Paid Off All My Debts, Got Some Change Left Over Yet

Flatter than a tabletop
Makes you wonder why they stopped here
Wagon must have lost a wheel or they lacked ambition one
On the great migration west
Separated from the rest
Though they might have tried their best
They never caught the sun

Friday Night Lights is set in Odessa, Texas. You may not have been to Odessa, Texas, but take my word for it, it’s flat. Flat and hot and empty and dry, with mesquite trees everywhere. If there’s one thing that Friday Night Lights does well, it shows just how flat and hot and empty and dry a place that Odessa is — apart from the one spot of turf, one hundred yards long, plus two end zones, the solitary oasis known as Ratliff Stadium, the home of the Permian Panthers and Mojo.

So they sunk some roots down in the dirt
To keep from blowin’ off the earth
Built a town around here
And when the dust had all but cleared
They called it Levelland

This is not about the Class 3A Levelland Lobos, although I guess it could be; it just doesn’t happen to be. It is not about where I went to school, the Class 5A Grand Prairie Gophers, either, but that would be a different story altogether. (Mostly because, last year, the Gophers went 1-9, and got spanked by the South Grand Prairie Warriors, 57-10.) It is about high school football, though, which is what Friday Night Lights is all about.

I know a bit more about this than I want to. I grew up in Texas - graduated from high school, in fact, the year before the events portrayed in Friday Night Lights. I worked for my parents, who had the subcontract for the school district to run the concession stand; it was my first real job. I went to every game and every JV game, pulling Cokes and popping popcorn and putting jalapeno peppers on nachos - which is to say that I didn’t play football, myself. But I knew people who did, and a lot of what goes on in the movie goes on in real life, except that it is amped up to the nth degree in Friday Night Lights.

Daddy’s cotton grows so high
Sucks the water table dry
Rolling sprinklers circle round
Bleedin’ it to the bone
And I won’t be here when it comes a day
It all dries up and blows away
I’d hang around just to see
But they never had much use for me in Levelland
They don’t understand me
Out in Levelland

The biggest, most important, and loudest character in all of Friday Night Lights is the town of Odessa. Odessa is farm and ranch country - you wouldn’t think so, from looking at it, but it is. More importantly, it is oil and gas country. The school is Odessa Permian - “Permian” referring to the period of geologic time when the dinosaurs ruled West Texas, and stayed around as fossil fuel. It is the heart of rural red-state country (Ector County went 75% for GWB).

Odessa has a bit of a problem, though, something of an inferiority complex. Odessa is next-door to Midland, which is a larger community, and a bit more prosperous one, and a bit more cultured. (Although Odessa has the theater that is… well… you’ll just have to click on the link.) Odessa and Midland have a fierce rivalry, always have had, and the way that gets expressed is through football, and the annual battle between Odessa Permian and Midland Lee. That finds its way into the movie, as you would expect.

But it’s more than that. How the character of Odessa finds its way into the movie is through talk radio and through the play-by-play broadcast. (That, and the almost-subliminal planting of “For Sale” signs on the coach’s front yard, to indicate the town’s displeasure after a loss.) And it may seem to you, out there in California and Connecticut and (for all I know) Cameroon, that having a talk radio show about a high school football team is a complete Hollywood invention. Let me assure you that it is not. You can do that in Texas, where high school football is the national obsession, and you can definitely double-dog do it in Odessa, where that obsession borders on the clinical.

(If you doubt this, I encourage you to order, or pick up, or otherwise acquire a copy of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, an annual preseason publication that is as comprehensive as anyone could ever hope to imagine.)

You may ask yourself — Friday Night Lights certainly asks itself — why any young man of normal intelligence would play high school ball. We see the backstory of one player, a second-generation Permian fullback, whose father personifies a lot of what is wrong with the culture. Played by the annoyingly-popular Tim McGraw, the dad is a drunken, rageaholic wreck who cares much more about his son’s football prowess and the Mojo won-loss record than anything else in existence.

So why play high school football?

And I watch those jet trails carving up that big blue sky
Coast to coasters watch ‘em go
And I never would blame ‘em one damn bit
If they never looked down on this
Not much here they’d wanna know
Just Levelland
Far as you can point your hand
Nothin’ but Levelland

Well, that’s why, and that’s the big subplot; how the individual players can use high school football to get a free ride to attend a Division 1-A college somewhere else, anywhere else. And some of them do, although it’s not common. To the extent that Friday Night Lights is about anything other than the stoic Billy Bob Thornton character, it is about Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), the talented running back who has the God-given physical gifts to succeed at the NCAA level, and maybe beyond. (Pay attention in April 2005, when Midland Lee RB Cedric Benson goes high in the NFL draft.) Football is Boobie’s ticket out of Odessa, and when that ticket is imperiled, it impacts his life, more than you might expect.

Football is opportunity for the Permian Panthers, the way that boxing is opportunity for Hillary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, the way that getting a publisher is for Paul Giamatti in Sideways, the way that dating Amber Valletta is for Kevin James in Hitch. To the extent that Friday Night Lights is more than a standard sports movie — and it does that very well — it is that it winning the state championship is about more than just winning the state championship. It is more than about pride and sportsmanship and coin-flips and marching bands and the eternal power of Mojo. It is about opportunity, and in that way it is about everything that is important and fine and true.

I can hear the marching band
Doin’ the best they can
They’re playing “Smoke on the Water”
“Joy to the World”
I’ve paid off all my debts
Got some change left over yet and I’m
Gettin’ on a whisper jet
I’m gonna fly as far as I can get
From Levelland
– James McMurtry

Final Analysis

This is, for what it’s worth, what I look for in a movie when writing a review, together with what I was looking for in From Hell, and whether I found it or not.

Story: This is the most basic element. It is the essential core of the movie, the central idea of what the movie is and wants to be, why it exists. It is the six-second pitch that determines whether the movie will be green-lighted or not. It is what sells the movie in the trailer, what the commercial is about. It can be terribly simple and basic - “archaeologist searches for the Lost Ark”, “Iowa farmer builds baseball diamond in cornfield”, “astronauts face technical problems on moon mission” - or as complicated as Being John Malkovich or Memento or Pulp Fiction. If you don’t like the story, there’s a good chance that you’re not even going to see the movie, much less like it.

