Lance Mannion

Coming soon to an artsy-fartsy blog near you

June 11:  Tonight's open thread is underway here.

Revised, Tuesday afternoon.

New feature will get underway next week.

Lance Mannion's Wednesday Night at the Movies.

Starting next Wednesday, June 11, and for the four Wednesdays after that I'll be hosting an open thread over at newcritics devoted to each one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture for 1967:  The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle.  I was going to leave that last one off my list, but our favorite film blogger the Siren insisted I include it.  She swears it holds up a lot better than you'd think.  We'll see.

I chose these movies just because they're the subject of Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution, so I heartily recommend reading the book as a great backgrounder for the discussions.  No way, though, am I assinging it as homework.  These threads are meant to be fun, as if we were all just talking about a movie we'd just seen together at a coffee shop after the show and definitely not as if we'd all just watched it in class.

My plan is to open the threads at 10 PM EDT each Wednesday and we'll just start chatting away as if we'd all just finished watching the movie.  Of course it won't be necessary to actually watch the film just before.  It won't even be necessary for you to have watched the film recently---or at all---to join in.  Clearly, though, I'm hoping folks will watch the movie (re-watch for a lot of us) in the week leading up to that Wednesday's open thread.

So...here's my tentative schedule for the threads:

June 11:  The Graduate.

June 18:  In the Heat of the Night.

June 25.  Doctor Dolittle.

July 2.  Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

July 9.  Bonnie and Clyde.

(Schedule revised from this morning based on suggestions by Ralph Hitchens and SF Mike.  Saving Bonnie and Clyde for last, besides letting us end with a bang---sorry, couldn't resist.---finishes us off with the movie that had the most influence on movies for the next ten years.)

Let me know what you think of the list and the schedule and if you already have some points in mind you'd like the discussions to touch on.

If this goes well I think it will become a permanent fixture at newcritics, although we'll probably start rotating the hosting chores.  The Siren may not remember or may wish to forget but she's already volunteered to take on the next set of movies.

So, there you go.  Add The Graduate to your Netflix queue or buy it from Amazon or download it from somewhere or run out to your local video store or public library ASAP.  Please join in even if you can't watch the movies beforehand.

Now showing at newcritics:

The Siren's look at three movies about the Titanic.  She likes all of them, including you know which one.

Jason Chervokas' Bo Diddley Goes to Heaven.

Mrs Peel's review of the play Port Authority, "Three Irishmen Walk Into a Ferry Waiting Room."

And NCYWeboy's rave review of the Sex and the City movie, Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.

Summer movies and why it's Ken Levine's fault I won't be going anywheres near the cineplex between now and September

Ken Levine has a way of summing up movies that:

1.) Makes me think, Boy, I'll be giving that one the skip.

2.) Makes me think, Boy, I'm glad I'm giving that one the skip.

3.) Makes me think, I think I would rather read Ken Levine summing up movies than actually go to any movies.

I'm guessing that studio heads are meeting right now to put a contract out on him.

A sampling of Ken's sins:

CAPTIVITY – Perfect casting:  Elisha Cuthbert who’s been kidnapped so many times in 24 she can’t ride in a car unless she's in the trunk.

HAIRSPRAY – Movie version of the musical version of the movie. John Travolta plays a fat 1960’s housewife, reprising his role from BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

RESCUE DAWN – Christian Bale and Steve Zahn escape a brutal Laotian POW camp where they are beaten and tortured and fight for their lives in the murderous unforgiving jungle with no hope of rescue. German director, Werner Herzog decides to give comedy a try.

Lots more, in three parts.  One, Two, Three.

Your turn:  What are you looking forward to seeing this summer?

Oddly enough, I'm not looking forward to any of the big sequels I thought I'd be looking forward to---Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-man 3, or Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix---but I am looking forward to the sequel I'd have thought I wouldn't care beans about, Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer.  I refuse to believe it's just because of Jessica Alba.  Must be because the Silver Surfer is really cool.

(Warning:  That picture of Alba may not be safe for work.  For some of you, it is definitely not safe for looking at when wives or lovers are nearby.  Unless you are lucky enough that she enjoys sharing your tastes in female pulchritude.)

I think I'd also like to see Evan Almighty and  Ratatouille.  Other than that....

Well...

Season Three of Deadwood's coming out on DVD in June.

May is sweeps month and you know what that means

Yep.  More naked actresses.

There's so much about this I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.

Not the idea of Keira Knightley and Lindsay Lohan getting naked together.  I have no problem with that one, probably because it's purely an intellectual exercise for me.  Neither Knightley nor Lohan figure all that often in my erotic daydreams.  (Probably only a little more often than I appear in theirs.)  Together they might be more exciting, but I keep thinking back to Knightley's Vanity Fair cover with Scarlett Johanson and shake my head again with disappointment.

And Lohan reminds me of girls I knew back in the day who had reputations for being wild and sexy and easy good times, as long as your idea of a great night finished with you holding her hair back while she knelt over the toilet.

What's causing my head to spin is the evil little voice at the back of my head asking, "Oh yeah?  Well, then what two starlets would you like to see naked and making out together?"

I've got my answers.  Go get your own.

What is it with us straight guys and the idea of women having hot lesbian sex?

Well, in my case it's partly nostalgia, but that's none of your business.

Moving right along, though, this brings me to the next thing I can't get my head around.

A straight guy who isn't turned on by the thought of two beautiful young starlets getting naked together!

From TBogg, who passes along the whole story, I learned that there is in fact such a straight guy and, surprise, surprise, he's a Right Wing blogger.

Not only is this manly man not aroused by images of Keira and Lindsay smooching, he's positively disgusted by the idea.

Apparently he sees it as another sign of the heterosexual guy's apocolypse as the entire female half of the species under the age of 25 is Sapphosticated---spaceships from Venus have landed somewhere and the Amazonian warrior princesses are zapping all our nubile young women with ray guns that turn them into lesbians.

I can see why this guy is panicking.  He probably comes from that tribe of dateless young men who console themselves in their loneliness that every woman who refuses to go out with them is a dyke.  The websites they're visiting to help console themselves offer lots of visual proof of the evil Venusians' plot to eliminate men too.

Ladies, would you mind leaving us men alone together for a moment?  Thank you.

They're gone?

Ok, men, listen up. This generation did not invent muff-diving.  Back in my day, a hundred years ago, many a girl I knew experimented on the other side of the fence.  Of course, I spent a lot of time in the company of actresses, dancers, and other artistic types, and in several cases I only know what they told me and some of them I suspect were liars who were trying to mess with my mind, but the point's still valid.  The difference between this generation and mine is either, depending on your point of view, a lack of discretion or a healthy open-mindedness and honesty about sex, plus a higher quality and better marketed variety of pornography.

