The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

As many of you know, i become unbearable at Christmastime. I hope that it's a loveable kind of unbearable, but even if it's not, I guess that's the price everyone has to pay for knowing me. While everyone else is (apparently) thinking about committing suicide from Thanksgiving to New Year, I'm trying to bake a roomful of cookies, drink my weight in cocoa, and spend as much time staring at fires or snow falling or -- best of all -- Christmas movies.

And so, in that spirit, I think it's time to review one or two holiday movies before the end of the year. I'll be back in North Carolina as of tomorrow morning (and I have a final this afternoon), but I plan to not let even the 12.8 kbps speed of the internet back home prevent me from being both annoyingly excited about Christmas coming and annoyingly opinionated.

You have been forewarned

Procrastinating, and proving I'm not a snob

I have no problem admitting that in certain things (e.g., cheese, balsamic vinegar, novels) I'm a bit of a snob. But I have been accused recently of being a movie snob, and I'm not willing to accept this. Yes, I watch a lot of old movies, but this doesn't make me a snob; it makes me diverse. So, just so you know, this is a list (illustrative, not exhaustive) of non-snobby movies I love -- some with no shame and some with just a little:

• Back to the Future
• Dirty Dancing
• Ghostbusters
• Gone in 60 Seconds
• Hackers
• Independence Day
• Karate Kid
• Minority Report
• Office Space
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Shanghai Noon
• Zoolander

So there.

Can Jack Black redeem himself from Nacho Libre?

I hope this upcoming movie is good. The thing that makes me the most excited about it right now is its website. See if you can figure out which movies are spoofed in the layout (one of them I can't figure out yet). To see a different layout, click "You Name It, We Shoot It" in the top left corner.

Palm Beach Story

Well, it's been forever since I posted, but I'm finally back into the swing of things and have actually seen a few movies recently, rather than just spending my time catching up on work and old episodes of House, M.D. This week, I actually managed to make it to a great movie theater, The Brattle Theater here in Cambridge. The Brattle doesn't play as many old movies as I'd like (although I'd highly recommend Evil Dead 2, playing on Halloween!) but it's a nice little indie place. And over the past few weeks, they've had a series that has made up for their usual lack of old movies. They even played a Buster Keaton film. And I got to see a Preston Sturges film that I'd never even heard of: The Palm Beach Story.

Basically, all you have to know about the plot is this: it's ridiculous and far-fetched. The characters are absurd, and some of them don't make any sense at all. And overall, the movie is excellent.

The movie begins with a married couple, Tom (Joel McCrea) and Gerry (Claudette Colbert), who love each other but have no money. Gerry decides to leave Tom to try to get them the money they need by capitalizing on her looks. And, if you grew up ever watching the cartoon cat and mouse namesakes of this pair, you can guess what happens next: Tom follows Gerry, and escapades abound. Gerry snags an extremely earnest and extremely rich man, and Tom accidentally gets snagged by the rich man's man-crazy sister. In the end, though, everyone settles down happily through some unabashedly stupid plot twists ("That's a whole other plot entirely" says Tom when a couple of twins pop into the story to save the day.)

In the grand tradition of screwball comedy, though, nothing needs to make sense, because everyone is having too much fun. There are some unexpected hilarious lines ("That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous."), and some similarly unexpectedly amusing (and amusingly-named) characters, like the Weinie King and the Ale and Quail Club, which is comprised of a bunch of rich millionaires who like to get drunk, sing, and hunt, no matter the circumstances. The only bad thing about this movie is that I've now had "A-Hunting We Will Go" in my head for the past couple days....

An incredibly fun 3 Stars.

Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum follows a country vicar and his family, an archetype the British apparently find ripe for comedy. In the grand tradition of British Comedies about Vicars, the film is chock full of eccentric characters, and there are passing jokes about flower committees and country church politics, as well as making puns and other small lingual jokes that make you either love watching BBC sitcoms or not. (The town is called Little Wallop, for example, and the family portrayed is the Goodfellows.) What distinguishes this movie from the rest is its light handling of dark subject matter. Insanity, murder, adultery, and voyeurism -- along with normal family tensions -- are all included, but they are treated with wit and humor (and never make the film very graphic, either sexually or violently). The R rating comes from the number of greusome subjects and the frank way in which the characters engage in such behavior. This is not the Censor Board era, where you might miss the references if you don't know what's going on, but visually at least things are left to the imagination, which I appreciate.

