media don’t behave like the Media or that people don’t react to Whip as they did to Sully Sullenberger. It’s not just that the script seems to be inventing rules and regulations, practices and procedures for the airline industry for the convenience of the plot. It’s that the movie misses the implications of one of its own major plot points.
Whip’s plane goes into a nose dive mid-flight because an vital component of the hydraulic system snaps. That component, we’re told, had been identified in an inspection as past due for replacement a year before this flight!
I don’t believe that if the news came out that an airline was putting defective planes in the air anybody would care that the pilot who saved the passengers on one of those planes that came apart in midair might have been a little the worse for a few drinks.
Well, actually, the movie presents us with one person who does care. I didn’t mention another member of the cast who’s stuck in her own movie.
Melissa Leo has a delicious and devilish (though a very different sort of devil than Goodman’s) cameo as an inspector for the National Transportation Safety Board who is on to Whip from the beginning and seems determined to expose him and send him to jail. In her apparent lack of interest in the real crime---the airline’s negligence---and obsession with bringing Whip to her idea of justice, she’s like a more well-intentioned Javert to Whip’s much less noble Jean Valjean.
Flight annoyed and disappointed me but it’s not terrible. And there’s one compelling reason to see it.
Denzel Washington is very good.
Did I mention that?
Very, very good.
The Blonde’s Blurb: “Denzel! Wow!”
Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by John Gatins. Starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, Melissa Leo, Brian Geraghty, Tamara Tunie, and Nadine Valazquez. Rated R. Now in theaters.
Lost in the bazaar: Ben Affleck as CIA operative Tony Mendez leads the six American diplomats he’s come to rescue down a street in Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in Argo, an Affleck-directed political thriller based on an actual covert mission that involved putting a fake movie into pretended production and having the diplomats pose as members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for their non-existent Star Wars rip-off.
If you sit still when the lights come on and the credits start to roll at the end of Argo---which you should do because 1. It’s a good movie and you should be sitting all the way through it anyway and 2. These days filmmakers are in the habit of opening up audience-rewarding Easter eggs during and after the credits of their movies and you should still be kicking yourself if you didn’t wait until the very, very last credit of The Avengers---you’ll see how proud Argo’s director and star Ben Affleck is of his movie’s visual historical accuracy. And you can’t blame him.
Affleck juxtaposes scenes from Argo with pictures of the real people and events that show how closely he’s captured the look and feel and sense of those long, terrible 444 days from November 1979 until January 1981 when Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two American diplomats hostage within the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran and with them our national pride and, I’d argue, our collective mental balance.
It’s not just that many of the key players are the spitting images of their real-life counterparts (with one notable exception). That’s the easy part. It’s that the movie’s recreations of the scenes outside and inside the embassy and in the streets of Tehran more than look like the pictures on TV and in newspapers and magazines at the time---they have the same energy and evoke the same sense of something terrible, terrifying, and tragic happening right before our eyes and the same sense of frustration and helplessness that follows that godawful despairing realization that There’s nothing we can do!
If you’re old enough to remember the Hostage Crisis, though, you won’t need the pictures at the end to tell you how exactly Affleck and his cinematographer and designers got that right. You’ll have felt it right from the start.
That’s one of the very good things about Argo but it’s not the best thing. It makes the best things possible. If Affleck had been content with historical evocations, Argo would be a simple costume drama with blocky polyesters and bad facial hair choices in place of bustles and stovepipe hats.
Of course, the history doesn’t just drive the plot. The history is the plot. But it also provides Argo with its look, its feel, its mood, and one of its important themes.
On November 4, 1979, as the crowds of Iranian protesters and militants stormed the embassy, six members of the station slipped out the back and found sanctuary at the home of the Canadian ambassador and his wife, who hid them out for three months until the situation became dire and untenable. The Canadians were recalling the ambassador. The Iranians were on the hunt. There was nowhere else safe for them to hide. The fear back in Washington was that if they were caught they’d be treated as spies but if the U.S. tried to rescue them, the Iranians would take revenge on the fifty-two hostages at the embassy.
CIA agent Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who specialized in sneaking operatives, assets, and defectors out from under the noses of hostile governments, was tasked with developing a plan to get the six out. Inspired by his son’s love of Star Wars and Planet of the Apes, he came up with the idea of passing the six off as members of a Canadian film crew scouting desert locations for a science-fiction movie.
In real life the movie was called Lord of Light for which an actual script existed, based on the novel by Roger Zelazny. In Argo the movie is a Star Wars rip-off called…Argo. In order to fool any Iranians who might go looking for physical evidence that a movie is in production, Mendez makes a side-trip to Hollywood where with the help of an Oscar-winning make-up artist named John Chambers (a real person played by a lookalike John Goodman) and Lester Siegel, an irascible producer with a World War II secret service background and a patriotic streak that he forgot he had (Alan Arkin playing a composite of four actual people), he sets up a phony production company, secures “financing”, and generates public relations campaign that results in puff pieces in the trades.