Now, onto the less adolescent portion of this post.

Ladies, you can come back in now.

I've read two biographies of Dylan Thomas, neither one recently, but at least one of them at a very impressionable age, when the sudden knowledge that real human beings engaged in threesomes would have left me dazed and goggle-eyed for a week, and I don't recall the romantic episode that's the basis of the movie Knightley and Lohan are now not making together at all.

I remember lots of drinking, lots of vomiting, lots of drunken, fumbled passes at colleagues' and hosts' wives, but not much sex, even of the exclusively heterosexual twosome kind.

Thomas was a famous poet and famous poets, even slobbering, drunken, filthy ones who don't shower or clean under their fingernails, don't live celibate lives if they don't want to.  But I believe Thomas had more luck stealing clean shirts and underwear from his hosts' closets and drawers, something he was prone to do, than he had stealing the wives from their beds.

So I would have thought that the fact Thomas had a frisky, bisexual wife would not have been something his biographers overlooked, and I'm shocked that either it was left out of both books or I completely missed it, twice.

Now, here's the last thing I can't wrap my head around, and it's the thing I will never get my head around.

I'll deal with the movie and the naked starlets.  I'll forget about the Right Wing Blogger's curiously un-heterosexual hang-ups.  I will be persuaded that Caitlin Thomas did swing both ways.

I will never deal with the fact that all this sex and nudity is because of a guy who looked like this:

Then again the guy I knew in college who had the most notches on his bedpost looked like a rat.

He was a rock star though.  Rock star trumps poet, every time.

Keep swinging: Everyone's Hero and the last lesson of Christopher Reeve

Family movie night this week was the negligible Happily N'Ever After, a good premise done in by a script that seemed to have been written with the idea in mind that nothing was to go onto the screen that would tax the modest talents of the computer animators.  The result is kind of a Greek tragedy of a cartoon with all the important action taking place offstage while the characters declaim about their troubles and woes.

Last week the family feature was the only slightly better animated Everyone's Hero, a tall tell set in the year when the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs faced off for the second time straight in the World Series and the Cubbies came close to defeating the Yankees in six games, because the Cubs crazed owner, who is not Philip Wrigley, has Babe Ruth's magic bat, Darlin' stolen from his locker in Yankee Stadium.

The Cubs and the Yanks played each other in the 1932 Series, the Yankees wining it in four straight.  In 1933 the New York Giants beat the Washington Nationals Senators Nationals Senators (Either one. See comments), 4-1.  In '34 the Cardinals beat the Tigers, 4-3.

The Cubs were back in the Series in '35 and they lost, 4-2...to Detroit.

The next and only other time the Cubs and the Yankees met in the World Series was 1938 and the Cubs lost again, of course.  But not because Babe Ruth swung a magic bat or any bat.  Ruth was gone from the Yankees by then.

You could look it up.

In other words, Everyone's Hero is set in a year that never was, call it 1932B, a magical year in which baseballs could talk like Rob Reiner trying to sound like Billy Crystal in Monsters Inc and bats talked like Whoopi Goldberg sounding like Scarlet O'Hara one moment and like Aretha Franklin the next, the World Series was played over the course of two and a half weeks, without any rainouts, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Tony Lazzeri, Irish Bob Muesel, and Earle Combs, all of Murderers Row except for Babe Ruth, forgot how to hit at the same time and the Babe was carrying the team on his back, Ruth transformed into an elegant, articulate sophisticate, a little rough around the edges, but modest and self-effacing, and---SPOILER ALERT---a ten year old boy could be inserted into the World Series line-up at the last minute and hit a game-winning inside the park home run.

The younger critics in the Mannion family room bought the idea of anthropomorphic sporting equipment but...um...balked...at the idea that the rules of the game would be automatically suspended just so the hero of the movie could save the day in dramatic fashion.

They also thought it was just plain dumb that the story took all that trouble to get the Babe his magic bat back and then didn't have him swing it.

You got that right.  SPOILER ALERT IS STILL IN EFFECT.  The movie does not show Babe Ruth hitting a home run.

There's a difference between implausible and stupid and Everyone's Hero defines it in its final ten minutes.

Up until that point it's a likable enough evening's diversion.  Not terrible, but nothing to write home about and not worth a blog post half as long as this one already is and the only reason I'm still going on at this point---you knew I would have an excuse, didn't you?---is the moral of Everyone's Hero.

I've said it before here and I'll say it again.  I don't like morals in kids' movies.  Mainly for two reasons.

One, it's usually the same moral no matter what the movie.  Be True to Yourself.  Variations of this are Follow Your Heart and Follow Your Dreams.  There is nothing inherently wrong with doing any of these things, provided you know who you are and you are a decent person worth being true to and you can tell the difference between what your heart is telling you to do and what your vanity, ego, id, and appetites are telling you to do, and you're not insane or deluded and your dreams are things you have the ability to realize.  Not knowledge most children possess, but never mind.  As the guiding principle for character development, though, Be True to Yourself seems to me a recipee for raising a generation of egomaniacal monsters.

So I wish moviemakers would come up with some additional morals to tack on to their movies.

But it's that idea of morals being tacked on that makes me dislike them so much.  Because that's what morals usually are.  Tacked on. 

Morals may or may not grow intrinsically from a story's theme.  But when they appear, not always at the end, often they're repeated again and again throughout the movie, the filmmakers beating their young audience over the head with them, they appear in CAPITAL LETTERS, as the narrator or a character stops the action dead to lecture the audience, pretty much saying, "Now, children, what important idea have we learned here today?"

BE TRUE TO YOURSELF.

FOLLOW YOUR HEART.

FOLLOW YOUR DREAM.

Or, in the case of Everyone's Hero:

KEEP SWINGING.

If a moral grows out of the story then it's unnecessary to have anybody say it.  Kids are pretty swift on the uptake.  They get the point.

The little kid hero of Everyone's Hero who rescues Ruth's stolen bat and sets out to return it to him, a ten year old boy named Yankee Irving, has a big heart and big dreams, he is a devoted and knowledgeable baseball fan---he's a Jewish kid from a city that has three Major League teams, but he also follows the Negro Leagues closely enough to know all the players---and he loves the New York Yankees.  But he's short, uncoordinated, impatient, and not good at following instructions, all of which combined make him the worst ballplayer in his neighborhood.  He's the kind of player whose best chance of getting on base is by never swinging and hoping for a walk.  Naturally, he's always the last kid picked.  Naturally, this breaks his heart.  Naturally, by the end of the movie he's going to be the one to come through for everybody in the clutch.