While dark in subject, the film is actually quite deft in its handling of the subjects, and the characters who would be abonimable in real life somehow manage to be loveable. This is where a star cast really comes in handy, and the talent recruited here prove they are up for the task. Rowan Atkinson's recent work has completely redeemed himself from his Mr. Bean days, and here he remains in my good graces. As the vicar Walter Goodfellow he is clueless in a manner only vaugely reminiscent of his more famous character, and he introduces a sensitive and humanity that keep this film from becoming entirely about its crazy plot points and instead grounded firmly in the characters and their relationships to one another. In the film, Walter is struggling with mediocre sermons and neglects his wife Gloria, played with equal loveability by Kristin Scott Thomas. Gloria is just starting an affair with her golf pro (played to smarmy perfection by Patrick Swayze - yes Patrick Swayze - who seems wonderfully out of place in a small British comedy), their teenage daughter is acting out by having promiscious relationships with "bad boys," and their son is being bullied at school.

Enter Grace (Maggie Smith), a housekeeper who is an unassuming, gracious, maternal, quiet -- in a word, perfect -- older woman. She quietly starts up-ending the Goodfellows' lives, and gently reminds them what it means to be a family. Perfect little happy story, with only one monkeywrench thrown in: Grace has recently been released from a mental institution for calmly murdering her husband and his lover, an event we see at the very beginning of the story. Ms. Smith plays this insanity with understated aplomb, which matches the whole movie's tone perfectly.

The wonderful thing about the "insanity plot twist" is that it isn't a twist: the audience knows about this little problem from the very beginning of the movie, even before meeting the Goodfellow family, so the humor genuinely comes from the earnest acting combined with morbid situations that Grace brings with her in addition to perfect housekeeping, rather than from any shock value. The best part of the comedy simply comes from the strangeness of an insane killer bringing sanity and peace to a household, and though the joke lasts for the whole movie, that one note sustains quite well because of the cast. Even though the situations are over-the-top, the actors never are, making the film's world incredibly easy to believe, which makes the whole thing even funnier.

3 lbs

3lbs, the television show named after the three-pound organ that is the human brain, aspired to be complex, intriguing, and provoking. Achieving such a goal should have come naturally; the show revolves around two world-class brain surgeons and one neurologist and the cases they encounter. Instead, it got cancelled in the US after 3 weeks, leaving five more episodes unaired. But, being in Bangladesh, I get to see all of them on the Hallmark channel, and I've seen four so far.

In a House-like format, each episode involves a case or two that include bizarre, medical-mystery-meets-medical-journalism symptoms and results. Of the episodes I've seen, each case highlights the enigma of the brain -- is it "wires in a box," as one character claims, or is the human brain (or the human pysche) more elusive than that?

The most natural tension of neuroscience is, of course, what makes us human, which is mirrored nicely in the science/religion dichotomy that crops up quite frequently in the first few episodes of the first season. This could make for a fascinating, unspoken dialogue in the series, a tension that keeps the subject of the show relevant and thought-provoking, rather than simply the fodder to give the characters something to do in addition to their more trite interpersonal interactions.

Instead, 3 lbs makes that dialogue spoken between the characters, which is somewhat necessary to explain the science and philosophy, but makes every character a little too much like "Exposition Boy!". The show tries too hard to be both scientific and poetic, and ends up failing at both. The science goes by fast, but not fast enough to think that these people know what they're talking about, and also not fast enough for me miss the fact that some of the science sounds surprisingly suspect. And in an attempt to be mystical and poetic about the brain, the show's creators establish bizarre visual tropes in each episode to represent the mental effects of the brain damage at issue in the show. The special effects are generally surreal or dada-ist (my favorite so far has been the hanging lights in the hospital corridors acutally being upside-down dandelions that have gone to seed), but they disappear too quickly for the audience to be able to process them or figure out how they fit into the reality of the show. Most annoyingly, it's often unclear who "sees" these visual effects -- sometimes they are clearly the experience of the patient, but often they seem to be created by the mind's eye of the cynical doctor (played by Stanley Tucci).

