Saturday, November 26, 2011
Citizen Insane
By J.D.
The Mosquito Coast (1986) is one of Harrison Ford’s most fascinating performances and it came at a time when he was able to use his box office clout from the lucrative Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises to push more challenging films through the Hollywood system. This certainly applies to this film, released 25 years ago today, which focuses on a brilliant inventor who decides that Western society has become too corrupt and materialistic and moves his family to the jungles of Central America where he attempts to manipulate a small village into his idea of a civilized society. Not exactly the most accessible project, but Ford and director Peter Weir, hot off their successful collaboration on Witness (1985), teamed up again on The Mosquito Coast, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Paul Theroux.
The film examines a man obsessed with imposing his will on others to the degree that he exhibits self-destructive tendencies. What better person to realize this than Paul Schrader who was brought on to write the screenplay. He knows a thing or two about these types of protagonists as evident with Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), both of which he wrote. The Mosquito Coast also allowed Weir to continue his fascination with strangers in a strange land, which he had explored previously in The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) and Witness. So, the trifecta of Ford, Schrader and Weir was an inspired one, but the end result was too extreme for mainstream audiences and the film was a box office flop and received mixed reviews.
Charlie Fox (River Phoenix) narrates the film after the events depicted in the film. He is a young, teenage boy who clearly idolized his father: “I grew up with the belief that the world belonged to him and that everything he said was true.” Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) is a brash and brilliant inventor. Right from the first shot, he expresses his disappointment with what America has become as he tells Charlie, “Look around you. How did America get this way?…This place is a toilet.” Weir cuts to a shot of Allie and his son driving down a street dominated by fast food restaurants, their large signs almost completely obscuring several trees and a grassy hill as the visuals only serve to prove Allie’s point and will be eerily relevant towards the end of the film.
Allie continues his rant as if he were channeling Travis Bickle’s disgust for society from Taxi Driver: “The whole damn country is turning into a dope-taking, door-locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers, criminal millionaires and moral snakes.” Amazingly, these words come out of a film released during the height of the supposedly “Greed is good,” Ronald Reagan-era 1980s in America when the country’s economy was booming. However, these sentiments also apply to our current situation with the war in Iraq, the Enron scandal, 9/11, and the collapse of the global economy. Allie is disgusted by what America has become and is “sick of dealing with people who want things I’ve already rejected.” Ford delivers this angry monologue with just the right amount of self-righteous indignation.
The first inkling that Allie is losing touch with reality comes when he agrees to make a cooling system for a nearby farmer. Not only is he late with the device, but it isn’t what the man wanted. Ford is brilliant as he shows how Allie takes a rejection and deflects it, ignoring his mistake as a shortcoming of the farmer. This incident only confirms his beliefs. The farmer’s parting shot is probably the best observation about Allie: “A know-it-all who’s sometimes right.” After observing some poor migrant workers, Allie begins to think about how valuable ice and his cooling system would be in the jungle where it's always oppressively hot. He laments that these workers left the jungle to work basically as slaves for the farmer and muses about the courage it would take to leave civilization and live in the jungle.
So, Allie uproots his family — wife (Helen Mirren), two sons and two daughters — and heads for the jungles of Belize. En route, he and his family cross paths with the Rev. Gurney Spellgood (Andre Gregory) and his family. Spellgood is a man who will play a prominent role in their lives. Allie has little time for Spellgood and religion, referring to The Bible as “God’s owner’s handbook.” He is even able to quote Scripture back to Spellgood. Like Allie, Spellgood is zealous in his beliefs, they just happen to be based in religion, not science.
As soon as Allie and his family arrive, Weir immerses us in this strange new world with an audio-visual assault on our senses with local music and the hustle and bustle of the port city. Allie buys a small town and the next day, he and his family take a boat there. Weir shows a long shot of their journey along a curvy river that goes deep into the jungle and one can’t help but think of Willard’s river journey in Apocalypse Now (1979), only Allie is Colonel Kurtz ready to go native and impose his will on the locals. The river journey features some beautiful cinematography courtesy of Weir’s regular cinematographer John Seale. The vibrant greens of the lush jungle jump out at you and are in sharp contrast to the brown dirt that populates the jungle floor. As he did with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Year of Living Dangerously, Weir has a real knack for plunging us in the film’s setting, so much so that it almost becomes like another character. The Mosquito Coast is no different as we see how harsh the environment is, from the intense sun to the monsoon-like rain. This inhospitability is juxtaposed with the beauty of the trees and the serene river that winds through the jungle.
Allie puts his family and the natives to work, clearing the land and gathering resources so they can build his utopia. At times, he seems to do so through sheer force of will. Everything seems to be going smoothly until Spellgood shows up and tries to win back the hearts and minds of the townsfolk only to have Allie spurn him yet again, much to the pastor’s chagrin. The confrontation serves as a prelude to future conflict between these two headstrong men.