He's able to save the day because he never gives up.  He keeps swinging.  Throw him off a moving train to Chicago and he bounces to his feet and starts walking. 

Literally, Yankee's never thrown off a train, although he comes close to falling off one several times.  He is put off the train to Chicago, because he doesn't have a ticket.  But the train stops and the conductor shoos him off at a station in rural Pennsylvania, and after a moment of despair, Yankee plucks up his courage and starts walking.

Figuratively, though, Yankee is thrown off a lot of moving trains.  He has a lot of adventures on the way to Chicago that almost take the heart out of him.  But he keeps on going.  He stays in the box and keeps swinging.  As a lesson for kids, this isn't a bad one.  Don't give up.  Keep looking for a way to succeed.  If this plan doesn't work, come up with another one.  Go back to the drawing board and try, try again.

And I've said this before and I'll say it again, I don't mind lessons in kids' movies.  Lessons are different from morals.  A lesson is a practical piece of wisdom a story teaches just by telling itself.  Kids watching Everyone's Hero don't need to have it explained to them that when you've got a problem to solve the only way to solve it is to solve it---to keep at it, keep swinging.  They'll get it.

But the filmmakers didn't trust their audience.  Every step of the way somebody stops the story dead to tell Yankee, KEEP SWINGING, KID! and by the time the movie's reached its implausible and stupid climax, the lesson has turned into a moral that is very close to becoming another version of FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS.

The utter stupidity of the ending undercuts the good of the lesson, to boot, by suggesting that as long as you keep swinging at some point the rules of the universe will magically rewrite themselves in your favor and you will get your heart's desire just by virtue of having wanted it.

At any rate, not being a kid, just a dumb grown-up and therefore not swift on the uptake, by the time Yankee reached Wrigley Field and was poised to save the day, I had grown cynical about the lesson cum moral and was busy thinking up lots of examples of when Keep Swinging is in fact bad advice---I'd even muttered out loud, although, I hope, only loud enough for the blonde to hear, That's one lesson I wish George Bush hadn't learned; we'd be out of Iraq by now.  She told me to shut my trap.  Then the final credits rolled and I saw something that did make me shut my trap.

Produced and directed by Christopher Reeve.

Everyone's Hero was the project Reeve was working on when he died.

Judging from the documentary tribute that's a special feature on the DVD, he was only there for the earliest planning stages.  He worked on the storyboarding, but he never saw even the first stages of animation.

I don't know how close to final the draft of the script he was working from was.  I'd like to think that he wouldn't have allowed the stupid ending.  I'm not sure, but I had a sense, listening to them talk, that the filmmakers who finished Everyone's Hero for him wanted the movie to be a kind of monument to Reeve and they might have gone overboard on the idea of showing how a hero who everyone thought couldn't accomplish what he wanted to coming through in the end.  It's an article of faith among everybody who knew him that if he had lived Reeve would have done what was thought to be impossible.  He'd have been the first quadrapalegic to get out of a wheelchair and walk again.  It may have been that his friends thought they needed to show that happening metaphorically in his last movie.

I don't know.

All I do know is that if there was anyone who had earned the right to teach children that the most important thing is to stay in there, to try and continue trying, to never give up, to keep swinging, it was Christopher Reeve.

When he died, Reeve was still in the batter's box, still swinging.
________________________________

Extra innings:

Keep swinging isn't the only good lesson of Everyone's Hero.  As he makes his way to Chicago, Yankee is helped along by a bunch of characters who are, like Yankee himself, people not held in very high regard by the most everybody else.  They not only help get him to Chicago, they teach him how to be a better baseball player.  He learns about strategy from a trio of hobos.  He learns how to throw from a little girl.  And he learns how to hit and how to play with confidence from some men who will never get to play ball in the Major Leagues even though they are every bit as good as the players on the Cubs and the Yankees because they are black.

Not bad lessons for kids:  No one can do it all on their own.  All of us need help.  Everyone we meet has something worth sharing, something to teach.  Everyone counts.

_________________

In the movie the Cubs' owner is obsessed with Babe Ruth as the source of all his unhappiness.  In real life, Ruth didn't win the '32 Series single-handedly for the Yankees and in fact he wasn't all that great a factor in the Cubs' defeat.  He had a good series, but he hit only two home runs, both of them in the same game.  If Chicago fans had a reason to fear and loathe Ruth it was because of what he did to the Cubs in the 1918 World Series...as a pitcher...for the Boston Red Sox.

You could look it up.
_________________

Robin Williams does the voice of the Cubs' crazy, Irish-brogued, Ruth-hating owner.  William H. Macy does the voice of the cheating Cubs pitcher who steals Ruth's bat.  Robert Wagner does the voice of the New York Yankees' general manager.  And Mandy Patinkin does the voice of Yankee's father.  All of them were good friends of Christopher Reeve.

In the documentary, Patinkin tells about how when they were very young actors and he and Reeve were doing a play together in New York they used to ride home together on the subway after rehearsals.  The first of Reeve's Superman movies had recently opened so Reeve was suddenly a big star, but, says Patinkin, nobody ever recognized him on the train because of his modesty.  Reeve never called attention to himself in a movie star way.  He was just another working stiff taking the subway home.

I find it a little hard to believe that try as hard as they might have to blend in these two very handsome and very large young men could have sat there completely unnoticed on the subway night after night.  But then New Yorkers practice at being bored by the incredible.

What I really like about the story is just the picture of two friends at the beginning of what will turn out for both of them to be wonderful careers riding home together.   I think that's how all of us should be remembered, as we were when we were young and at our best and our lives were full of hope and promise.
___________________

Reeve's widow Dana Reeve was one of the co-producers of Everyone's Hero and she did the voice for Yankee's mother---she and another actress.  Dana Reeve died before she could finish her voice work for the movie.  She was sick while she was working on it.  She was still in the box, then, too, still swinging, at the end.
__________________

And here's the post I wrote when Christopher Reeve died, Powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Not gonna grind my teeth over Grindhouse

Makes no nevermind to me that Quentin Tarantino thinks the schlock movies he watched until his eyes bled when he was in the early stages of his ongoing arrested adolescence are among the greatest achievements in the art of cinema.

And I don't care if he wants to spend the rest of his life reliving his still unspent youth by remaking those movies.  Filmbrain is a little harsher on him about this:

Tarantino needs to find a new source of inspiration that informs his screenwriting. Like a hyperactive child, his desire to share his encyclopedic knowledge of cult and fringe cinema has gone from supplementing and enhancing his cleverly written screenplays to becoming the sole purpose for their existence. Yes, Quentin, we know you've seen every Chia-liang Lu and William Rotsler film. Time to move on.