With these problem, 3lbs fails to be a stellar show. However, the three main actors prop up the show enough to keep it decent. Stanley Tucci plays the star surgeon, a brilliant but cynical, Dr. House-like character who doesn't like people that much except as brains to tinker with. Indira Varma plays the neurologist, who's much more new age-y and loves patients and people (think Dr. Cameron in House), and Mark Feuerstein plays the new guy who is Tucci's sidekick and is supposed to represent the wise and happy medium. All three actors are likeable, and try their best to overcome the cheesy, formulaic plots and interactions with "unsolved scientific questions." I for one am certainly willing to put up with a certain amount of plot stupidity for Stanley Tucci and Mark Feuerstein, though for completely different reasons. One's an amazing actor, and the other, well, is just fun to watch, if you know what I mean.... In the end, though, with better medical dramas on television (especially House, M.D., which has practically the same formula and characters) it's not surprising this show got cancelled so fast.

1.5 stars

Babette's Feast

Ask almost anyone what his favorite food is, and it's unlikely you'll get the same response as if you had asked what the best meal is he's ever had. Once in a very long while, however, intellect and emotion converge, and "good" food corresponds with "favorite" food. With me, though, this convergence happens almost exclusively in food that is exquisite because it is simple but perfectly executed with just the right ingerdients: a fresh loaf of ciabatta (five ingredients, but it’s all about time and kneading), chocolate mousse (four, but the egg whites must be folded the exact right amount), green beans with just a bit of salt and olive oil (OK, there’s no real technique there. The beans and olive oil just have to be high quality.).

Movies work the same way. There are some incredibly good movies I've seen that will never be my favorite movies because they are just too heavy (or too long, or too bloody – the analogy still works in each case). Meanwhile, some of my favorite movies are definitely the film equivalent of empty calories, predictable comfort food, or dishes that you love simply because they bring back good memories. And then there’s that rare movie that can both be counted as a favorite and an artistic accomplishment.

Babette’s Feast is one of those rare movies. Like those special foods, it succeeds precisely because it is simple in its aspirations, but meticulous in its details. The story was written by Danish author Isek Dinesen and first published in the 1950s in the Ladies Home Journal. The title character is Babette Hertsard, a French refugee in the 1800s who finds herself in a remote fishing village on the coast of Denmark. The village is simple, humble, and devoutly religious, and Babette becomes the servant and cook for two elderly sisters whose father founded the devout religious sect the village people follow. Babette’s only tie to her French (read: more worldly) past is a yearly lottery ticket. One day she wins that lottery, and decides to thank the sisters for the past fourteen years by cooking them and their congregation an elaborate meal.

The 1987 Danish film benefits from its humble and succinct beginnings. Because the movie primarily revolves around the preparation of a single meal, there is no rush to just move through the plot, and instead the film can linger over the visual details and delve into the characters’ nuances and intriguing pasts. The plot quietly progresses, and before you realize it, there is a final satisfying twist that I didn’t predict only because I was enjoying the movie too much. The cinematography savors both the food and the countryside, and the result is beautiful. The juxtaposition of the sumptuous meal and the ascetic village enriches the portrayal of each, and gives the film most of its depth and texture. Better still, in the end this juxtaposition seems to melt away, leaving the viewer to realize that Babette’s loving and extensive preparation bears more similarity to religious devotion than one might realize; eucharistic undertones develop, and the woman anointing Jesus with expensive perfume comes to mind.

While the meal portrayed in Babette’s Feast may be elaborate and extensive, the movie itself is exactly like my favorite foods: complex in its simplicity and made of really good ingredients. Also like most of my favorite foods, the enjoyment of Babette’s Feast is not without labor. With food, you have to invest time and technique; with Babette’s Feast you have to sit through a slow beginning and read subtitles. But it’s well worth it.

Harvie Krumpet

An unlucky little clay man, Harvie Krumpet, and the movie to which he donates his name, represents the best that storytelling has to offer. First of all, this movie is funny. From the slightly random fact that Harvie’s real name is Harvek Milos Krumpetzki to the downright ridiculous events of his unfortunate life, Harvie’s life epitomizes simple humor. And Geoffrey Rush, who the filmmakers rightly claim is the Godfather of Australian Film, expertly narrates the tale with just the right balance of sincerity and irony to make every scene even funnier.