From Hell has a great story, in fact, one of the great stories ever. Policemen are roaming the foggy streets of Victorian London to catch a horrific serial killer named Jack the Ripper who is murdering young women and killing them. You can’t ask for a much better story than that. In fact, the story is so good that it’s been the subject of countless movies and A&E documentaries already. So what counts here is doing the story in a different, original way.

Script: This is not the same thing as the story, of course. For example, the stories of vampire movies are basically all the same, but there are all sorts of vampire movie scripts you can write. The story is the vehicle, the script is the direction the vehicle is going and how many things it runs over on the way there. It can be very basic and minimalist or talky and complicated. A good script is not destiny but it works to improve the odds.

From Hell has a script that is imaginative and complex without being any good. It focuses on two Scotland Yard detectives tasked to capture Jack the Ripper. Detectives Abberline and Godley must discover who is doing the killing and for what strange reason the murderers are occurring. The problem here is not the script itself, which is actually quite good in spots. However, the script indulges in a great deal of unnecessary elaboration and speculation. It isn’t enough to make the Abberline character a brilliant detective in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, From Hell has to have him solving crimes in visions through the delusional fumes of opium smoke. It’s not enough to chase a legendary serial killer, From Hell has to drag in secret societies and dark conspiracies and profane rituals and the Royal Family and God knows what. Apparently From Hell believes that modern audiences want the most speculative and complicated Ripper theory out there; it delivers that, if nothing else.

Performances: If the script brings the story to life, then the actors bring the script to life. Actors transform a script; they bring it from two-dimensional black-and-white flatness to full Technicolor glory. Bad casting or inadequate acting can lift a movie above the common run or sink it to the depths. This is the easiest area to analyze, by the way; pretty much everyone can tell a good performance from a bad one. And the easiest one to write about, too, because everyone likes making fun of celebrities.

From Hell has better acting than it deserves. Its star is Johnny Depp, who is not the most interesting young actor in Hollywood but the one who consistently makes the most interesting choices. He has the role of Abberline, the tormented and romantic detective, and he cuts a brooding and romantic figure. He spends so much time being brooding and romantic that one wonders why they just don’t go ahead and remake Wuthering Heights and be done with it already. He’s perfectly fine, if he’s not perfectly challenged. Robbie Coltrane plays his partner, his mother hen, and his anchor to reality, all with a formidable gentleness and dignity. Coltrane is one of our better character actors, and it’s always a treat to see him at work, but one would wish that he was given more to do here than just roust Depp out of opium dens. Ian Holm disappears into his character in that characteristically Ian Holm way; here he’s a brilliant doctor who may or may not be helping Depp. Heather Graham is characteristically beautiful (with sublimely gorgeous red tresses that she somehow manages to keep in splendid order and divine cleanliness, although early on we see her taking a bath in a horse trough) but also characteristically out of place as a London prostitute targeted by the Ripper.

Production Values: This is kind of a catchall area encompassing directing and set design and costuming and soundtracks and cinematography and what-have-you. It is all the things that define the look of the movie. It is what Hollywood, with its army of technicians and technological toolboxes and skilled artisans, does better than anything else right now. (Outside of creative accounting and marketing tie-ins and the care and feeding of celebrities.) The production values create atmosphere and mood and all the intangible things that make movies so wonderful, and that all too often go unnoticed.

From Hell is almost but not quite redeemed by its production values. It may have the best atmosphere of any movie this year. Everything about it looks just right. It is the dark and foggy London town so beloved by Victorians (although the movie was mostly shot in Prague, which is less encumbered with modern architecture, apparently.) The clothes and the accents and the fog and the gaslights are well done without being too much overdone. Everything about the look of the movie bespeaks skill and craftsmanship and all that is good about the lively art of production design. It makes the movie worth seeing, although maybe not worth paying much attention to otherwise.

Impressions: This is the part of the movie that is almost entirely outside of the control of anyone involved with the film. This is what the audience brings to the movie and what it takes away. This is everything the movie brings out in you, everything it reminds you of, everything you will remember about it ten years from now. It plays no real part in the movie but it is the heart and soul of the movie review. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, why movie reviewers end up differing from each other so often; why most critics tend to be at odds with most moviegoers. It is the area where the subjective overwhelms the objective.

From Hell mostly had me thinking about television, which is not a generally good impression for a movie to leave. In the back of my mind, I was expecting From Hell to be something like a Victorian version of Law & Order, with Abberline and Godley using scientific detecting methods to chase down the killer and solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper, just the way that Briscoe and Logan do. (I love Law & Order, by the way, it’s the best thing on television that isn’t The Simpsons or baseball.) Instead, it ended up being more in tune with The X-Files, with supernatural revelations and high-level cover-ups. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the X-Files approach, but it seems wrong and out of place in Victorian London, and it adds that extra, unnecessary layer of complication to the script. From Hell is a historical police procedural that wants very badly to be a horror movie, and I didn’t feel as though it really succeeded either way.

I came up with another impression, too. It had to do with the autopsy scenes in the movie, and in a Jack the Ripper movie, there are going to be a lot of those. (My favorite autopsy scene in the movies is in Backdraft, with an impatient coroner telling William Baldwin to grab a horribly burned body; “Come on, he’s not going to sell you insurance!”) Anyway, with all the autopsies, I was sort of thinking that you could do an autopsy of a movie review, taking apart the constituent pieces, holding them up to the light, weighing and measuring them and writing a report on what you find out. Which is more or less what I am doing right now. For what it’s worth.

A Hardball World

“Mandated by the Geneva Convention of 1922, the purpose of enclosing bullets with full metal jackets was to reduce combat fatalities. The bullets were designed to pass through bodies and, if no major organs were struck, only to wound the victim. Before metal jackets, bullets often detoured inside the body. That the 6.5 Carcano ammunition was designed to do exactly what it did on President Kennedy and Governor Connally is often ignored.”
– Gerald Posner, Case Closed

Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is not about the Kennedy assassination, of course, but it does reference it; a Marine Corps drill instructor tells his troops about the shooting exploits of Marine sharpshooters Lee Oswald in Dallas and Charles Whitman in the Tower in Austin. There’s something like pride and admiration in his voice, for the skill of the marksmanship if nothing else. You hear something like that and you remember it. It sticks in your mind. If you’re not lucky, it wakes you up in the middle of the night sometimes, asking yourself, “What did he mean by that?”