But then Filmbrain has seen Grindhouse and I haven't and, not that I had any real plans to go, I'm not going to, now that Filmbrain has saved me the trouble.   

At any rate, I don't care what obsesses Tarantino.  Pulp Fiction is what it is, a touchstone of the pop culture of the end of the last millenium.  And I liked Jackie Brown.  What bugged me about the Kill Bills was that Tarantino used them to utterly waste the time, talent, and beauty of Uma Thurman.

Now, in his half of Grindhouse, Death Proof, he's apparently gone and done Rosario Dawson and the other smart, beautiful young actresses in the cast the same favor.  Sez Filmbrain:

It’s one thing for Quentin to present us with a bunch of middle-aged guys sitting around a table, hanging out in a hotel room, or driving around in a car engaging in lengthy dialog liberally seasoned with pop-culture references – everything from Like a Virgin, fast food menus, Kung Fu, The Man From Rio, or AM radio hits. These are Tarantino’s geeky obsessions writ large. Yet in Death Proof, black suited guys are replaced by hotties in baby tees and tight pants, and the results come off as little more than male geek fantasy – gorgeous young women sitting around dropping references to Zatoichi, obscure British rock bands, and 70s cult cinema. It’s unbelievably juvenile, and more than a little pathetic.

Oh, well.  Their business.  And like I said, wasn't on my list and, anyway, Filmbrain's seen it so I don't have to. Filmbrain didn't have much to say about Robert Rodrguez's parts, but clearly there's too much Tarantino in Tarantino's:

Death Proof is too self-congratulatory and self-aware to work as either pure exploitation or even homage – in fact, it's Tarantino paying tribute to Tarantino more than anything else. He seems unable to distance himself from his auteurist self in order to create something worthy of the grindhouse moniker. It's more adolescent than sleazy, and lacks the salaciousness of, say, a Russ Meyer film, whose unique flavor of girl power Tarantino co-opted. Too self-satisfied with the characters he created, he lacks the conviction to gaze upon them the way Meyer did. What we're left with is neither fish nor fowl; too conscious of itself to adhere to the genre, but not clever enough to subvert it.

At least, though, says FB, Death Proof isn't as misogynistic as some critics have said.

Read the whole of Filmbrain's review, Aging SWM director seeks kickass F, great feet a must.

Meanwhile, across the cineplex, at The House Next Door, Keith Ulrich, a major Tarantino fan, and Matt Zoller Seitz discuss their Tarantino problem.

The Good Shepherd: Notes for a review that will never be written

Things Robert De Niro knows about directing he did not learn from all his work with Martin Scorsese:

How to be quiet.

How to keep his actors still.

How to fill up a scene with images rather than activity.  In The Good Shepherd, De Niro lets us look at a shot, stare deep into it, allows us to take our time and study it.  Scorsese tends to force us to keep our eyes moving about constantly.  Something is always in frenetic motion, usually his actors' mouths.

Exhibit A:  In The Good Shepherd, De Niro has cast Joe Pesci as a mobster and Pesci, for once in his career, plays somebody who resembles an actual human being.

Much of this difference in directing style is due to tone and theme.  Scorsese's movies are usually about people whose emotions get out of control, whose thoughts are all over the place.  The characters in The Good Shepherd have stifled their emotions.  They don't think anymore either.  They calculate.

In The Departed Matt Damon played a man without a soul.  In The Good Shepherd he plays a man whose soul has withdrawn to one side.  It's there, watching him, horrified at what's happening.  If it had a voice, it would scream.  We see it in Damon's eyes.  Whatever or whomever he's looking at, his gaze is always a fraction off to one side.  He seems to be watching himself watch himself, as if he can see himself reflected inside the lenses of his glasses.

I wonder if the glasses Damon wears are a tribute to Alec Guinness's George Smiley.   They are a joke and a disguise, that's for sure.  The joke is that they make Damon look like Clark Kent and at the back of our mind we can't help expecting him to whip them off at some point and reveal the real hero within, even though we know there is increasingly less and less inside him that resembles a hero.  But The Good Shepherd does seem to owe a lot to John Le Carre's spy novels in which the spy game is not a romantic adventure starring James Bond types; it is soul-deadening work for clerks who have little heart to put into to begin with and who learn to ignore, even smother, what little they have.  And the 15 year battle of wills between Matt Damon's Edward Wilson and the Russian spymaster Ulysses definitely mirrors Smiley's decades' long contest with Karla.  The difference between Wilson and George Smiley is that by the time Smiley comes to the fore in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy he has developed a kind of nostalgic loyalty to his former self, the one-time idealist and romantic who fought the good fight and wooed and won the Lady Ann.  He does some things for that former self as if repaying a debt.  This doesn't bring his heart roaring back to life, but it makes him act as if he still had one from time to time.  Wilson's character may have reached that point by the end of the movie but most of the film is devoted to observing the flame within him flicker and die.

If anyone wants to make a new biopic about President Kennedy they can do worse than cast Matt Damon as JFK.  De Niro and Damon both seem to be aware of the resemblance and use it to suggest idealism and romanticism carrying the country away.  Payoff at the end---Damon in the Smithsonian with a Mercury capsule suspended behind him---may be too subtle.  Like I said, De Niro likes to let images tell the story, make us look into the background of a shot.  Something to be said though for dialog and action at least to bring things to a conclusion.  Images, being static, have no conclusions.  This movie could use a few more of those conclusions.

Blood Diamond, The Departed, and The Good Shepherd make an interesting triptych for students of acting.  Leo to Leo and Matt to Matt:  A Study of Leading Men Playing Heroes as Character Types.

Angelina Jolie is a good actress when she takes a part that requires her to act rather than pose and posture.  She is not the prettiest or the sexiest actress in the movie.  Tammy Blanchard is.  That fact is due to Jolie's being such a good actress.  Jolie's character, Clover, is a trophy and knows herself to be a trophy.  The reason she happens to look like a goddess is purely practical.  Who'd want a trophy that wasn't beautiful?  Jolie plays Clover as a trophy come to life, aware of her beauty as a practical fact about herself, willing to use it when necessary, but otherwise indifferent to it except as it requires admiration to be worth anything.  Trophies only have meaning if the winner who takes possession of them cares about them.  A living trophy that was not constantly admired wouldn't know itself to be a trophy.  It wouldn't be able to tell itself from any other knick-knack around the house.  Jolie plays Clover as if she can see herself visibly tarnishing and gathering dust, feel herself fading into the background as Damon grows increasingly indifferent to her.  Without losing her outward, trophy-like stillness she manages to show Clover on an emotional see-saw, always going up and down between panic and petulant depression.

When Damon reveals that he has never loved her, never valued her as a trophy, she ages twenty years overnight.