Second, the story is poignant. Harvie is born desperately poor. Then he becomes a refugee to Australia during World War II. He had Tourette’s syndrome, gets struck by lightening, loses a testicle (I forget how – I haven’t seen the movie in four years), and eventually gets Alzheimer’s. And yet, Harvie remains simple and optimistic. A perfect example of enjoying the simplest pleasures of life even in the face of a life others might regret or complain about, Harvie plods along in his life, armed with a book of Fakts (another source of funny lines) and unending good nature. He gets married, adopts and raises a thalidomide baby, works for animal rights and even in his old age become a nudist. (And let's just say that this being claymation makes this a lot more funny than if this were a live action short.)

Last, this story is airtight. At only 23 minutes, this movie chronicles Harvie’s whole life, from birth to death, and somehow seems to get plenty of story in. Not a line is wasted, and every detail – visual or otherwise – is there for a reason. It’s enough to make me angry that it’s almost impossible to find a place that shows or sells movie shorts (there appears to have been no American DVD release). But if Harvie Krumpet didn’t complain about his life, I suppose I can’t complain too much. After all, I caught this short almost by accident back when I lived in Chicago, so really my luck is much, much better than Harvie’s.

The Pursuit of Happyness

I watched The Pursuit of Happyness on an airplane from Newark to Heathrow this week, so it was probably not exactly the best experience to evaluate the movie, especially as it was on for about an hour before they stopped it (the entertainment had started because we were stuck on the plane for many hours before we actually took off). So I kind of watched the movie in two parts, which definitely breaks the flow of the narrative.

That being said, I think this was an excellent, if slightly trite, movie. It’s pretty much your powerful Hollywood drama, complete with a big star and a cute kid. In the movie, Will Smith plays a man struggling to get by in San Francisco in the year 1981. He’s a salesman of some obscure medical device, which basically means his job is to constantly be rejected as he tries to sell all the devices he invested in. Then his wife leaves him, leaving him a broke and single dad to his four-year-old son, Christopher, played by Will Smith's real-life son Jaden. (That casting certainly makes the father-son bond convincing, a huge benefit for a movie that's main danger is becoming too schmaltzy.)

Enter your favorite “overcome adversity” soundtrack. Will Smith’s character, named Chris Smith, is only a high school graduate, but he's also something of a math whiz. To prove this point, there’s a few fun scenes involving the “latest hot new toy” – a Rubik’s cube, which is one of the few things that solidly grounds the story to a date. So Smith applies to a stock brokerage internship to try to work his way out of his shoestring lifestyle.

Oh yes. It’s an unpaid internship. So, he has to be a single parent, a salesman of an unsaleable product, AND an intern in a highly competitive program. And pretty quickly, make that a homeless single parent.

If I have to worry about spoiling the plot for you, you haven’t paid enough attention. Did you notice that this is movie with Will Smith, the man who has saved us all from aliens multiple times? And that there’s a cute kid involved? Through all the hardship, all the juggling, all the immense pressure of trying to succeed, our hero finally does, and I was surprised to see how much I actually cared, given the fact that the outcome was never really in question.

My favorite part about this movie, though, isn’t the inspiring story, though that makes it worth the watch. What pushes this movie into the above average category is how unconventionally it gives the audience cues with which to understand and invest in the story. It does this in two ways. First, the first-person narration, which some might consider a crutch, is actually used quite effectively here by providing short comic relief or philosophic consideration, so necessary for making a drama not seem too didactic, without actually having to break the story. The narration also helps keep the audience aware of when the story is about to turn; every once in a while, Smith narrates the beginning of a scene saying, “This part of my life is called Being Stupid,” or “This part of my life is called Running.”

Second, the obscure medical device (a bone density scanner or something like that) also really helps the narrative. At first, I thought it to be just a strange and slightly annoying way of making Chris Smith unemployed but unable to get unemployment checks. But each device is very expensive, and so each one, and its sale, represents a significant if unreliable economic buoy for Smith and his son. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, the mere image of the nondescript off-white, sewing-machine-sized device had become a visual representation of the elusive monetary security that drives the whole movie. Very cool to use something that initially seems pointless and boring to the advantage of the story. (If I were still in college, and a film major, I would definitely write a paper about what that device achieves in the movie.)