Harrison Ford delivers one of his best performances as he shows us the method to Allie’s madness. He is a charismatic despot of sorts. In a way, many of his diatribes about the wasteful nature of America are right on point. It’s his solution to its ills that don’t always make sense. Ford commits fully to the role without a shred of vanity. He’s not afraid to play an unlikable character and approaches Allie Fox as someone who thinks that they aren’t crazy even though it is pretty obvious that he has a very skewed perspective on things. Ford nails the zeal of Allie’s beliefs but still is able to make him somewhat relatable thanks to his natural charisma. It’s a role that calls for the kind of physicality that Ford excels at as we see Allie building the town with his own hands. He is so good at the physical aspects of acting — hence all the action roles he’s played in his career — and Allie is no different. More importantly, Ford shows how Allie’s megalomaniacal tendencies gradually consume him. It is small things, at first, such as the way he belittles one of his sons for complaining about having to rough it in the jungle.
Weir does a good job ratcheting up the tension during a sequence where three armed mercenaries arrive and Allie has to come up with a way to get them to leave. It is where Allie’s madness actually works to his advantage — but at a horrible price — as he'll allow the destruction of everything he worked so hard to build in order to get rid of the mercenaries. Eventually, Allie’s epic vision becomes incredibly myopic as he alienates his own family. The actors that play the family members all excel, from Helen Mirren as the nurturing mother to River Phoenix as the loyal son. Initially, they all believe unconditionally in what Allie is doing, but they gradually come to question his methods. Allie pushes these decent people to their breaking points.
Producer Jerome Hellman read Paul Theroux’s novel in 1982 and bought the film rights with his own money shortly after it was published. He felt that a great film was possible if the right people were involved, but he also had his reservations and in the film's production notes, admitted that he “didn’t fully appreciate how out of the ordinary the Establishment would consider this.” He soon hired screenwriter Paul Schrader to adapt the book and a first draft was developed in 1983. That same year, Hellman approached Peter Weir to direct based on films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Year of Living Dangerously. Hellman said, “the thematic harmony between Peter’s previous work and The Mosquito Coast was striking, but I was also impressed with the humanism in his work.”
After reading the first draft of the script, Weir met with Hellman and Schrader in Sydney, Australia, where they spent a week discussing every aspect. Once he felt that it could be made into a film, Weir agreed to direct. Hellman then brought him to the United States and showed him the book’s New England locations. The producer also arranged a meeting between Weir and Theroux, but the director was apprehensive because he had a bad experience with a novelist on one of his earlier films. Fortunately, the two men got along and Theroux encouraged Weir to make the film his own. Hellman and Weir then spent two years trying to get a studio interested in making The Mosquito Coast but with little success. According to the Daily News, Hellman remembered that they were turned down all over Hollywood, “most places three or four times.”
In early 1984, they realized that due to the seasonal demands of the plot, they would have to delay principal photography for another year. However, Weir was chomping at the bit to direct a film and he received an offer to direct Witness. During the making of that film, he developed a close working relationship with Ford. Jack Nicholson also became interested in taking on the role of Allie Fox but when the deal fell through, Hellman and Weir agreed that Ford would be perfect to play the character. Ford was drawn to the role because it was so different from anything he had done. As he stated in the film's production notes: “I was aware that there was opportunity here for more complicated characterization and because the character is so verbal and effusive, it goes against the kind of characters for which I’m best known.” Ford also wanted “the edgy feeling of the book still to be preserved. We didn’t want to abandon the balls of it because it’s not necessary for him (Allie) to be entirely likable as long as the audience can understand what he’s about.”
After Witness became a big hit, almost every studio wanted to make The Mosquito Coast but Hellman, burned out from shopping the film around and getting rejected repeatedly, wanted to find independent financing. He met with producer Saul Zaentz to ask for advice and to read the script. He did and was so taken with it that he offered to have his company finance, present and supervise the film's distribution.
Seeing as how most of the film is set in the jungle, it was crucial that Hellman and Weir find the right location. They considered Costa Rica, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico and Hawaii before picking Belize, which had everything they needed —mountains, ocean, jungle and rivers — all within an hour radius of Belize City. It also was an English language country whose political situation was stable. While filming in the jungle, the cast and crew endured cuts and bruises, mosquito bites and heavy sunburn with large snakes common on the set. Ford found the shoot long and humid. It was more exhausting for him mentally than physically because of “the complexity of the role and the endless process of sorting out and reappraising where we were at,” he told the Daily News. Weir drew inspiration for the visual look of The Mosquito Coast from a bulletin board he had on location that was adorned with postcards, pages from magazines, a pressed flower, a match box, and so on. “It’s a question of texture, a kind of mosaic of inspirations,” he said in an interview with American Film magazine. Weir felt that it was important to film the construction of the town Allie owns in continuity, so three versions were created. Each was a little more advanced than the one before. As the crew moved from one set to another, the construction crew would do additional work on the previous set. This allowed Weir to film in days what would’ve taken many months to do.