I wish De Niro had spent a little more time showing how Clover's disdain for the Skull and Bones' All boys together clubbishness and later for the CIA's clannishness are not signs of her rebel spirit, only of her jealousy. Clover represents and stands for a different kind of conformity.

Two spheres are competing for total possession of Damon/Wilson.  Both represent the same system of values---conformity, unquestioning loyalty, total denial of self, service to a stated Ideal---Family, Patriotism---that is really a mask for Money as the source of all that's good.

The world of home, love, and family that Clover thinks she represents is really just the material representation of wealth and privilege; the job her husband does, which she sees as taking him away from home, love, and family, defends that wealth and privilege.  This is all there thematically and even symbolically in The Good Shepherd.  I just could have used a scene or two dramatizing it.

I also wish De Niro had spent a little more time showing how the Cold War had eroded John Turturro's character's soul.  We see him in World War II as a wiseguy GI type, our favorite kind of American soldier from the movies, us incarnate---cyncial, brash, anti-authoritarian, but tough, proud, taking no nonsense, knowing what's right and what's wrong instinctively and instinctively always coming down on the side of right.  Then all of a sudden he's a cold-hearted, merciless, too efficient functionary of the CIA, a servant of the establishment instead of a true patriot.  One scene would have done it.  De Niro is satisfied with one look in Turturro's eyes

It's one hell of a look though.

A look full of the horrified shock of recognition.

Physically Turturro is a dream come true for an artistic designer whose job is to recreate the look of the 1950s for a movie.  He just looks like he's been cut and pasted from a photo in a contemporary issue of LIFE magazine.  See him also in Quiz Show.  Same effect.

Good to see William Hurt at work again.  Ditto Keir Dullea.  Twenty years ago, who'd have thought Alec Baldwin would one day be taking on the type of roles then going to Charles Durning?  Or---see Running With Scissors---Dabney Coleman?

Already suggested The Good Shepherd is an American Smiley's People.  It can also be seen as a WASP Godfather.  (Maybe De Niro learned more about directing from Coppola than from Scorsese.)  Which would explain why it feels unfinished.  Like The Godfather it wants and needs a sequel.  Unlike The Godfather, though, it doesn't stand on its own.  It's two hours and forty-eight minutes of prologue.  We start with the Bay of Pigs and end there.  The Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's Assassination, Vietnam, Watergate are all ahead of us.

By the way, I've never kept up on the conspiracy theories.  Apparently on his deathbed Howard Hunt fingered LBJ as the mastermind behind the murder of JFK.  I think his mind was wandering.  He was mixing up his spy novels with reality.  But as anyone taken a serious look at the role the Cuban exile community might have played?  If anyone had a motive it would have been the people who blamed Kennedy for leaving their relatives to be slaughtered on the beach.

Perhaps The Good Shepherd Part II will deal with that.

On topic:  Jon Swift speculates on Who Killed Howard Hunt?

The Good Shepherd.  Directed by Robert De Niro.  Screenplay by Eric Roth.  Starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, John Turturro, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, Keir Dullea, Tammy Blanchard, Billy Crudup, and Robert De Niro.  Universal.  2006.

Sleeper still wide-awake

Mannion Family Movie Night this week featured Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

When Uncle Merlin heard he wondered if it was dated.  Nope, I said.  There are a few jokes that aren’t funny anymore even if you remember the pop culture references.  Mostly, though the comedy is all wisecracks and slapstick, the kind of jokes that were funny when Hector was a pup and will still be funny come Judgment Day.

"I haven't seen my analyst in 200 years. He was a strict Freudian. If I'd been going all this time, I'd probably almost be cured by now."

"I'm what you would call a teleological, existential atheist. I believe that there's an intelligence to the universe, with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey."

Keaton:  So what do you believe in?

Allen:  Sex and death.  Two things that come once in a lifetime.  But at least after death you're not nauseous.

I hadn’t planned to show the guys any of Woody Allen’s movies until they were a little older.  I’d forgotten that they'd already seen a Woody Allen movie.  They remembered though and recognized the fact about a third of the way into Sleepers.  Antz.

Antz is a great Woody Allen movie the way Galaxy Quest is a great Star Trek movie.

Maybe it’ll be ok to show the boys Love and Death.

Reason I decided on Sleeper now was that one day last week the guys and I were at the post office and in the parking lot was a beautifully restored 1972 Volkswagen Beetle.

Guy a few years older than me was standing there admiring it.  He’d been in college when this car was brand new.  He was shaking his head, thinking about how he and his friends treated VW’s back then. 

We used to cut these up and turn them into dune buggies, he said.  Never imagined they’d be collectors’ dreams.  Thought they were cheap pieces of junk.

Who knew, he said.

Woody Allen knew, I said, suddenly remembering.  I asked him if he’d ever seen Sleeper.  Not in a long time, he said.  I reminded him of the scene.

Woody and Diane Keaton are on the run from the futuristic cops.  They duck into a cave to hide out and find a 200 year old Beetle.

The key’s still in the ignition.  Allen gives it a try.

Starts right up.

Once they heard about that scene, the guys wanted to see the movie.

They loved it.

The VW in Sleeper sports a bumper sticker that I bet few VW’s in 1972 actually sported, except ironically: “Register Commies Not Guns.”

Keaton asks Allen to explain it to her.

He says, “Oh he was probably a member of the National Rifle Association.”

She needs that explained.

“The National Rifle Association?  That was an organization that helped criminals get guns so they could shoot ordinary citizens.  It was kind of a public service.”

There’s one joke I wish had dated.

Pretty much all of Allen's movies are available from my astore.

Licenses to kill

A long time into Casino Royale---a very long time into Casino Royale---Daniel Craig, modeling his new tailored tux, looks up into the mirror and gives himself a smile that, with the camera looking in over his shoulder at his reflection and his reflection looking back at the camera, is really meant for us, a smile that asks, "Remind you of anyone?"

Of course he does.

Bond, we say in our heads, James Bond.

And it would be a great moment, like the moment in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie when Clark Kent, dashing across the street, pulls open his shirt to reveal the big red S we've all been waiting to see, if it had been the moment it was meant to be, the moment when we finally accept that Craig is the new Bond.

But as I said it comes an awful long way into the movie, a movie in which Craig has been extremely busy right from start being James Bond.

I thought Casino Royale was supposed to be about how Bond became Bond.  I expected a learning curve to be part of the plot.  But aside from a few lines of dialog mentioning it and a couple of good jokes---"A martini!"  "Shaken or stirred?"  "Do I look like I care?"---Bond's being the new kid in town doesn't figure much in the storyline.  He's just been promoted and the ink's still wet on his license to kill, but he takes to the job as naturally as Craig takes to playing the part.