Let me illustrate. I’ve never been to boot camp. I went to law school, which is not as bad as Parris Island, but it lasts longer and the pay is worse. One day, I went to class in the middle of Austin’s dreaded cedar fever season; I felt miserable and my throat was raw from coughing. Naturally, I got called on in my business law class, and I made my excuse; sorry, I can’t talk. The prof looked right through me. “I understand, Mr. Edmonds, I had a sore throat too, when I was called on in law school.” Everyone laughed but me. I remember that moment, but that’s just about the only moment I remember in that class. I’ve forgotten everything else (except for the D I got), and to this day I couldn’t tell you how to form a subchapter S corporation if my life depended on it.

If Full Metal Jacket — especially the second half of the movie — seems choppy and odd, it has something to do with the way we remember things. Full Metal Jacket doesn’t have one cohesive narrative because it’s less or a movie than a collection of memories strung together in chronological order. The things that are remembered range from the insignificant (a haircut, cleaning a barracks bathroom, a tedious staff meeting, an encounter with a brash Vietnamese prostitute) to the mesmerizing (the incomparable R. Lee Ermey’s tirades, a birthday party for a dead North Vietnamese soldier) to the horrifying (the bloody climax of boot camp, a sniper atteck in bullet-riddled Hue).

The memories presented in Full Metal Jacket all share a common theme; the hardening of men for war. The first (and most coherent) half of the movie takes place on Parris Island, South Carolina, Marine Corps boot camp. The soldiers march and clean and learn new skills and climb obstacles and serve as the focus for some profane, creative verbal stylistics from Ermey. All the time, they’re getting tougher, becoming more and more gung-ho, becoming more and more a part of the Green Machine. All except for Private “Gomer Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio, who’s gone on to bigger and better things), the platoon’s scapegoat who’s half a step behind and building up a huge reservoir of internal rage.

The second half of the movie follows boot camp graduate Joker (Matthew Modine, who hasn’t gone on to bigger and better things) around South Vietnam. Joker is a war correspondent behind the lines, chafing under the authority of an arrogant pompous Southern public affairs officer who’s trying to spin the media coverage of the war. (No, Al Gore hasn’t called and said that Full Metal Jacket was based on his life the way that Love Story was, but give him time.) After the Tet Offensive, Joker gets to go out into the field, where he finds out if the toughening and dehumanization of boot camp actually took root or not.

Kubrick presents Joker as an everyman character, which is necessary as we’re seeing Parris Island and Vietnam through his eyes. Modine’s always been an average actor at best, but that works in his favor, though. Despite his annoying voice-overs — which could have been edited out, no loss — he has our empathy. We understand, all too well, why he wears that peace symbol and has “Born to Kill” written on his helmet. Joker is our ambassador to the hardball world of the Marine Corps, and the movie rightly ends at the point when he enters that world fully and leaves the audience behind.

The major point of divergence between our memories and the memories of Private Joker is the skill of Stanley Kubrick. Where memories tend to be incomplete and hazy, Full Metal Jacket is sharp and clear. The photography in the boot camp scenes is nothing special — Parris Island not being noted for great natural beauty — but the Vietnam scenes are compelling and hyper-realistic. Full Metal Jacket is not your standard Vietnam movie in that it spends little time in the jungle; most of the battle scenes are in the ruined town of Hue. The genius of Full Metal Jacket is that the battle scenes look like they were shot on location in Hell itself. The last battle against a lone sniper and the last scene of singing Marines marching past a city on fire are wrenching, horrifying, and utterly memorable. Private Joker’s memory is not a comfortable place to be, but all hail to the late great Stanley Kubrick for sharing those memories with us.

By Grabthar’s Hammer, What A Movie!

The only thing wrong with Galaxy Quest is that it was released at the wrong time of year. If any film ever deserved a mid-February release, it is this one. For Star Trek fans (and you know who you are) Galaxy Quest is a great big gushy Valentine of a movie. Galaxy Quest is to Star Trek, in a way, what Shakespeare In Love is to Shakespearean theater: a warm-hearted, affectionately satirical love letter. Both movies poke fun at their respective conventions while staying true to that which is important.

(Not to say that The Trouble With Tribbles is equivalent to Romeo and Juliet, mind you, just trying to make a point here.)

Galaxy Quest works because it hits the three points of the Star Trek strategic triad: the actors, the fans, and the show itself. The movie begins with the crew of the USS Enterprise… ahem, that’s the NSES Protector, sorry, preparing for their appearance at a convention. Like the Star Trek actors, the Galaxy Quest actors are trapped in Stereotype Hell: they can neither get another acting job nor escape their fans. Some, such as Sigourney Weaver’s communications officer, are touched but bemused by the attention. Others, like Alan Rickman’s obligatory alien life form, are sick to the point of despair at the prospect of another sci-fi convention.

And then, way at the far end of the spectrum, there’s Tim Allen, playing actor Jason Nesmeth, playing Galaxy Quest star Commander Peter Quincy Taggart. Nesmeth is an egomaniac of staggering, galactic, even (if I may say so) Shatnerian proportions. (One even expects him to take off his toupee at one point, such is the resemblance.) Naturally, he loves the attention from the fans, though he doesn’t understand it. Naturally, he hogs the limelight, to the annoyance of his co-stars. And naturally, he’s the one who gets kidnapped by a race of space aliens who believe that the Galaxy Quest show is real and that he can command their replica starship to victory over the space lizards.

This starts the show, which we’ll get to in a moment. First, a word about the fans, who are at once the core audience for Galaxy Quest and the target for much of its satire. Accordingly, Galaxy Quest has adopted an attitude that’s mocking, yet respectful. Most of the comedy directed towards the fans is in the form of sight gags — middle aged people walking around with alien makeup on their heads. It’s possible that some fans might take offense to this portrayal — the woman in Arkansas who showed up to the Clinton trial decked out in Starfleet regalia comes to mind — but the mockery in Galaxy Quest is nothing if not affectionate. (There is a Shatneresque explosion directed towards one fan by Allen, but Allen gets his comeuppance, you just watch.)