All in all, if you want a quality uplifting drama, of which there seems to be very few these days, this is definitely worth a look. 3.5 stars.

Mr. Deeds Goes To Town

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Call me a sap, but there’s something about starry-eyed idealism mixed with screwball comedy that makes me a sucker for so many movies directed by the great Frank Capra: It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take it With You, It Happened One Night, Arsenic and Old Lace and even Meet John Doe. With this kind of background love of a director’s work, I eagerly anticipating watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, another Frank Capra film.

The plot is ripe for Caprian dramatics. Made in the middle of the Great Depression, the movie weaves its fantasy around the issues of the times: Mr. Deeds, an unassuming small town man played by Gary Cooper, inherits an absurdly large fortune, and goes to New York to figure out what to do with his money. He falls for an undercover female reporter who writes stories making fun of him until she (of course) falls for him, too. He then meets a desperate and poor farmer, and Mr. Deeds decides he wants to spend his money to fund farms for thousands of poor and homeless families. This abrupt and altruistic decision causes the moneygrubbers surrounding Mr. Deeds to claim that he is insane and his fortune should be taken away from him, and the movie culminates in a sanity hearing where all characters can make their rousing speeches to the judge and the movie audience.

Such trite plots usually provide Capra an excellent platform on which to direct feel-good movies that amount to character studies of the American Everyman. Like Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds is supposed to represent the noble average American, and represents the resilience of such Men through the Great Depression. The movie even won Capra Best Director in the 1936 Academy Awards, which I think can only be a testament to the era's sentimentality to such a message, because, frankly, the movie itself wasn't that good.

I really wanted to like Mr. Deeds and his movie, but the movie just didn’t age well. Mr. Deeds comes off more as a spoiled brute who punches people and silently sulks, rather than an unspoiled individualist who stands up and speaks out against corruption. What’s more, he also rotates between naïve country bumpkin and hardnosed businessman just about every five minutes. While Gary Cooper can carry both Mr. Deeds personas with aplomb, the rapid switches are almost too much to take, creating an almost dizzying affect for a modern audience. Mr. Deeds goes from sympathetic listener one moment to domineering authoritarian kicking the speaker out the door the next moment. We go from a goofy-looking Gary Cooper easily duped by Jean Arthur’s female reporter to scowling Cooper sucker punching a bunch of elite poets. What’s going on here? This is the ideal American? I certainly hope not.

In sum, this movie was a mixure of saccharin and soap-boxing combined with ridiculous characters. Now, that would generally describe any Frank Capra movie, but in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, each element was so extreme that even I couldn't stand it.

PoMo Commercial

Generally I'm sooo post postmodernism. But every once in a while, I'm thankful for it, like when I found this beer commercial that makes fun of the major premise of beer commercials:

Molson Ad

Disturbing Ad

Continuing with my posts about commercials (wow, YouTube is awesome):

Some commercials are random to the point of being disturbing. Ikea has a whole lot of these ads, like the following one. I wonder, though, if this worked very well for them; all the current Ikea ads I see on TV are significantly, uh, happier.

Ikea Commercial

Is there plagarism in art?

In academic writing, you have to make sure you credit your sources, even when you're doing it with permission. So I'm always confused when I see a remake that doesn't flag the fact that it's not actually an original.

Case in point? No Reservations, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, is coming out this summer, but nowhere on their website or trailer is the fact that it is simply a remake of the excellent German film Bella Martha. From the trailer, the new movie looks like it's going to be practically a scene-by-scene remake, too: just different actors and a different language.

I hope that at least they don't screw it up -- the original was delicate, precise, and nuanced (like Martha, in a way). I can see the Americanization pushing too hard and being too corny, too sugary, too-- well, overseasoned. Sorry, I couldn't resist using food metaphors.

Kids and Ads

Continuing a series in advertising, here are my two favorite ads involving kids, although they're basically opposite in effect.

Stratos (Norwegian commercial)


Zazoo (Belgian commerical)

Another Ad

OK, this one isn't a strange commercial, but I like it because I'm a movie geek. I count 9 movie references (and I've seen them all). Not bad for a 60 second ad. See comment for the list of the movies.