Which makes it just another Bond film.

I say that as a compliment.  It's just not the compliment I expected to be paying it based on all I'd heard and read about it before seeing it.

As just another Bond film it's better than most of them, as good as a few of the very best, but except for the big chase through the construction site and the embassy it didn't add any scenes to the ultimate ideal Bond movie that's been playing in my head since I saw my very first Bond, which, for the record, was Live and Let Die, so Sean Connery, great as he was, does not define Bond for me---he's a contributor, but not the creator.  Roger Moore didn't define Bond for me either, much as I enjoyed his take on 007, because he was already defined in my imagination as The Saint and Beau Maverick and Lord Brett Sinclair, Tony Curtis' partner on The Persuaders.  I had the same problem with Pierce Brosnan, who will always carry a little too much of Remington Steele in his Bond.  That's why, back in the day, I was so looking forward to Timothy Dalton's Bond and why I really liked Craig's.  Neither one of them entered my head with any previous work's baggage to check.

But, not even considering how it fails as an origin film, Casino Royale disappointed me as a Bond movie because its plot was upside down.

Spoilers coming.

Putting the poker game in the spot where the big climactic chase or shoot-out should have been was a really bad idea.  The loss of the money and Bond's apparent betrayal would have been a good way to get the plot off the ground and the chase across the airport runway, which, by the way, was as clumsy and dumb as the big chase in A View to a Kill, although it has a great payoff, should have been the big finale.  The buildings crashing into the Venice canals could have been left out entirely.  Structured that way, the whole middle part of the film could have been about how Bond learns to be Bond or at least how he learns to be a better Bond.  M would have had a whole lot more to be exasperated with him for, a real reason to consider pulling his license to kill, instead of merely fussing over his failure to shoot out the security cameras in the embassy.

Spoilers over.

What Casino Royale has going for it is Craig. 

Now, if you're a Bond fan, if you actually like the character and whole conception behind the movies, your opinion of what Bond should be like is probably based on how seriously you take the whole license to kill thing.

If you think the fact that defines Bond is that he's an assassin and therefore basically a cold-hearted killer, a paid thug who happens to know how to tie a bowtie and which fork to use, then of course Connery is your Bond and Craig will appeal to you because he has a good degree of thugishness about him.  Craig looks like he could be a British football hooligan.  He looks more like he could be a soccer star, the kind of player though who makes soccer into a contact sport more brutal than rugby.  And he can do cold.  Not cold as in ice.  Brosnan did that.  Cold as in stone.  A stone that has hurled itself off a cliff face aiming itself right at your head.

He's brutal, but he's also clearly intelligent and educated.

Connery's Bond was smart too, but there was something of the unfinished auto-didact about him, a scholarship boy who had to drop out of school when the money ran out, possibly even before he reached university. Craig looks like he made it all the way to his final semester at Cambridge before he got kicked out for seducing his tutor's wife and beating up four or five star players on the cricket team.

That makes his Bond a bridge between Connery's and Brosnan's and Moore's Bonds, both of whom got firsts at Oxford and were well liked and popular despite having seduced their tutors' wives and beaten up four or five star players on the cricket team.

Bond's license to kill doesn't mean as much to me as a sign of his innate brutality as it does as a sign of his intelligence and judgment.  Hired thugs don't have to be discerning.  Being given the power to decide whom and when to kill means being given the power to decide this person doesn't need killing at this particular time.  Bond is a spy before he's an assassin.  We only see him on missions when things are so out of control or have gone so wrong that the bad guys must die.  But there are plenty of suggestions in all the movies that Bond routinely goes on missions in which he slips in somewhere, extracts the information he needs, and slips out without anybody getting their hair mussed.

The women we often see him with at the beginning of a movie are there to reward him for his good behavior.

Brosnan and Moore were able to suggest that, while they didn't have a problem with the killing, they thought more highly of themselves for pulling off a job without pulling out their gun, because that meant they'd been really clever.  Good spies shouldn't leave any traces behind and dead bodies are hard not to notice.

So it's not Craig's toughness that I liked as much as the fact that his toughness never gets in the way of his letting us see him thinking.

What Craig adds to Bond is blood.  And sweat.  Craig's Bond is the first who looks like the work he does is physically demanding.  When his Bond jumps from a steel girder to a swinging I-beam he feels the force of it in his chest and arms.  He gets hurt.  He bruises.  He gets the wind knocked out of him.  He gets tired.  The payoff of the chase through the embassy depends not on Bond being cornered but on his being too exhausted to run anymore or think his way out of the situation.

Craig isn't the first Bond since Connery who looks like he can do the stunts Bond is required to do.  Brosnan was in great shape in his first two Bonds and he moved like a panther.  But Craig is the first one who looks like he is really taking the punishment.  What's more, he looks like he could survive them despite the toll they take on him.

This new and realistic physicality isn't all Craig's doing, though.  It is a result of filmmakers having learned since Roger Moore's hey-day how to stage and shoot and edit fights in a way that makes them appear more real and physical.

I was watching The Spy Who Loved Me last week and I was struck by how the director didn't even bother to try to make Moore's fight scenes look like hard work for Bond.  Moore was fifty years old at the time.  He was in fine shape for an old guy but it was clear that he'd lost a step or two, that he wasn't as limber as he once was---and Moore even when he was playing Simon Templer never gave the impression he was much of an athlete---and yet a number of his fight scenes and chases were filmed in long shot with very little cross and jump cutting so that we could see either that we were watching a stunt man or that Moore and the stuntman he was fighting were being very careful with each other.

But then nothing about Moore's Bond movies was supposed to be taken seriously.  It was all a game, a fun fantasy.  Moore's job was to make us simultaneously see the game and the fun while getting caught up in the excitement.  He was good at that.

By the way, despite his age, he was the only Bond who was persuasive as the kind of man who didn't have to rely on damsels in distress throwing themselves into his arms and villainesses scheming their way into his bed to get laid.

Handsome and dashing as all the others including Craig are, none of them look like they'd be a lot of fun on a date or even in the sack, unless you like it fast, muscular, and without any cuddling afterwards and any chance you'll have company for breakfast.

Don't confuse the roguishly charming post-007 Connery with his gloomy misogynistic Bond, James "Let me call you a cab before I have to kill you" Bond.

So, for what it's worth, Craig is the first realistic Bond.

By the way, when this quality of the movie, its relative realism, was being touted back before its release, I was confused.  I had thought that we'd already had a realistic Bond.  Timothy Dalton.  Turns out my memory was playing tricks on me.

Watched License to Kill recently too.  It had been one of only two of the Bond films I'd never seen.  (The other was and still is Moonraker.)  I was shocked.