The true fans of the show are the Thermians, the alien race that constructed the “Protector 2″. They have been monitoring Earth television and are so convinced that what they see on TV is real that they have remodeled their entire civilization around Galaxy Quest reruns. (Star Trek fans will recognize this as one of the show’s typical conceits — the original show featured alien civilizations based on the Roman Empire, Chicago gangsters, and even the Nazis.) When the Thermians show up at the hung-over Allen’s house, he takes one look at their pasty faces and Moe Howard haircuts and assumes they are fans. (One wonders if this is an everyday occurrence for Shatner.)

Allen’s Buzz Lightyear character in Toy Story 2 asks himself at one point, “Was I ever that deluded?” Allen is plenty deluded here, at first, thinking that the Thermian vessel is just an elaborate set. (This is one of more existential moments in Galaxy Quest: you have an actor on an elaborate set playing the part of an actor who thinks he’s on an elaborate set.) Allen, however, eventually realizes the truth and hustles back to collect his crew for another joyride.

This is where the real show begins, and it’s a splendid, hysterical farce. Galaxy Quest manages, one way or another, to spoof every single Star Trek episode there ever was. Every one of the show’s conventions is gleefully, impishly trashed to the point that I won’t even bother to catalog the goofiness. The Galaxy Quest screenwriters are operating with an immense amount of knowledge about the Star Trek universe — so much so that one wonders if they haven’t been to a few sci-fi conventions themselves — but they manage to distill it all down into a series of funny skits that should delight even those who have never seen the show.

Like Star Trek itself, Galaxy Quest is an ensemble piece. And like the Star Trek actors themselves, the Galaxy Quest actors have experienced stereotyping themselves. The underappreciated Sigourney Weaver is back in space again, but she’s cleverly cast as the anti-Ripley, a blonde bombshell with little to do and less to wear. After his boffo performance in Die Hard, Alan Rickman was typecast into sardonic villain roles, and he appears here as a sardonic good guy. (Unfortunately, he doesn’t steal the show hear to the degree and extent that he stole the show in Dogma.) Tony Shalhoub and Daryl “Chill” Mitchell are both refugees from Must-See-TV (Wings and The John Larroquette Show, respectively). Mitchell isn’t given much to do, unfortunately. Shalhoub isn’t given much more, but he makes the most of what he has — including one line that still makes me giggle every time I think about it.

Tim Allen, of course, has the most stereotyping of anyone on the crew. It’s hard to say if Allen is a victim of stereotyping or if he just doesn’t have much range as an actor. (Probably both.) Nevertheless, this is the perfect part for him, and he plays it with brio. Allen is allowed here to be cocky, overconfident, and incompetent but still be charming and funny.

If Galaxy Quest is too early to be a Valentine, it is the funniest New Year’s card you’ll get. Star Trek fans will howl with laughter, kids will giggle uncontrollably, and everyone else will, at least, be entertained. Go see it.

Glory Days

If Far From Heaven is, as R. Ebert has said, “like the best and bravest movie of 1957,” you can make the argument that Gangs of New York is the best movie from 1977 that never got made, and with more justice. Gangs of New York is the 1970’s project that Martin Scorsese never got to do, and in its way, it is every bit as much a representation piece of its time as Far From Heaven is of its time. But the similarities don’t end there.

Admittedly, tackling both Far From Heaven and Gangs of New York in the same review is problematic. Both movies (probably) deserve reviews all their own. But the similarities are there, if you care to look for them. What’s more, the similarities between the two movies are — for me, anyway — more interesting than the movies themselves. What follows, therefore, is a parallel review, looking at different elements of the two movies, and how they relate to each other despite being from dissimilar eras and covering seemingly dissimilar topics.

The first point to be made is that the movies are both period pieces, and doubly so. Far From Heaven is not only set in the 1950’s, it is shot and scripted as though it were a 1950’s movie, and it is one of the big gloppy melodramas common in the era. In fact, the movie is set right in the heart of the 1950’s, suburban Connecticut, scripted around the lives of an upwardly-mobile couple, and wrapped in the mantle of postwar prosperity. (The characters are constantly referred to as “Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech”, referring to the husband’s employer, which makes televisions or something like that.) Its originality is that it refuses to be original in its form, choosing retrospection over innovation. Writer/director Todd Haynes designed Far From Heaven as a homage to the work of 1950’s director Douglas Sirk (work unseen by me); setting the movie in Sirk’s timeline reinforces the link.

Gangs of New York is also a period piece, but of two different periods. The setting is Manhattan in the early 1860’s, where the street gangsters of the Five Points had made common cause with the political gangsters of Tammany Hall. But the movie’s center of gravity is fixed in the 1970’s, and it feels like a relic of that time. Like New York in the 1970’s, the 1860 version is divided over an unpopular war, beset by street crime, incapable of self-governance, riven by the yawning gap between an indifferent rich and a volatile poor.

Where Haynes is intent on recreating the style of a past director, Scorsese is reaching back to his own past. Gangs of New York is also representative of the type of movies that Scorsese and Coppola and others were putting out in the 1970’s; sprawling, multi-generational urban dramas, heavy on the scripting and light on the action. Just as Haynes is updating Sirk, Scorsese is updating Scorsese, injecting new life into the films of the 1970’s, showing the same themes again with a new cast of characters.

Far From Heaven and Gangs of New York are not so much tributes as throwbacks. Both are an attempt to recapture the glory days of their respective periods. Far From Heaven would, if released in 1957, have been a bombshell, shocking both critics and audiences with its language (one F-bomb dropped by Dennis Quaid) and its themes (homosexual and interracial romances). Gangs of New York would not have considered quite so groundbreaking, but it would have been a major media event in 1977 and likely would have enjoyed a long run as the top movie of the summer. Those were the glory days; in 2002 both movies were consigned to the arthouse circuit and the crowded midwinter schedule, and that’s all you need to know about the eras.

The concept of concurrent period pieces may be more a coincidence than a resemblance; it’s a common enough theme that it hardly seems worth noting. (Just to provide one unrelated example, the Star Wars movies are set both “a long, long time ago” and in the swashbuckling world of the 1930’s.) But there’s also an arguable similarity in themes, too. Despite the yawning gulf in tone, style, and substance, there are unmistakable parallels in the course of both movies.