JC Penney Ad

Random Ads

Some ads are hilarious just because they're totally strange. As a tribute to the late-night brainstorming of ad executives, here are some of my new favorites:

Starburst Commercial


Shout Commercial


Folger Commercial

Le dîner de cons

About half-way through watching Le Dîner de Cons (translated to The Dinner Game) last week, I realized it really should be a play. And, after a little research, I found it was originally written for the stage in 1993. I'm glad I found this out, and I wish I had seen it on the stage rather than as a film. The story is definitely better suited to the stage - not much happens, and it's mostly an exercise in self-reflection. It's a nice little movie, but it is just that: little. It never grows out of its self-imposed four walls.

The international title of the movie doesn’t do the title justice. A literal translation reveals much more: The Idiot Dinner. The entire plot revolves around a French intellectual and the “idiot” he has picked up to take with him as a sort of trophy to a weekly dinner where the man who brings the biggest idiot wins a prize. This competition is done with exactly the malice and superiority the previous sentence suggests (as opposed, for example, to the scatterbrained but charming Carole Lombard bringing a homeless man to a dinner as a scavenger hunt item in My Man Godfrey). But, instead of going to the dinner, the intellectual pulls his back and is confined to his apartment when his guest comes to be taken to dinner. As the movie progresses, the “idiot” Francois becomes the intellectual Pierre’s only line of defense against a litany of troubles in his apartment: his wife leaving him, an overeager girlfriend wanting to come over as soon as she hears the news, a tax auditor coming to Pierre’s too-well-furnished apartment. Through it all, Francois tries to help and constantly makes things worse. It’s funny in a painful way to see it all unfold – I found it to be much the same humor as watching I Love Lucy episodes, but without the goodheartedness or assurance that in the end Ricky’s going to come home and make it all better.

Jacques Villeret, as the prize idiot Francois, possesses a perfect combination of pathos and grating characteristics. Francois is a civil servant (working for the French IRS, basically), and in is free time makes models or architectural and engineering feats out of matchsticks. His hobby consumes him, which is why the intellectual Pierre, played by Thierry Lhermitte, decides to take him to the dinner. But always lurking underneath Villeret’s Francois is a man you know actually cares about people and desperately wants to fit in, even though he is clearly incapable of it. As I watched the film, I found myself torn between hating Pierre for taking advantage of such a helpless and hapless guy and hating Francois for being so darn dense.

In true French film style, the end doesn’t leave the audience comfortable and satisfied. Is it OK to think people are stupid? What makes someone an idiot – is it being nice, or self-important? Is being a jerk or an idiot part of a coping mechanism? The movie never takes a definitive stance, preferring instead to leave no moral and no way of knowing if any of the characters have learned anything from the events of the evening. Much more like real life, perhaps, but in a story involving an Idiot Dinner, I’m hoping we’re not striving for life-like realism.

2 out of 4 stars

Maxed Out

This evening I went to free screening of the new documentary Maxed Out. (I love being a student. The director James Scurlock came to answer questions, as did Professor Warren, who was interviewed in the film.) It’s a movie about a fascinating and timely topic: consumer debt in America. The median American household currently spends 107% of their yearly income. Which pretty much everyone would agree isn’t sustainable. So what is it about our culture, our society – our credit card and mortgage market? – that gets us in this predicament? And what can we do about it? This film only partially addresses each idea, but it’s a big problem with a lot of players, so one can’t really expect more from a single 87-minute documentary.

Maxed Out is a documentary of the Fast Food Nation and Fahrenheit 9/11 family: relatively entertaining, a bit over-simplistic (I wish there had been a bit more data, and dates), and really best at snide comments. I kind of wish that a documentary maker would remember that he has the audience for about an hour and half – he doesn’t have to make his jokes by media footage intercut with silent text poking fun at politicians’ soundbites. It just seems like a cheap shot to make fun of politicians, especially when you don’t have to and the topic is big enough not to be partisan anyway. Also, when intercut text is the documentary maker’s version of a comedian’s one-liner, its passivity and lack of voice makes it feel like it has less integrity to me.