Affleck and his director of photography Rodrigo Prieto have given Argo the gloomy and gritty texture of those films, conjuring up the same look and feel of a society that had given up on itself, of a world literally crumbling from neglect---summed up by an anachronistic shot of the iconic Hollywood sign falling to pieces, which really had happened, although by the time of the Hostage Crisis it had been put back together. and nobody seemed interested in putting it back together---the same mood of reasonable paranoia, the same sense of people taking shelter in lonely, little groups, hiding out from an almost sourceless menace. Mendez’s apartment in Virginia, his hotel room in Tehran, the kitchen of the Canadian Ambassador’s house reminded me of Faye Dunaway’s basement apartment in Three Days of the Condor and Jane Alexander’s character’s sister’s house in All the President’s Men. And I couldn’t help thinking of President Carter looking lost and alone in his self-imposed imprisonment in the White House. Throughout the movie, Carter is mostly seen on television sets in the background in real news footage, looking shrunken, isolated, trapped, and ignored. In those ‘70s political thrillers, the threat comes from a secret source inside the government, if not from the government itself. In Argo, the government is as threatened and baffled as everyone else.
I feel like I’m making Argo sound unremittingly grim and didactic as well. It’s neither. It’s not exactly light-hearted but it is full of humor and not all of it of the gallows kind. The movie has a satirical edge, although the edge is of a blade fingered behind the back rather than drawn and pointed. Its targets are Hollywood, of course, but the government, politics, bureaucracy, and the spy game come in for it and, to a darker and more circumspect degree, so does the Iranian Revolution, which produced its own absurd bureaucracies and brand of politicians.
But in all cases the humors arises not from the institutions or systems being satirized but from the people who make them up. Argo’s Hollywood is a collection of lunatics among whom eccentrics like Chambers and Siegel connive to thrive and survive. Mendez, Chambers, and Siegel have no trouble setting up their phony production company. The easy joke would be that that’s because one way or another everybody in the business is a phony and the whole industry depends on all these phonies pretending not to notice each other’s phoniness. But in Argo it’s more the case of everyone being too caught up in their own problems to pay close attention to what others are up to. It turns out to be a similar case among the Iranians, with the difference being that people’s individual problems are often matters of life and death. Revolutionary Iran is a scary place even for revolutionaries. But Mendez’s plan depends on individual Iranians having too much else to worry about besides whether or not he might be a spy.
Affleck takes the view that no matter how dire the circumstances get, people will be people and that means that they’re often ridiculous. We’re funny that way. But it’s one of the things that makes us strong and resilient. We just can’t take it all in. Our egos and vanities and misperceptions get in the way. Our best defense is that we aren’t aware enough to realize how much trouble we’re in. It’s a likable trait, even admirable in its way, and it’s the root of our commonality. Before we’re anything else, an American spy or an Iranian revolutionary, we are ourselves. We just can’t help it.
To illustrate this point, Affleck fills Argo with characters being themselves despite themselves. All of them, from the leads and supports, and cameos to the nameless bureaucrats and spies in Washington and at Langley, to the bit players, stagehands, suits, and hangers-on in Hollywood, to the Iranian citizens, soldiers, shopkeepers, low-level government officials, and airport workers, are given dialog, even if only a line or two, or a shot in a scene that reveals them as distinct individuals with feelings and thoughts that transcend their function in the plot.
The odd exceptions are the six diplomats Mendez is trying to rescue who are differentiated mainly by their their hairstyles and shirt collar widths. One of the six is given more lines and screen time than any of the others but for the most part he’s the spokesmen for their collective fears, doubts, and regrets. Except for one scene, and it’s a redeeming exception, he doesn’t speak for himself or, rather, he doesn’t speak as a particular self we get to know and understand on his own terms. I’m guessing Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, were being tactful and taking into consideration the feelings of the of the real people all of whom are still alive and probably still haunted by their ordeal and Affleck may have been too careful about not seeming to exploit it or them they wouldn’t like to see it or them for dramatic effect.
But while this weakness may be deliberate and understandable, it’s all the more glaring because of how vividly almost all the other characters in the movie are portrayed.
Argo is an ensemble piece. Affleck is undoubtedly the star and his character is the hero, but although it’s a star’s part, it requires him not to do a star turn. The job he’s given himself is to be the calm center around which the craziness swirls. He builds a sheltered space where we can stand with him and watch and think along with him. In fact, much of his performance is watching and thinking. The showier work is left to others, with Goodman and Arkin getting the best of it and having the most obvious fun.
As Chambers and Siegel, they make a dueling but amusingly complementary pair of cynics. Different types of cynics. Chambers is the good-natured, forgiving type, amused by other people’s foolishness but grateful for it because it allows him to lead his two lives as artist and spy. Goodman plays him with an almost permanent grin as if he’s on the brink of bursting into a hearty laugh that will give away the whole game. Siegel is a cynic of the self-loathing kind whose disdain for humanity in general begins with disdain for himself in particular. Siegel has himself convinced that he’s not doing anything worthwhile with his life. It’s a feeling leftover from his glory days an intelligence officer in World War II. Making movies, even award-winning ones, just doesn’t compare to fighting Nazis. But like most movie cynics he’s a closet romantic and an idealist and, while profanely and grumpily expressing reluctance, he jumps at the chance to get back to meaningful work. Since he’s played by Alan Arkin, however, he’s even grumpier and more profane in his idealism than in his cynicism.