Primarily, both movies feature a an intractable, irreconcilable family conflict with no pat answer. Far From Heaven has the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech (Quaid and Julianne Moore), a picture-perfect marriage riven by Quaid’s growing attraction to other men. Gangs of New York has a surrogate father-and-son relationship between apprentice gangster Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and erstwhile “community leader” and gang boss Bill Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis); Cutting takes Vallon under his wing, unaware that Vallon is the child of his oldest enemy and is sworn to kill him. In both movies, the characters are like paired magnets, drawn together and pushed apart by forces they cannot control and only dimly understand. The climax of the conflict in Far From Heaven, like its characters themselves, is understated and repressed; the conflict in Gangs of New York is as violent and bloody as its characters. (Gangs of New York also bears out one of Joe Queenan’s pet theories, this one about what audiences expect of good-looking leading men.) But the conflicts are still there, and they drive both stories as far as they can go, and when they end, the movies stop.

There are parallels in the secondary themes, too. Both movies feature a main character struggling against the demands of their communities. Moore is constantly surrounded by her Connecticut social circle, who cast disapproving eyes on her every move. DiCaprio has his own social circle to contend with, members of his father’s gang who would like him to take up the leadership mantle again. (The gang is known as the Dead Rabbits, and one wonders why PETA isn’t out in force.) And both films feature doomed romances. Moore’s is with her African-American gardener, Dennis Haysbert, on whom she stares longingly with wistful eyes. DiCaprio’s is with Cameron Diaz, and the romance is doomed to fail because she is, after all, Cameron Diaz.

The themes are again different, but parallel. There are massive differences between Connecticut socialites and Manhattan gangsters; the gangsters are much less cruel, for one thing. Dennis Haysbert’s character cannot bring himself to raise his voice to criticize Moore; Diaz comes near to cutting DiCaprio’s throat early on. The differences underline the similarities, though, making the plots — if nothing else — of Far From Heaven and Gangs of New York distored mirror images of one another.

These may be just superficial resemblances. There is at least one other superficial resemblance, though, that’s more meaningful. Both Far From Heaven and Gangs of New York are simply astonishing in terms of their production values. While the two movies look as different as chalk and cheese, both should ring up an inordinate amount of Oscar nominations for cinematography, art direction, costumes, and all of the other categories given out in the first six or so hours of the Academy Awards broadcast. (Only The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets even come close in this field, and both of those movies have unlimited budgets in comparison.)

Far From Heaven has the showiest look; it’s a Technicolor barrage of imagery, featuring lush dresses, autumn leaves and big tacky cars. Gangs of New York is gritty and urban and nasty; one of its repeated design motifs are dead bodies strewn across the streets like so much litter. But the amount of quality, care and attention to the design of the movie is identical, enough so that it would be hard to pick a winner between the two of them. The cinematography in Far From Heaven is superior, and the overwrought, cheesy score fits in perfectly with the subject matter. The costumes and set design in Gangs of New York are a little more complex and comprehensive and should be strong contenders.

In fact, the design elements in both films threaten to overwhelm everything else. Who can pay attention to the plot when there is so much else to look at — whether that is fall in New England or the teeming tenements of Manhattan? The excellence of the technical aspects of the movies has to be counterbalanced by the human aspects of the movies — namely, the acting.

Far From Heaven has the best acting, especially by the leads. Julianne Moore is the put-upon housewife; it’s a seemingly effortless performance, but she has to work hard not to overact, not to let the goopy sentimentality of the part carry her off. She accomplishes her task well, although she doesn’t always keep the movie from going completely off the rails. (Far From Heaven is still, above all else, a sticky, icky melodrama; Moore can’t save the movie from its high unintentional comedy quotient all by herself.) Dennis Quaid has the toughest job; he’s got to keep up his stolid Organization Man facade while letting it crack every so often to reveal the bitter, broken man inside, wounded by his betrayal of his family and the tug of his awakening homosexuality. (Quaid deserves recognition from the Academy for this performance and his stellar work in The Rookie, he’s more likely to get the supporting nod here.) Dennis Haysbert lends the movie a much-needed touch of dignity, but you wish sometimes he would let some of that pent-up frustration out, just a little.

Gangs of New York has the stronger ensemble cast, with reliable character actors like Jim Broadbent and John C. Reilly lending their considerable weight to the proceedings. DiCaprio is, surprisingly, not completely annoying as the conflicted young apprentice; more than that I don’t ask from him. Daniel Day-Lewis is, as always, a revelation when he appears on the screen; he’s got an Olympian level of talent. (Meaning, as always, that he only shows up every four years or so.) From the previews, it appears as though his performance is as stiff as his old-fashioned mustache. But he combines a creepy sort of ingratiating charm with a leisurely sense of authority; it’s easy to see why DiCaprio can’t help but admire the man he is sworn to destroy. There’s something a little off-center about Day-Lewis’s performance — it’s as though he’s doing a Robert DeNiro impression while adopting Mandy Patinkin’s accent — but he uses that oddness, makes it work for him, without giving into the temptation to turn his character into Snidely Whiplash.

There’s one more similarity I’ll mention here, and it’s the similarity that led me to write the reviews in just this way. I admired both movies a great deal, but I couldn’t bring myself to love them. It would have been hard for me to love Far From Heaven anyway; I react to big gooney tearjerkers like this the same way that Tom Hanks did in Sleepless In Seattle. (”And Richard Jaekel and Lee Marvin… were sitting on top of this armored personnel carrier, dressed up like Nazis…”) I might have gotten into it if I cared about the characters, I guess, but so very few of them were acting in recognizably human ways that I couldn’t look past the lush set design to see them as people. Moore and Haysbert are so uptight that it’s hard to take anything they say or do seriously. (Quaid is the exception; he’s uptight, too, but you can tell that it’s driving him nuts.) The emotional depth of Far From Heaven is concentrated in its cinematography and costumes and scores; but not enough spills over into its characters and its performances.

Gangs of New York has the opposite problem. Its characters are not repressed at all; the concept would be foreign to them, like the idea of microchips, or the importance of bathing regularly. Their emotional lives are big and outsized, and show up well on the sprawling canvas of the movie. The problem is that Scorsese gets carried away with his story and lets it drag on far too long, spoiling the movie’s impact by crosscutting the ending with the story of the New York draft riots. The wars between Scorsese and the Miramax honchos are a minor Hollywood legend, but after watching Gangs of New York, it’s not hard to want to root for Harvey Weinstein. Scorsese is brilliant here, on the top of his game, but there’s simply too much movie packed into a small narrative space here.