But this is a quarrel with the style of documentary that has become popular, and there’s probably nothing I can do about that. Within the framework of this style, the documentary is satisfactorily put together. There’s a bunch of footage, some of it really funny, some of it heartbreaking, some of it maddening. There are some great juxtapositions of a 1960 instructional video about credit and current credit card advertisements, and some pretty great stock footage that is used to make points by putting the analogies interviewees make on the screen, including one a zealous and enthusiastic collector makes comparing himself to a pirate whose job is to “push someone out on the plank as far as they can go, so then they will do anything to come back.” He said it to explain why he likes his job, but the image was just so appalling that when an old silent film scene of a pirate sword fight flashed on the screen, it was both sad and hilarious.

Perhaps it’s not saying much to say that the film was actually compelling even with its stylistic faults. I mean, how can it not be compelling? This documentary really makes you realize that debt in this country isn’t happening just at the margins of our society. Nor is debt exclusively the result of “spend money to make money” “Flip that House” TLC-show spending. It’s happening to middle class families and their kids in college. It’s happening to servicemen who were deployed for much longer than their savings and mortgages could stand. It’s happening to the poor, too, and the disenfranchised, and the mentally disabled, and the elderly, and the sick. If you aren’t aware of the scope of the issue, this movie is really worth it. But even if you do know, from academic reading or an anecdote, it’s heartbreaking to hear some of these stories from real people. A few of the stories are truly tragedies, and to see the ripple effect of bankruptcy and bad credit, sometimes to the point of death, is just... let’s just say that I was actually crying at one point.

At times, Maxed Out strays from its didactic message (“Consumer Financial Products Companies Are Exploiting America, and We’re Letting Them”), which makes the film a bit scattered. Originally, it was supposed to be a movie about consumer culture in America, and you can tell he just didn’t have the heart to lose his favorite footage. There’s a prologue and epilogue section that are far too long and don’t really mesh with the rest of the film’s story about debt, except debt’s tenuous connection to our ideas about the rich and famous (Robin Leach is even interviewed). Mr. Scurlock also included a few random scenes that seem to try to paint other entities with the same brush as the banks who charge astronomical interest rates and fees, such as a single throwaway scene of a preacher talking about tithing. I think he was trying to say that megachurches talking about tithing are like bank collectors who demand payments from people who can’t afford them. But to give the director the benefit of the doubt, there’s no explanation why that scene is in there, no connection to the rest of the film. It’s just there, like a remnant of the original “consumer culture” film idea that was just never cut. But if Mr. Scurlock is trying to imply with that scene what I think he’s implying, he’s just wrong. Which is sad, because so much of the rest of his film is solid and compelling, and now I have to go to sleep at night wondering, “Why, oh why, do we allow and even support what amounts to nothing less than predatory (and sometimes deceitful) usury?” Maxed Out can't answer that question, but it’ll certainly make you want to ask the question until someone does reply.

The Gun Seller

I don’t usually review books, but since I gave up television for Lent this year, I haven’t watched any DVDs recently. However, earlier this week I really needed a break from law school work, and so I read a novel. What a quaint idea, I know.

The book, The Gun Seller, was itself pretty quaint. The first novel by actor Hugh Laurie, it was pretty clearly influenced by the writing of P.G. Wodehouse (which is actually why I picked up the book in the first place). The book is filled with delightfully pointless sidenotes by the narrator, in the style of Bertie Wooster. For example:

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.

There are a couple jokes that don’t quite translate to the American ear, the most prominent one being a misunderstanding about a character’s name -- Murdah, not Murder, which, instead of making me have to rethink the spelling of the character’s name, made me have to rethink the pronunciation of Murder. But for the most part Mr Laurie successfully creates a deft and amusing narrating voice, which I loved.

However, the book didn’t rest on just being quaint. Instead our verbally deft narrator is set in the middle of a complicated spy novel. Characters come and go, and their dialogue often doesn’t keep clear their relationships to each other. The book itself is split into two parts, with each part feeling like a completely separate story because the main ensemble cast completely changes, other than the narrator. And if you were confused the first time you watched Mission Impossible, the plot is going to run away from you more than a couple times. My attempt to summarize will hopelessly leave out important plot points, but here goes: Thomas Lang, the narrator, is asked to kill a rich American. He refuses and decides to warn the American, but in doing so accidentally gets involved in a multinational plot to sell weapons to rogue nations, specifically by creating terrorism in order to swat it down. (Think Gulf War newsreels as marketing campaigns.) Lang gets recruited to help destroy the conspiracy, then recruited to be part of it by infiltrating and setting up the terrorist group. And along the way, he falls in love a couple times. Even with first-person narration, it’s difficult to keep track of who is deceiving whom and for what purposes.

