Lydia: please write a spec script for Law & Order in which someone says, "As a professional psychologist, I endorse their views. You are crazy. Or mentally retarded. Actually, as a computer scientist, I can endorse the "robot" hypothesis as well."

Psychologist: Patient:

My Son, My Son, What Have You Done?

Curious after my last post I watched My Son, My Son, What Have You Done?, which is streaming on Netflix. By "I watched" I supposes I mean "I am Watching." It's pretty much what you expect--a study of someone with a serious problems, loosely based on reality, and existential at great length. It has some weird acting and some even weirder dialog. I wasn't surprised to find that there was not a lot of time invested in writing the film: "Herzog became convinced that they could make a film and that they could write it quickly. They went to a house in the Austrian countryside: Herzog set a week's deadline and within 4½ days they had their screenplay."

You can really feel the extra half a day's effort--especially in the scenes where Herzog has the actors freeze the scene for a long still shot. Sevigny does a fairly good job of staying still.

There aren't any albino crocodiles, but there is a too-long conversation about ostriches.

I can't guarantee I will finish this.

[photo: I didn't]

Big Love

In keeping with my attempts to wrap up everything I said I'd do this summer, today I finished watching Big Love. The series sort of finished behind my back, and even though it looks like a lot of people were debating the series finale online, I somehow missed the discussion, and had to catch up. So, to add to the rabble just a bit too late, here are my thoughts:

First, lot of people complained about the show's climax. I will not be one of them. If I learned one thing from Jurassic Park, it's that the enemy you have most to fear is not the one before you, but the one that lies in wait hidden. So it is with dinosaurs and so it shall ever be with politics.

Though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call Big Love "thought provoking," I have to admit to feeling the final season left me with a lot to think about. I'm not one to object to plural marriage. I tend to think marriage should be left entirely to churches, and that definitions about who can constitute a single marital unit should be defined by those particular groups, leaving the government out of it except in investigating abuses. So I didn't expect that I would be one to feel judgmental about the relationships bridging Bill, Barb, Nicki, and Margene. I realized as I watched the series conclude that I'm totally wrong about this. I've been consistently waiting for this marriage to fail. I've seen Nicki as the Villain, Margene as the Victim, and Barb as the Real Wife. I saw Barb as trapped in a house of crazy people because of a bad decision made on her death bed; I saw Margene abused by a motley crew of people who couldn't possibly love her; I hated Nicki without much thought.

The final two seasons and the final episode really changed my perspective. This show was never about Bill and his bed-hopping; it was always about a very delicate, if sometimes dreadful, relationship between the three principle women. Barb sacrifices monogamy, but she doesn't lose Bill. Nicki is hateful, yes, but Barb loves her anyway. Margene sacrifices absolutely everything, but she gains a family in return. These three sister wives are less sisters and more one another's wives, and I think beyond all of the drama on the compound, this show actually did a great job of showing what a successful marriage might look like between three people. I say three and not four because Bill, in my estimation, fails where his wives succeed. He makes no compromises, lives only for his own vision, and thus cheats himself and those around him of the rich relationship that results from continual mutual grown and accomodation. I suspect from the series finale that the writers felt this too and saw a real need to turn the focus to Barb, Nicki, and Margene.

I also feel a weird disconnect between where the show left off--with polygamy newly highlighted as a debate in American politics--and where we actually live, in a nation happy to praise the characters on this show (as they do--in countless comments sections of episode reviews, and on message boards about the show), but not to rethink our legal ban of the practice. So, Big Love has finished, as has the Warren Jeffs trial. It's the end of an era. I have absolutely no idea what I'll pay attention to now when I want plural marriage scandals, or gratuitous compound footage. Cheers to you, Big Love. Thanks for keeping Chloe Sevigne away from upsetting movies like Gummo, at least part time.*

*But, did it? Apparently she made a Herzog movie** at the same time.

**I might have to see that.

NOOOOOOOooooooo!

This unsubstantiated rumor might not be true, but that won't stop me whining.
http://nearwestendnews.net/2011/08/09/westhampton-theater-to-become-upscale-restaurant

Note: the Westhampton theater, especially upstairs, is very small and very cramped. Even I feel like the seats are too close together, and I am very short-legged. I don't care.I still don't want it to be converted into another restaurant I will never go to. 

I would actually sort of like to see our NTC participants post about their own pivotal movies or movie decades.

I tried recently to come up with a big list of "the movies that made me love movies" or something like that. I was thinking of making a movie-themed redwork quilt. (I'm probably not ever going to do that.)