But if neither picture is fully, completely realized, both Far From Heaven and Gangs of New York are at least magnificent efforts. Glory, after all, is not always in the succeeding, but it is always in the striving. Both Far From Heaven and Gangs of New York have earned their glory, and deserve whatever awards come their way.

A Bright, Shining Lie

I shouldn’t really be telling you this, you know. I hope I can trust you, I wouldn’t want word of this to get around.

I was watching Gaslight at the Paramount Theater in Austin, and very early on, I had a very naughty thought, one that’s not worthy of me.

I was watching one of the scenes where neighborhood busybody Dame May Whitty (best known for the title role in The Lady Vanishes) is trying to sneak into the “murder house” on 9 Thornton Square for the purposes of gossip and nosiness. One of the denizens of 9 Thornton Square, of course, is Nancy the saucy maid, played by a young Angela Lansbury. And the thought ran through my mind, and I can’t get it out: wouldn’t it be a nice idea to remake Gaslight, with Lansbury in the role of the nattering busybody?

Probably not. Just a thought, anyway, couldn’t be done.

If you’ve never seen Gaslight before, you already know too much about the movie as is. The title has entered our vocabulary — as a verb, oddly enough. To “gaslight” someone is to try to drive them insane — or rather, to trick them into believing that they are insane. And it’s not enough to force them to watch all of Brian DePalma’s movies, or Clinton inaugural addresses, or other known forms of inducing psychosis. You have to be subtle about it, and clever.

Gaslight isn’t a particularly suspenseful or thrilling movie, but it’s got subtle and clever in spades. The smiling villain of the piece is Charles Boyer, playing a Hungarian pianist and composer. He sweeps poor sweet innocent Ingrid Bergman right off her feet, marries her, and installs her in her aunt’s house in London.

The aunt has been killed, years before, in the house, in a famous and unsolved murder case. The house has been shut up for fifteen or so years, until Boyer and Bergman move back. They banish all of the aunt’s possessions into the attic, clean and restore the house, put up new furnishings, hire a couple of servants, and prepare to live in wedded bliss forever.

The Scriptures tell us that perfect love casteth out fear. But imperfect love throweth it right back in again, and that’s what happens in Gaslight. The movie is a delicious, evil, heartless chronicle of Boyer’s attempts to introduce Bergman to the Divine Secrets of the Ga-Ga Sisterhood. Boyer keeps pulling these devilish little pranks on Bergman — stealing her cameo, moving the pictures on the wall, accusing her of stealing his watch, minor annoyances like that.

In and of themselves, these little tricks and traps wouldn’t drive anyone crazy. They work only because Boyer uses them to ever so slowly, ever so patiently mold the contours of Bergman’s mind. He’s got two or three different ways to induce fear going on at one time, and he uses them to slowly make her more and more deranged. He even manipulates poor Angela Lansbury (who does a super job) into being his unwitting assistant.

This probably shouldn’t be as chilling for modern viewers — who already know what Boyer has planned, sort of — but it works. There’s one scene where a painting has “disappeared” from the wall. Boyer hectors the poor staff about its disappearance. Bergman protests that she didn’t move the painting, but Boyer just gives her a shrug and a sigh. Bergman takes off and runs up the staircase, and spots the painting, hidden behind a statue or something. Boyer tartly points the finger of suspicion at her: how’d you know where the painting was if you didn’t hide it? Well, says Bergman, her voice trailing off, that’s where it was the last three times… I still feel a chill up my spine, just writing that. And it gets better, too, as Boyer pushes the boundaries of emotional cruelty and abuse even farther, and Bergman falls further and further into madness.

There are two main reasons why Gaslight can’t be remade. First, is that modern women won’t put up with the stuff that Bergman puts up with in this movie. In her best, bravest effort to walk out on that evil cheese-eating surrender monkey Boyer, Bergman got a huge, stunning round of applause and hoots from the audience. Of course, it doesn’t work, her efforts turn into an unmitigated triumph for Boyer. If you were going to make that movie today, you’d almost have to have the wife (Kathleen Turner, let’s say) be the one gaslighting the husband.

The second reason, of course, is that there’s no substitute for Ingrid Bergman, really there isn’t. Gaslight shouldn’t be remade for the same reason Casablanca shouldn’t be remade; there’s no way possible to do justice to the original. No one acts that well today, and you couldn’t afford all the supporting characters you need, and even if you could, the studio wouldn’t let you make it in black-and-white.

It’s not just Bergman’s stunning good looks, of course. Bergman would have had every right to turn in a bad performance here. She’s trying to play a character that’s Anglo-Italian, and ends up with a completely screwy accent. (Boyer’s is worse, though, and Joseph Cotten shows up from the parallel universe where they hire Midwesterners at Scotland Yard.) Her character is completely boring, annoyingly timid, and exists only to be manipulated. She even has to sing opera, bless her heart. And yet, still, she pulls off an amazing, memorable, vulnerable, Oscar-winning performance.

Gaslight is a good old-fashioned melodrama that doubles as a tense psychological thriller, with an astounding acting duet between Boyer and Bergman. It’s as unlike the fast-paced movies of summer 2000 as you’ll find anywhere, and it’s a true pleasure to see Boyer’s plot revealed and his bright, shining lie unmasked. Take my advice, don’t wait for the remake.

The Gene in the Gray Flannel Suit

In 1986, British police officers changed the face of law enforcement forever. Baffled by two brutal rape-murders, the police decided to take blood samples from every young man in the area. The search for the murderer, dramatized in Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding, ended in the apprehension and conviction of a suspect based solely on genetic identification.

The same concept is carried to a fare-thee-well in Gattaca, a cautionary fable about the dangers of genetic discrimination. Our hero is Ethan Hawke, a genetically disadvantaged social climber trying to join the genetically perfect elite in a futuristic society where it’s not what you know, or even who you know, but who you are that counts. The only “network” you use to get a job at Gattaca, Inc. is the double-helix network of your DNA strand. Like a light-skinned African-American “passing” for white in a racist society, Hawke is forced to live a precarious double existence, buying tissue and blood from a person with superior gene structure and a spinal-cord injury (Jude Law) and living in what looks like a Danish modern genetics lab. When the murder of a co-worker puts the law onto Hawke’s genetic trail, a game of cat-and-mouse ensues.