Bryan Cranston and Chris Messina, as Mendez’s immediate superior at the CIA and the agent in charge of operations in the control room at Langley, have almost as much to do as Affleck in roles that allow them to be more active and show more range than the star’s own. Bob Gunton as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Philip Baker Hall in an uncredited appearance as Vance’s unnamed deputy who almost certainly is meant to be Warren Christopher have one brief scene together that apart from its effectiveness in its own right serves up one of the best Muppet jokes ever not made by the Muppets themselves. Richard Kind turns up as a shark of a Hollywood agent who is almost a match in cynicism and irascibility for Arkin’s Siegel. Adrienne Barbeau turns up an a fiery cameo as one of Siegel’s ex-wives. Zeljko Ivanek and Keith Szarabajka bluster and storm as State Department officials and capture the frustration and desperate need to do something, anything, but what? that gripped not just the administration but much of the entire country.
Compelling in quieter roles are Kyle Chandler as Carter’s Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, Victor Garber and Page Leong as Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife Pat, Sheila Vand as their young Iranian housekeeper Sahar whose loyalties are a mystery even to herself, Ali Saam as a member of the Revolutionary guard who comes calling at the Canadian embassy and tests Sahar’s loyalties, and Hooshang Tooze as the Deputy Minister of Islamic Guidance who is probably something more than the simple bureaucrat he presents himself to Mendez as being.
The last three along with other actors playing Iranians of all sorts and conditions are important to Affleck’s determination to individualize the Iranians and make us see the Revolution through their eyes and not as the angry mobs we saw on TV at the time. This doesn’t mean that he wants us to sympathize with the revolution. The Iranians are shown as dangerous and implacable enemies of the United States, which, although Affleck doesn’t shy away from our transgressions and mistakes and crimes in the Middle East, is still us to the Iranians them. But sorting out the good guys from the bad guys isn’t the issue. and the question of who’s right and who’s wrong---or who’s more right or less wrong---is irrelevant because it’s irrelevant to the characters in the movie. They can’t do anything about it and figuring out an answer won’t help them solve their problem at the moment.
Which brings me back to the way Affleck uses history in Argo.
Affleck and Terrio grant themselves a good deal of dramatic license, naturally. It wouldn’t be a Hollywood movie without the filmmakers taking liberties with the facts. And Argo is a movie, a thriller not a docudrama. But Affleck never lets us forget the reality behind his story. As I said, it does more than drive the plot. It gives Argo its mood and its tension. And it’s vital thematically.
Affleck lets us know from the beginning and keeps reminding us that we’re not to expect a sense of triumph if Mendez pulls this off. At best we’ll feel relieved. Then he keeps the pressure on so that intensely that relief, if it comes, will be enough. We’re not allowed to see the operation as a potential surrogate victory over the Iranians or even a moral one. This is a job that has to be done for its own sake. It will have no effect on the larger crisis except in that if the mission fails it might make things worse.
There are times when there really isn’t anything we can do. There are problems that can’t be solved. There are situations where even someone as powerful as the President of the United States has no control. Under those circumstances, when success isn’t an option, despair and surrender are temptations that must still be resisted. The best thing we can do is do our jobs, to exercise what little control we have in the little sphere in which we still have it, and instead of holing up by ourselves, reach out to those nearest whom we can help. We have to take care of each other.
“I’ve never left anyone behind,” Mendez tells the six people he’s come to rescue.
He’s not boasting. He’s not merely trying to be encouraging. He’s stating a simple fact. This is his job, to make sure no one gets left behind.
That’s all our jobs.
No matter what else, we’re here to make sure none of us gets left behind.
Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, screenplay by Chris Terrio, based on a Wired article by Joshuah Bearman. Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Kyle Chandler, and Chris Messina. Rated R. Now in theaters.
. It’s about a high school student who sets himself up as a detective. Colin is an Aspie. Well, of course he is, someone who knows Asperger’s only from what they’ve learned from watching TV might say, Aspies are natural born detectives because they see everything, like Monk and Sherlock Holmes. Well…no. Monk is OCD and Holmes is just a scientist with bad manners. Someone with Asperger’s, like Colin, has to compensate for his Asperger’s not rely on it. Try interviewing a witness or a suspect when the first thing you have to detect is their mood and you can’t read their facial expressions. Colin carries drawings of faces with a range of expressions he refers to when baffled. Our house’s Asperger’s kid studied charts like that when he was in the early days of therapy. 
and to 
at Amazon.
. In Argo the movie is a Star Wars rip-off called…Argo. In order to fool any Iranians who might go looking for physical evidence that a movie is in production, Mendez makes a side-trip to Hollywood where with the help of an Oscar-winning make-up artist named John Chambers (a real person played by a lookalike John Goodman) and Lester Siegel, an irascible producer with a World War II secret service background and a patriotic streak that he forgot he had (
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