The first movie I saw in a theater was Annie. My grandmother took me to see it, and I was pretty scandalized by all Carol Burnett's bad behavior. Confession: I still think of Tim Curry as Rooster before Frank-N-Furter,  or Wadsworth or whatever else you think of him as. This guy probably:



Labyrinth. The first movie I bought myself on video. Followed closely by And Now For Something Completely Different. It is a very reassuring feeling, owning a movie, knowing that you can see it whenever you want to, and pause it, or start over when it's done. It seems so obvious now, but it was a revelation in 1990 or so.

It's a Wonderful Life and Harvey. I had a record of Jimmy Stewart reading Winnie the Pooh stories when I was a kid. He was the first movie star I felt a personal attachment to. Celebrity culture is one of the weirdest aspects of being a movie lover/watcher/fan. You come to feel as if you know these people, and it's rare (and sort of a relief) to see the occasional movie without familiar faces in it. On the other hand, sometimes you like a movie just because of who is in it...

Dead Poets Society. The first time I remember loving and hating a movie at the same time, which is a really important part of my experience of movies. I fought with people about what was left out (e.g. any women, any poet born after 1900), but I also toted around my mother's copy of The Viking Book of Poetry of the English Speaking World all that summer while I worked at my first job, selling dried flowers to tourists in an alley in Kennebunkport. Parts of Leaves of Grass still remind me of the aggressive scent of lemon verbena and rose potpourri.

Heathers. The first movie that I watched so many times I could recite most of it from memory. It is hard to watch now, because..well, because it's kind of bad. I don't remember why it was so great then. Speaking of things I no longer understand my adolescent fondness for (I'm talking about Winona Ryder), I saw Edward Scissorhands at The Movies on Exchange in Portland, and I was sad for days afterwards, thinking about...you know, mortality and stuff.

The Fisher King. Oh how I loved The Fisher King. I saw other Terry Gilliam movies earlier, and others are better, but The Fisher King is the one that got inside my head, made me incredibly sad, and made me keep thinking about it. I was fifteen when that movie came out. Amanda Plummer's mean, novel-reading character was named Lydia. That alone would probably have won me over.

There were a whole series of sort of smarty-pants movies that I rented and watched by myself, in the back room of the dance studio where my mother was working, or in my room on a tiny black and white TV. These are movies that made me think, made me feel smart and stupid in turn. The Seventh Seal, Mindwalk, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Jesus of Montreal. I am not sure I understood all of the issues raised in these movies. They made me realize that watching a movie can be hard work, and that it can be worth it.

Finally, I remember going to the Nickelodeon theater in Portland, where they showed second run movies for $2. It was a hot day, and I watched Scent of a Woman then immediately went back and watched Benny & Joon. That was the first time I went to see a movie alone, and I loved it so much I did it twice in the same day.

The funny thing about my list of movies that mattered to me is how many of them are not movies I ever need to see again. Even Harvey, which I would have named as my favorite movie for many years, seems a little trite these days, if I'm honest. Does everyone feel this way? The stuff that made you who you are, do you still love that stuff? Are you embarrassed by it? Do you cling defensively--or proudly--to nostalgia for terrible things you loved when you were thirteen?

Sherlock

So...um, yes. Like all of you, I watched series I of Sherlock with total glee, and have been fantasizing about the second series since. Like so many of the BBC Masterpiece anthologies, it was too short for something so delightful, and I find myself wishing it would wear out its welcome with about 20 more episodes this season. Alas.

So, as you can imagine, when I saw that Tor was doing a quick review of various imaginings of Holmes (emphasis on quick--I wouldn't mind something a little more pedantically comprehensive) I followed the jump to read the whole article. I read through without much surprise until I came to this:

"Benedict Cumberbatch"

I am trying to keep my squeals to a mature minimum, but is this, for truth, his name? PLEASE tell me my thus far favorite Holmes adaptation stars Dickensian gentry?

Thad has been insisting we name our first dog "Beric Dondarrion the Lightning Lord," but I'm going to have to vote "Benedict Cumberbatch" for any animal fond of radishes, or exhibiting signs of gout.

Higgledy piggledy,
Benedict Cumberbatch
breaks the Shakespearean
rule with his name.

In TV history
certainly others have
played Sherlock Holmes, but it
isn't the same.




[Photo: Benedict Cumberbatch demands more Higgledy Piggledies!]

Horror isn't just...

Horror isn't just for perverts and lowbrows anymore. Whether the undead pose a threat to serious art is unclear. What I'm more concerned about is the danger serious art poses to the undead.

Jason Zinoman in Slate