The futuristic trappings aside, the plot of Gattaca doesn’t differ from The Blooding in any appreciable way. Hawke, innocent of the crime of murder, has committed the crime of genetic impersonation, and it’s just a question of how long he can evade the constant genetic probes before his own genetic structure gives him away. That’s not interesting. The characters aren’t interesting, either. Hawke plays his poor-man’s-Tom-Cruise part to the best of his abilities, but he does nothing to hold the audience’s interest. Uma Thurman is wasted as a genetically superior ice princess. The supporting cast isn’t much better, with a raft of refugees from NBC’s Thursday night schedule (Tony Shalhoub, Ernest Borgnine, Blair Underwood) and not much else. All the performances are strictly room-temperature, save for Jude Law’s turn as the sarcastic wheelchair-using tissue donor.

My question is this. You’re parents, right? You can make your kid into anything you want to be, whether he’s a pianist with twelve fingers or a prototype NFL quarterback. You would think that billions of different people would make different choices, right? But in Gattaca, it looks like everyone has bought the same showroom model — the Yuppie LX. (The set design looks just like an Infiniti ad.) The Gattaca employees are bland, dull, Organization Men in identical designer suits. Looks as though they’ve edited the gene for non-conformity right out of the genome. If this is the point of the movie — and it may well be — it may not be worth making.

And if they’re going to show one side of the coin — the genetic elite setting orbital patterns in a Bauhaus office complex — I think the filmmakers have an obligation to show the dark side of genetic tampering. I was driving down Guadalupe Avenue in Austin this evening and got a good look at what the GenX college students are doing as far as hair color and tattoos — I wonder what would happen if they gave these kids their own gene splicer to play with? But there’s no subversive cyberpunks anywhere to counterbalance the bland conformity that is Gattaca.

Gattaca (the name, by the way, derives from the letters G, A, T, and C in genetic coding) is a serious, almost humorless movie. To it’s credit, the film does a good job in raising questions about the intersection of human rights and genetic technology, almost before they’ve been asked. But as entertainment, it’s a snooze, and as a thriller, it’s a flat out disappointment.

The Best Movie You Haven’t Seen

It was the Year of our Lord 1989 and International Communism in Europe came crashing down with a thump. Writer P.J. O’Rourke was in Berlin, setting aside his usual cynical mien to exult. “The West won the Cold War,” he shouted. “The privileges of liberty and the rights of the individual went out and kicked butt.” O’Rourke saw an impoverished East German border guard stretching out a skinny hand through the ruins of the Berlin Wall, begging some raucous students for a souvenir piece, and he got all choked up. “The tears of victory rolled down my face.” he wrote, “and the snot of victory did too, because it was an awfully cold day.”

Where O’Rourke was standing, he could still hear the glorious sound of power tools tearing the Berlin Wall to pieces. He couldn’t have known that, over ten years later, the triumphant echoes of that sound would still ring out across the world. And he would never, ever, have dreamed that the echoes of freedom would stretch to a little Soviet mini-republic called Tuva, half a world away from anywhere, and that they can still be heard in the harmonious echoes of a traditional form of music called throat singing.

Tuva is a little country on the map, wedged in between Siberia and Mongolia. We’re told it’s about the size of North Dakota, and it looks to be on the same latitude as Winnipeg. Its people are nomadic sheepherders with a religion that’s part shamanistic and part Tibetan Buddhist. Just as the Tibetans have been squashed by the Chinese Communists over the years, the Soviets oppressed the Tuvans, forbidding their clothing styles and culture and even their language. When the Soviets folded up their yurts and headed back to Moscow, the Tuvans were free once more to talk and think and dress as they pleased, and pass on their unique culture to their children.

But the recovery of freedom in Tuva is not the whole story of Genghis Blues.

For, you see, Tuva had been free once before, back in the mid-1920s when the Soviets were too busy fighting the Russian Civil War to pay attention to Tuva. The first free Tuvan state might have passed into total obscurity had not they issued a set of odd-looking stamps. A young man named Richard Feynman collected these stamps, and grew up to be a famously iconoclastic Nobel Prize winning physicist. He developed an interest in all things Tuvan (after all, he said, any place with a capital named “Kyzyl” had to be interesting), but was denied permission to visit Tuva by the Soviets. His friends maintained the “Friends of Tuva” association and were eventually successful in bringing some Tuvan musicians to play in San Francisco in the early 1990’s.

But the unlikely relationship between Americans and Tuvans is not the whole story of Genghis Blues.

No, the real story is even more unlikely. For at the Tuvans’ concert in San Francisco, a member of the audience met up with them backstage and began throat singing a Tuvan ballad in the ancient style. Paul Pena, a blues musician who is blind, heard a Tuvan throat singing performance on a shortwave radio some years before. Fascinated, he figured out the Tuvan musical style of throat singing, which involves using the lungs like bagpipes to create this weird harmonic sound. Well, the head of the Tuvan delegation immediately invited Pena to the Tuvan throat singing competition and cultural symposium in 1995. Pena left San Francisco and traveled to Tuva, accompanied by a team of kamikaze filmmakers and a local radio DJ.

This is the story of Genghis Blues — the story of the triumphal visit of Paul Pena to Tuva — and you won’t see a better movie this year.

Now look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’ve lost my mind. This can’t be the best movie of the year. It’s a documentary, for crying out loud. It’s got subtitles. It’s about some weird kind of music that you have to hear to even believe.

I know. It sounds incredibly goofy. It sounds like the sort of movie that your friend the film buff tells you to see that’s only playing at a tiny theater on the other side of town and has Ralph Fiennes wearing something other than a Nazi uniform or Harvey Keitel not wearing anything.

But trust me. This is a great movie. Let me tell you what happened to me. There’s a scene, early on, where Pena visits a school in Tuva. All these little kids are lined up, and they’re demonstrating throat singing. After they’re finished, they come up to Pena — who’s this great big shaggy bear of a guy — and hug him and welcome him to their country. And one of these kids is wearing a San Francisco Giants cap, and when I saw that, I started grinning and didn’t stop.