As Rob Farley says of both Dalton efforts, License to Kill doesn't even feel like a Bond film.

I remember liking The Living Daylights but if Dalton's work in License to Kill is a continuation of what he was doing in his first Bond the I must not be remembering it very well.  I don't know what he was up to, but he wasn't playing James Bond.   He was playing some British toff who'd gotten caught up in a spy game and thought the only way he could get through it was by acting like James Bond.  His Bond is realistic in that Dalton acts out every emotion Bond might be feeling at a given moment.  When Bond has reason to worry, he looks worried.  When Bond is smitten with Cary Lowell's character---the first and so far only Bond girl I believe might have a realistic counterpart in this universe---Dalton looks smitten.  When he's in pain, he looks like he hurts.  But it doesn't add up to a character and all that emoting certainly isn't what anybody expects out of James Bond.

Craig suggests that his Bond has real feelings by showing us how he's hiding them.

Last thoughts:  I liked Craig as Bond and I'm looking forward to his next outing.  But as I said I don't think Casino Royale was exceptional.   The actor playing Bond is finally only as good a Bond as the movies he's playing Bond in are good Bond movies.  I think part of the reason a lot of Bond fans see Brosnan and Moore as so much weaker Bonds than Connery's is that they appeared in some bad movies.  Two out of four of Brosnan's movies are not any good (Here's me on Die Another Day) and several of Moore's are just plain awful.  A couple of Connery's Bond movies are pale efforts, particularly You Only Live Twice, and depending on my mood Thunderball is either a hoot or a bad joke, but the first three are well-made genre movies, each one almost able to stand on its own without your having to like or know anything about the Bond series.

We'll see if Craig's movies measure up, then we'll know if he's truly the rightful heir to the double O's.

But the basic appeal of the Bond movies is that they are the ultimate fantasies of male escape (which isn't to say that women don't share the same fantasies only that in the movie the fantasy is pitched at men):  Bond is a truly free man.  He doesn't need anybody or anything.  He doesn't need the job.  He doesn't need MI6.  He doesn't need a family, friends, or relations.  They need him, but Bond is free.  He is free even of moral constraint.

And being free he doesn't have to care.

That he bothers to care is what makes him a hero and not a villain or a monster.

The difference between all the Bonds is in each actor's decisions about how much Bond does bother to care and how much he then shows it.  Leaving Dalton out of it, Moore cares the most, although he is cool about showing it, while Connery cares least.  Where Craig fits himself in between them will decide who his Bond is.

Licenses to Critique or A View to a Review:

Tom Watson hated, just hated Casino Royale.  He didn't think much of Craig as Bond either.  And did I mention that he hated Casino Royale?

He's outvoted though by Dennis Perrin who likes Craig's barely concealed "raw physical and psychological fury" and thinks his Bond could mop the floor with Connery's, by Rob Farley who says Casino Royale is the best Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and by Shakes who thinks Craig is to live and let die for.

Meanwhile, Moved by Michael Medved's politically correct misreading of Casino Royale, TBogg knocks on Medved's wooden head and asks if anybody's home and Jason Chervokas considers the question, Is a post-Cold War Bond possible?

Sir Roger Moore has a webpage through which you can help him continue to save the world, for real now, through his work for UNICEF.

Casino Royale.  Directed by Martin Campbell.  Screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade.  Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Mads Mikkelsen, and Jeffrey Wright. MGM. 2006.

Casino Royale available from my aStore.

Color me Updike

The one, the only, Nancy Nall asked me to tell this story.

First she had to tell it to me, because I'd forgotten it.

Nance remembered it because her memory had been jogged by the release of the movie Color Me Kubrick last week in the theaters and simultaneously on DVD.

Here's the story as Nance told me I told it to her.

Back in Indiana, I used to teach with a guy who did not look like John Updike.

This must be as distinctly understood as the fact that old Marley was dead or just as in A Christmas Carol nothing wonderful can come of the story.  My collegue did not look like John Updike.

Updike is bony and angular with a long jaw and a big beak of a nose and a boyish mop of blond hair.  At the time this story takes place he was in his mid-fifties.  My colleague was in his thirties.  He was barrel-chested and burly, with a round face and a snub nose.  His hair was dark and he wore glasses with thick lenses.  The only way he resembled Updike is that he was tall, well over six feet.

So, one day, my colleague was having lunch at a McDonald's in Indianapolis and as he was finishing up his Big Mac a woman approached his table.  She had an apologetic air and looked ready to bolt like a rabbit approaching a dog it wants to borrow money from.  She spoke to my colleague in a near whisper.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said, "But I had to ask.  Are you John Updike?"

And my colleague, without stopping to think for a second about what he was doing, smiled up at her and said, "Yes, I am."

It was reflexive.  He wasn't a born liar or a habitual practical joker.  He didn't make a hobby of going around impersonating famous authors.  He was just responding to the woman's need to believe he was who she thought he was.  It was so obviously important to her that she was meeting the real John Updike that he didn't have the heart to disappoint her.  He became John Updike to help her out.  He was doing her a favor the way he'd have told another stranger who asked the time or given them directions.  The woman was thrilled when he said he was John Updike, but she was also relieved.  She'd have been mortified if he'd turned out not to be Updike.  As it was she was feeling a bit foolish for disturbing a stranger while he was eating.  My colleague reacted instinctively to save her from embarrassment.  He wanted her to be meeting John Updike and he wanted John Updike to be nice to her.  So he was.

He invited her to sit down. 

She was too shy and flustered but she had to tell him how much she loved his books.  He was her favorite living writer, she said, still whispering, as if she was afraid that if anyone overheard a crowd would come rushing over to join them.  She was reading Rabbit is Rich and it was wonderful, she said, and she showed him that she had it with her to read on her lunch hour.

My colleague said, "Would you like me to sign it for you?"

The woman nearly fell over.  Of course that's what she wanted but she was afraid to ask.  She handed him her book and he autographed it with a flourish.  Inscribed it to her and dated it and everything.

She gushed her thanks and hurried off.  My colleage was a little disappointed.  He'd thought she wanted to talk about "his" books with him and was ready to oblige.

That was it.  My collegue had never been mistaken for Updike before and probably never has been since.  I have no idea if that woman ever realized she'd not met the real Updike.  Given the way people's minds work and how bad most of us are with faces, odds are that even if she saw a picture of Updike later that afternoon she'd have convinced herself that it was the same guy she'd met in the McDonald's.  I like to imagine that a long time afterwards she met the real Updike at a bookstore or college reading and asked him to sign a copy of Rabbit at Rest or In the Beauty of the Lilies and when she got home compared the inscription to the one in her old, treasured copy of Rabbit is Rich and wondered why Updike's handwriting had changed.