The book works best if you’re the sort of person who loves both the TV show Jeeves and Wooster and 24. If not, there will be parts of the novel that feel slow or pointless or confusing. But if you somehow feel you’ve always wanted to read an American spy thriller and a British class comedy at the same time, this may be the only book that can fulfill your need.

Sorry, Wrong Number

After the Great Depression and a second World War, our relatively young and optimistic country was realizing (and attempting to comprehend) humanity’s great potential for evil and immorality, bigotry and fear. And so, American culture in the 40s and 50s finally created a major art form to reflect the fear, ambivalence and cruelty we seemed to find in the world: film noir.

Now maybe that’s an over simplification of film noir’s roots and purpose, but whatever its origins, film noir is understood to be melodramatic, suspenseful and ultimately unhappy renditions of “gritty” or “hard-boiled” characters. Morals in film noir are often ambiguous, and the “good guys” rarely own white cowboy hats. In attempting to explore the genre, I recently watched “Sorry, Wrong Number,” the 1948 movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster.

Based on a 1943 radio play, “Sorry, Wrong Number” stars Barbara Stanwyck as a spoiled but invalid heiress named Leona who overhears a telephone conversation about a murder planned to take place at 11:15 that night. Through the course of several telephone conversations and flashbacks (which sometimes occur within each other), Leona becomes convinced that she is the intended murder victim.

Now, if this were, say, a Hitchcock film rather than film noir, there might be a lot that could be done with this premise. Instead, it’s a pretty straightforward story about a spoiled, domineering woman and the desperate husband who hates her. There are no plot twists or surprises – even with flashbacks within flashbacks, the story unfolds almost uneventfully. It’s a decent example of film noir; both Stanwyck and Lancaster, as Leona’s husband, convincingly play selfish and desperate people. But they have very little to play with: there are really no interesting character foils or plot twists, as in Double Indemnity, a film noir classic that far better utilizes Ms. Stanwyck’s talent and toughness. Here, the characters don’t even get to do much – much of the “action” takes place in phone booths or Leona’s bedroom – much less actually tangle with moral ambiguity, thwarted plans, or clashes between strong characters.

The most fun thing about the movie is actually what makes it a mediocre movie, even for film noir: the story’s radio play roots. The original play was about a third of the length of this movie (even though the film clocks in at only 89 minutes), which means a lot of the story seems to simply be spinning its wheels until the dramatic finish. The last ten minutes definitely transform the movie into a nail-biter, and make you almost forget how slow the rest of the movie was. But not quite.

But it is fun to watch the movie realizing that almost the entire story could be heard instead of watched. Heavy narration and extensive use of radio play-type sound effects make the whole movie seem more like an opportunity to watch a radio play, which is actually pretty exciting since the radio play is an art form rarely encountered by modern American audiences (although if you are fascinated by this movie/radio play, I highly suggest you find some radio plays online to listen to. Many are public domain because of poor copyrighting, and BBC radio still airs new plays in its regular programming). But if you’re looking for a high quality example of film noir, Barbara Stanwyck, or Burt Lancaster, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

2 Stars.

The Death of Movie Genres, #1

I know, I know, this was aired for Valentine's Day. But it's a really fascinating piece about how our culture's "enlightened" relation to romantic love has created yet another casualty: The Romantic Comedy.

Maybe this is why I love old movies: they are untainted by our modern views of sex and love, and can create stories without their tongues in cheek, which leaves them free to do other things (And by "other things," of course I mean "be witty."). Ah for the days of main characters being able to be smart, funny, *and* earnest -- Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and even Doris Day come to mind for the ladies. Men could also keep their wits and still be funny: think Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Jack Lemmon. These days, I think the best you can do is two out of three. If you're smart and funny, you can't take anything seriously, but if you're funny and earnest, you can't be very smart.

Being a geek has its benefits: I'm easily amused