Doctor Who & Science Fiction

Recently I read a blog post about science fiction and how it's not very popular among women. one of Professor Somin's assertions caught my eye:

Casual empiricism suggests that most people with a strong interest in science fiction or fantasy literature developed that interest very as children or teenagers. I think it's very difficult to persuade an adult to take an interest in these genres if they never had previously.

Empirics aside, it must be noted that adults are not immutable in their interests. I have always avoided science fiction by and large. What little science fiction and fantasy I read comes dangerously close to being what I will call "literary fiction" -- fiction about books, history, etc. (but not historical fiction). Jasper Fforde novels are the prime example here. A couple Terry Pratchett novels are as deep I wade into science fiction. I've also always disdained of science fiction television. I pretty much can't stand any of the Star Treks, although I do like the original in small doses for its kitsch value.
So it surprises me greatly to tell you that my new TV obsession is the revived series of Doctor Who. I've thought about it quite a bit in the past couple weeks, as I've been devouring the first three seasons and part of the fourth, and I think I know why:

In the end, science fiction isn't really a description of the type of storytelling you're going to get. It's like "westerns" -- all you know is the location of the plot, not anything about it. The problem in the genre occurs when an author thinks that said location matters more than the rest of the story. When westerns are just cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups, when science fiction devolves into monotone repetition of fanciful pseudo-science, then the genre is in real trouble. But if you dig beneath the surface, the new Doctor Who is really just an action comedy that happens to have made-up places and people. Star Trek is just a soap opera with the same (I know I'm going to get killed for saying that, but there it is -- all the episodes I've seen are so *serious*!). I like Doctor Who because though it caters to the obsessive sci-fi geeks who live for finding patterns hidden in the episodes, many of the story lines are basically just ghost stories littered with strange jokes. The quirky humor is everywhere: take even the fact that the doctor's space ship isn't some cool, sleek, "boys' toy" but rather a blue police box because the spaceship's cloaking device got stuck. There's plenty of sci-fi standbys like teleporting, but in the end the science doesn't matter as much as the plots and stories: the only two repeating "gadgets" are a blank piece of "psychic" paper and a "sonic" screwdriver.
And the use of historical plots as well as outer space plots makes the thing more like that "literary" fiction I like -- I geeked out a little bit when they visited Shakespeare and the Doctor quoted Dylan Thomas to the Bard but then told him he couldn't use it because it was "someone else's." My other favorite episode from that season (3) takes place in 1913.

So, maybe if we're all concerned about making science fiction attractive to girls as well as boys, maybe writers should take a hint from Doctor Who, which reaches about a broad an audience of British children as it can possible get. Or maybe that's just a commentary about British television and the forced ubiquity of the BBC.

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.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

I’ll admit it: I read movie critics’ reviews to decide whether to watch movies, especially A. O. Scott of the New York Times. So when he, along with seemingly every critic with a word processor, fell in love with Miranda July’s first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, I was ready to like it. In fact, I was eager to like it – so much so that I sat through the entire movie struggling to figure out what, exactly, it was that I was supposed to like.

Miranda July, who wrote, directed, and starred in the film, is first and foremost a performance artist, and to a large degree her debut film valiantly and stubbornly refuses to comply with the conventions of feature films, instead relying on her own background to create the world of film. This creates some very magical moments, all underscored by Mike Andrews’ beautifully simple and whimsical soundtrack. Certain scenes are more like poems than scenes in a movie: a walk down a street becomes a metaphor for a couple’s relationship, a ten year old girl uses her bedroom ceiling as the blank page to blueprint her future kitchen, and a man tries to hide a framed print of a bird – a relic of his unhappy past – by wedging it into a tree.

Unfortunately, these moments do not come together with the charm that they individually suggest. While I am all for films creating worlds and storytelling paces that are not “realistic,” films (and, indeed, all art) requires some real connection between the audience and the characters or plot. The loose story noncommittally wanders between small plots involving an amateur performance artist, a shoe salesman, and their family and friends, but we never really get to see any story long enough to really understand it. Worse still, we cannot care about characters so utterly removed from humanity that they have none of the same worries and fears as normal human beings. In the world of Me and You and Everyone We Know, people do not worry about conversations with strangers or being too forward when first meeting someone. They do not worry about a child who obsessively buys kitchen and home supplies for her hope chest. They do not worry about the fact that sexually explicit messages taped to a window facing a bus stop might be read by more than the two teenage girls for whom the messages are intended. Somehow, in this world, everyone is unconcerned for the safety and health of a man who pours lighter fluid on his hand and ignites it in front of his sons. Nor does anyone seems to notice or be disturbed by a seven year old boy who wanders into an online chat room and ends up having multiple conversations I will not describe here. Instead, all of these incidents are supposed to be somehow endearing and indicative of inherent worth.