It's important to note that although he was ready and willing to play along longer than she needed him to, my colleague did nothing to convince that woman he was John Updike.  She convinced herself before she even went up to him.  She'd wanted to meet her favorite author and so she did.

The reason Nance was reminded of this story is that Color Me Kubrick is about a guy who looks and acts nothing like the film director Stanley Kubrick going around London in the early 1990s pretending to be the film director Stanley Kubrick.

Alan Conway, a failed travel agent turned petty grifter, wasn't doing anybody any favors by letting movie fans think they'd met a famous movie director.  He took advantage of their self-deception, using their desperation to be liked and thought well of by a celebrity to get them to buy him drinks and meals, put him up for the night in nice hotels, go to bed with him.

After Nance told me the story of my colleague and about Color Me Kubrick I went out and rented it.

Don't rush.  Unless you are a truly devoted fan of John Malkovich and have more than a passing interest in Stanley Kubrick, it's not much more than a witty diversion.  Malkovich himself seems to be engaged in an experiment to discover just how creepy and repulsive he can be and the director, Brian Cook, seems to have been so fascinated and amused by Malkovich's experiment that he decided he didn't need to do much actual directing, he could just point the camera at Malkovich and let him loose, tossing him chunks of scenery to devour every now and then like a keeper at SeaWorld tossing fish to a particularly hungry and starved for attention killer whale.

Letting an actor do whatever he wants is a sign of either timidity or a complete lack of interest in the actual art of acting, which is what I suspect was going on in the case of Cook with Malkovich.  But then Cook would have learned his indifference from the master of indifference.

Cook was the assistant director on three of Kubrick's last four movies.  For some reason he missed working on Full Metal Jacket.  Screenwriter Anthony Frewin was Kubrick's long time personal assistant and his screenplay is as indifferent to the characters of Conway and his victims as Cook is to the actors playing them.  No surprise.  Kubrick himself regarded characters as the excuse to make a movie and treated actors as merely the focus point for his camera.  He was the coldest-hearted of great directors.  (I'm talking about the side of himself that shows through in his films.  For all I know he was a warm and loveable teddy bear of a guy in real life.)  After Dr Strangelove, nothing like a real human being ever appeared again in a Kubrick film, except for Vincent D'Onforio's baby Marine in Full Metal Jacket, and I'm not sure his humanity isn't an accident of the absolutely inhuman way the character's treated.

Adams and Frewin seem to have made Color Me Kubrick because they saw it as an amusing way to send Kubrick a greeting card in heaven.  The movie's full of in-jokes and affectionate allusions to Kubrick's movies.  My favorite is the very opening shots of the movie which starts with a couple of bowler-hatted young thugs who look like rejects from Alex's gang in A Clockwork Orange on their way to break into a house and re-enact the rape scene.  Turns out that they are a couple of extreme Kubrick fans who think they're on their way to Kubrick's house to pick him up and take him out to dinner.

There's an I'm Spartacus moment that's almost as funny, but takes place late in the film long after the point when I stopped caring about it.

The biggest inside joke, though, is the one that comes from the true story of Alan Conway.  Conway knew absolutely nothing about Stanley Kubrick or his movies.  This could have been the basis for a number of scenes in which Malkovich gets lectured to by his victims on what a great artist he is.  As it happens, this is what happened to one of the actors in the film, Jim Davidson, who was actually met Conway back when Conway was passing himself off as Kubrick.  A friend introduced Davidson to "Stanley Kubrick" in a restaurant and Davidson sat down to talk and ended up buying Conway's dinner and drinks.  But, although Davidson didn't know what the real Stanley Kubrick looked like, he was a fan of his movies (Hey, I wouldn't recognize Ridley Scott or Pedro Almodovar if I fell over them.), so of course he wanted to talk about them with "Kubrick."  He was especially interested in the long tracking shot in Full Metal Jacket.  "How many takes did that require?" he asked Conway.

Conway smiled wanly and after a long pause said, "Lots."

At which point Davidson realized what was happening and excused himself from the table.

There are few moments like this in Color Me Kubrick, partly because the movie is naturally more concerned with the people Conway managed to fool than with those he didn't, but also because the filmmakers thought it would be more fun for us to watch Malkovich doing a guy who knows jack-all about filmmaking and the business of making movies going on and on and on about both, constantly overplaying his hand with wilder and wilder flights of fancy and yet somehow still getting away with it.  The inside joke is that anyone who knows anything about Kubrick and his movies, and that includes all of us watching the movie, doesn't it, would have pegged Conway as a fraud right away, which makes all of his marks complete fools and all of us watching the movie oh so superior.

This saves the filmmakers from having to ask the question, just how did Conway get away with it?  If all his victims were fools and buffoons the question's answered before it's asked.

Because they never ask the question, the movie only gets interested in the other characters at the moment when they're meeting Conway and it loses interest in them at the moment they realize they've been had.  This means that even though they are all different types their roles in the movie are exactly the same and each of Conway's cons is pretty much exactly the same as the last.  It gets repetitive and old awfully fast.

But I was thinking of my colleague and the woman who colored him Updike.

She was not a fool.  She was in a way lucky she didn't sit down to talk with "John Updike."  What are the odds she'd have picked an English professor who could have discussed Updike's work with her, unless part of what drew her to my colleague was his "scholarly" air.  But who was she anyway?  Why was meeting John Updike so important to her?   What good did it do her to have met him?  What harm might it have done to her if she'd found out the man who autographed her copy of Rabbit is Rich wasn't the author?  What harm might it have done her to think that it was?

Without any answers to those questions my story is really just an amusing anecdote.

Stories begin with the question what happened, but they don't get anywhere until they start asking Why should we care that it happened to these characters?

This is the way that Color Me Kubrick is a real tribute to Stanley Kubrick.  It never starts asking that question.

Say you've got an Irish playboy in the 18th Century who lives a careless life and ends up having his leg amputated after a duel?

Say a writer goes up to an isolated hotel in the dead of winter and gets writer's block.

Say a squad of Marines goes to Vietnam after having survived boot camp with a psychopathic drill instructor.

Say a married couple's bored with each other sexually.

Say there's a creepy guy who goes around pretending to be a famous movie director.

Say what about them?

Color Me Kubrick: A True...ish Story.  Directed by Brian Cook.  Screenplay by Anthony Frewin.  Starring John Malkovich, Jim Davidson, Richard E. Grant, and Robert Powell.  Magnolia Pictures and First Choice Films.  2005 but not released until 2007.

Please visit the movie department at my aStore, Mannion at the Movies.