It gets better. (Not right away, there’s a sheep slaughtering scene in between, but it does.) There are two scenes in this movie where Pena gets on stage and performs… and… well, I’m never going to be a throat singing fan, and if this stuff ever hits the airwaves on anything other than NPR I’ll be shocked. But that doesn’t matter, not one little bit, because these scenes are electric. Pena develops this incredible rapport with the audience that completely transcends the music, East-West relationships, anything you care to name.

There are those who say that 1999 was a great year for movies, and a lot of them point to what they call “movie magic”. From a pure special effects angle, they have a point, and movies like The Matrix and the new Star Wars movie show a lot of technical wizardry. But the real magic of movies is not what’s on screen but what’s in the heart. Genghis Blues is the most magical movie of the year. It tells an extraordinary story about great characters in a faraway land, and it does it with the kind of open, exuberant spirit you don’t see in movies anymore. Genghis Blues reminds us that movies, like children and music, have the power to stir the most cynical bean-bag of a heart. Yes, and to make it dance.

A Man In Full (Armor, That Is)

The key moment in Gladiator is at the end; the final battle in the Colosseum. I won’t give away the ending of the movie, mind you, except to call your attention to something curious. During the movie, the computer-generated crowd at the Colosseum has been pretty noisy, with shouts of “Death!” and “Kill him!” in just the same semi-organized way that NBA crowds chant “Air ball, air ball” when someone leaves a jumper short of the hoop. But at the end, the crowd is silent. It’s just like Russell Crowe was a rookie relief pitcher, brought in from the bullpen late in the game with the home team down by eight, just to chew up some innings. It’s as quiet in the Colosseum as it is in the Metrodome most nights. (One wonders when and if the Twins or the Expos or the Devil Rays will resort to computer-generated crowds.)

The only thing more silent than the audience on-screen is the audience in the theater.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is a deeply unsatisfying film. Despite its awe-inspiring special effects and superior costume and set design, it’s nothing more than a botched attempt to combine an action thriller with Roman political intrigue. Crowe has the title role; a Roman general who survives an assassination attempt, only to be sold into slavery as a gladiator. He fights lions and tigers and big hairy mean guys in the arena by day, and meddles in imperial politics by night.

Gladiator starts out well enough, with an admirable battle at dawn between the Roman legions and a band of German barbarians. The endless ranks of Roman soldiers bring to mind C.S. Lewis’s description, “terrible as an army with banners”. The conflict — which sees Roman catapults and cavalry rout the Germans — is wonderfully staged and beautifully directed. Scott’s camera follows every flight of every flaming arrow, catches every flake of falling ash at the battle’s end. It’s a powerful achievement, ranking just below Spielberg’s vision of the Normandy landing in Saving Private Ryan.

From there, the story shifts to palace intrigue. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) is old, frail, and mistrustful of his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). The Emperor reveals his master plan; Crowe will be his successor. In the great Roman tradition of Cincinnatus, Crowe’s General Maximus will reign long enough to return power to the people and end the rule of the corrupt Caesars. Crowe doesn’t want the throne — which, in the Emperor’s eyes, makes him qualified to wear it.

What follows is the first of several inexplicable scenes involving Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix’s role seems like it was lifted out of a made-for-TV movie, there’s nothing imperial about his performance. Here, he confronts Harris and gets all teary-eyed, complaining that his father doesn’t love him and hasn’t said nice things about him to help his self-esteem.

Well, as you can probably predict, once Phoenix takes the throne, Bad Things start happening to Crowe. Crowe makes the mistake of referring to his wife and son one too many times, thereby condemning them to the fate of the families of heroes. Crowe ends up as a slave in the gladiator AAA league, waiting for a chance to make it to The Show. (When the gladiators do make it to the Colosseum, they look for all the world like rookie ballplayers walking into Yankee Stadium for the first time.)

Crowe has a tattoo on his arm, “SPQR”, the Latin abbreviation for the Senate and the people of Rome. When he gets to gladiator school, he takes it off in a messy, bloody way. The symbolism is dual; he’s only out for himself now, and he’s one tough, mean hombre.

Crowe’s mentor, Marcus Aurelius, was a great Stoic philosopher, and Crowe lives and breathes the Stoic work ethic throughout Gladiator. If you’ve run across Stoic philosophy lately, it’s probably been through the fine Tom Wolfe novel, “A Man In Full”, where a disgraced Atlanta real estate baron is redeemed by the works of the Stoics. Crowe is a Man in Full, indeed, taking on his opponents in the political and sporting arenas with “strength and honor”. However, this leaves him as colorless as one of the washed-out dream sequences that close the movie. We respect Crowe, but we don’t admire him. Crowe gets some good advice from his trainer, the late Oliver Reed, to the effect that he has to do a better job to make the crowd love him. It doesn’t work, though. We don’t really love Crowe, and he doesn’t do anything to make us want to love him.

Not only does the audience not love Crowe, it doesn’t hate Joaquin Phoenix. He’s supposed to be the villain of the piece, but he’s ineffectual at best. The biggest crowd reaction he gets is laughter when he whines.

Part of this is the script; part of it is Phoenix’s acting, which is like Quentin Tarantino on Ritalin. (Not a bad idea, that, come to think of it.) He’s geeky and goofy in a slow, langourous way. More than anything else, Phoenix reminds me a little bit of Chris Sarandon in The Princess Bride, but he doesn’t have Prince Humperdinck’s quick wit or arrogance.

Another non-entity is Connie Nielsen, playing Phoenix’s sister. Nielsen, who didn’t make any impression in Mission to Mars to speak of, spends the whole movie doing her Michelle Pfieffer imitation. She’s got the potential to be a good, strong, evil character, but she fades badly down the stretch.

Gladiator is worth seeing solely for the spectacle. The actual action on the Colosseum floor doesn’t save the movie. It looks for all the world like the football scenes from Any Given Sunday; edited within an inch of its life, enough so that it’s hard to follow the action. But it’s a fabulous-looking film, with all the ingredients (chariots, swordplay, Derek Jacobi) you’d want in a Roman Empire movie.

But, like the crowd at the Colosseum, you’ll be leaving the theater in silence, without any applause or any roars of approval. Unless, of course, there’s someone in the back delivering the only appropriate response to the movie:

“Aiiiiiiir balllllll….. aiiiiiiir balllllll….. aiiiiiiir ballllll…”