Instead of exploring her characters, Ms. July relies on the crutch that too many modern artists lean on: being different without deciding why it matters to be different. Instead, her work seems to proclaim that just being different makes it Important. Most critics seem to have fallen victim to this ploy, falling in love with this movie for no other reason than the fact that Ms. July uses a non-linear plot and doesn’t focus on character or plot or, indeed, much of anything. After all the critical attention this tactic acquired, a conscientious viewer might, like me, try to like the film because it claims to be Artistically Important.

And yet, I could never focus on the artistic techniques and merits of the film because I was too distracted by the fact that I didn’t care at all about the movie or the people it portrayed. Who cares if a film is artistically different if it doesn’t use those qualities to convey something more powerful: a message, a story, or maybe even a character’s revelation or two? The same critics who pan a blockbuster action film for not developing plot or character even if that film created new innovations in pyrotechnics or computer animation should have turned in a similar complaint for this film: all technique, but for no reason.

Me and You and Everyone We Know feels more like something you should be watching as an installation at your local museum, sitting on a large hard bench and pondering not only the film but the paint splotch helpfully named “Untitled No. 4” next to it. It is a noble idea to remind us not to pigeonhole the medium of film any more than we do the medium of paint or print. However, without any other purpose that breaking filmic conventions, this film ends up being more something the critics tell you you’re supposed to appreciate than something you can actually enjoy.

1 out of 4 stars (do I have to give it any stars?)

Movie Review: Stolen

My relationship with rain fluctuates quite a bit. Sometimes it's glorious to walk through; sometimes it's just annoying to get wet. Sometimes I feel cooped up being inside; sometimes I love looking out the window at the raindrops, or curling up with a book or movie. Currently, though, I'm pretty happy with rain. It's summer rain, first of all, so it's warm and therefore less of a pain to walk through. And second of all, it's allowed me to duck in to a couple movie theaters recently and see some good flicks on the big screen. Yesterday's movie at E Street Cinema was one you may not have heard of, but if you get a chance, you might want to check it out.

Stolen is a documentary about the 1990 art theft that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, wherein two unknown thieves posed as Boston police officers entered the museum, tied up the guards, and proceeded to steal thirteen works of art, among them three Rembrandts, five Degas, and a Vermeer. But Stolen is also a documentary about Isabella Stewart Gardner herself, her art collection, and its acquisition. And though the film is only 82 minutes, it also has its share of con artists, conspiracy theorists, art detectives, and art-obsessed writers. And a bit of a ghost story. And some international politics. In order to keep all these elements organized, the viewer is subjected to many interjected chapter titles, which are annoying and ruin almost all sense of pacing.

To the film's credit, however, all these disparate elements somehow come together to create a single story, even though it's hard to say what that story is. One could make the argument that it is just about the theft, and all the background about museum and the thirteen stolen pieces, especially Vermeer's The Concert, just illuminate just what what stolen and why it is important. Presumably, this is what the film's creator, Rebecca Dreyfus, wants this film to be about: the trailer, the website, and even the film's title lend themselves to this reading of the myriad of topics she raises in her film.

But almost as easily, the exact same film could have been named Isabella's Museum. There is a lot of focus on the aura of this little museum in Boston, to which the theft has certainly contributed: because of the structure of Ms. Gardner's will in 1924, the museum's collection may not be altered, so the walls simply remain empty where the stolen pieces used to hang. The woman behind the museum and how she acquired the pieces is at least as interesting as the theft that occured there, and we learn about both in parallel.

My opinion, though, is that Stolen is really about how art can capture the soul, the imagination, and perhaps even the common sense and sanity of those who dedicate their lives to it. In just 82 minutes, it is hard to understand how so many people have had their part of their lives consumed by the art involved in the theft. And yet every single person onscreen is overcome, either by the artwork itself or the mystery that surrounds it: a Boston reporter claims to have "lost" a year to the search for the masterpieces, a Vermeer biographer and a couple novelists nearly break down just talking about the theft of The Concert, and in a letter Isabella Stewart Gardner compares her art collecting to taking morphine or being alcoholic. A renowned art detective is dedicated to recovering these pieces even though he has skin cancer and is past retirement age, and becomes perhaps too confident that he can recover at least some of the artwork. Another detective stops talking on the record for safety reasons. And perhaps most intriguing are the museum attendant and the former art thief who find themselves involved in this story, each obsessed in his own way.

Even the film itself seems a result of this preoccupation with the museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and that single Vermeer that was stolen along with 12 other pieces of priceless art. Ms. Dreyfus saw the The Concert as a little girl, and her film now studies -- pores over, really -- the image of that painting, hinting at Ms. Dreyfus's own obsession. And for those in the audience who do not share a passion for 17th century art or 19th century Bostonian museum creators or 20th century art theft, it is the obsession itself -- not the object of obsession -- that captivates one's attention.

2.5 out of 4 stars