In some respects, one could see The Mosquito Coast as a commentary on the extreme nature of the cult of personality as both Allie and Spellgood are prime examples of people who believe that their vision of society is the right one. At first, Allie’s vision is quite seductive and seems to work but as time goes on and outside forces threaten it, the cracks begin to show. Weir takes an unflinching look at the extremes of science and religion and this apparently turned off audiences and critics alike. It is time for this film to be rediscovered and recognized as one of his more thought-provoking efforts made within the system by a movie star with enough clout to make it happen.
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Labels: 80s, Books, Fiction, Harrison Ford, Mirren, Movie Tributes, Nicholson, River Phoenix, Schrader, Star Wars
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Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Fighting aliens in Old West, Bond brings out best in Indiana Jones
By J.D.
Jon Favreau has certainly come a long way since his independent film roots with Swingers (1996), the film he wrote and starred in. Over the years, he’s increasingly spent more time behind the camera than in front of it, directing Made (2001). The modest success of that film transitioned him to studio films with larger budgets such as Elf (2003) and Zathura (2005). Then came Iron Man (2008), his most ambitious effort to that point, and he rolled the dice on casting Robert Downey Jr. as his leading man. The gamble paid off and the film was a massive success, paving the way for the inevitable sequel. Rushed into production, the end result was a commercial success but a critical failure, which upped the stakes for his next film, Cowboys & Aliens (2011), an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.
The premise is an intriguing hybrid of the science fiction and Western genres with an alien invasion set in 1873 New Mexico. To hedge his bets, Favreau corralled Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford to headline his film, which caused epic seismic ripples through the fanboy community at the prospects of seeing the actors who played James Bond and Indiana Jones in the same film together. As a result, expectations were understandably high. Could Favreau and company deliver the goods or would this be another Wild Wild West (1999)?
A man wakes up in the middle of nowhere wounded and with a strange futuristic device strapped to his wrist. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Three men on horseback show up assuming he’s an escape convict and try to take him in. He quickly and brutally dispatches them, taking their gear and heading towards the nearest town — the former mining colony of Absolution. He eventually learns that his name is Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), a notorious outlaw wanted by the law for a variety of offences. One of which was robbing local cattle baron Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) of his gold. When he learns that Lonergan is in Absolution, Dolarhyde and him men intend to lynch the outlaw in retribution.
However, a strange light appears in the sky just as Dolarhyde arrives into town. The device on Lonergan’s wrist activates and the light turns out to be several alien spacecraft that proceed to blast the town to smithereens and kidnap several of its townsfolk. Lonergan discovers that his wrist device is a weapon, which he uses to take down one of the alien craft. The film sets up Dolarhyde as a mean son of a bitch while Lonergan is a no-nonsense criminal. They represent two unstoppable forces of nature and one of the pleasures of this film is when they have to put aside their differences, repel the alien invaders and rescue the kidnapped townsfolk.
For years, Harrison Ford has made bad choices in the films he’s decided to be in and phoned in one-note performances, playing the same gruff character, but with Cowboys & Aliens acting against someone like Daniel Craig has inspired him to bring his A-game. Ford actually looks interested and engaged in the material and the role. It’s great to see him go up against Craig and their scenes together crackle with intensity and tension. Best of all, Ford has two scenes that expose his character’s gruff exterior and reveal a more vulnerable side. They are poignant and heartfelt because we’ve become invested in these characters by this point. This is the best Ford has been in years and reminds one when he used to play characters we cared about.
Craig adds another impressive man of action to his roster. He excels at playing edgy tough guys and is well cast as the enigmatic outlaw. Favreau does a good job of surrounding Craig and Ford with a solid ensemble cast of character actors. You’ve got Clancy Brown as the upstanding town preacher Meachum, Sam Rockwell as Doc, the mild-mannered saloon owner, Keith Carradine as Sheriff John Taggart, the always watchable Adam Beach as Nat Colorado, Dolarhyde’s right-hand man, and Olivia Wilde as a mysterious woman named Ella whose exotic beauty gives her an almost otherworldly aura. Hell, Favreau even throws Walt Goggins in for good measure as a member of Lonergan’s gang.
Favreau has all the traditional Western iconography down cold and the fun of Cowboys & Aliens is seeing these motifs clash with the science fiction elements. So, we see cowboys on horseback being chased by fast-moving alien spacecraft. This film doesn’t stray from the conventions of either genre or try to reinvent them but instead merges and fulfills them in a crowd-pleasing way. Cowboys & Aliens has impressive special effects, nasty-looking aliens, several exciting action sequences, and two cool heroes to root for. This may not be the classic that people were hoping for but it is a very entertaining film in its own right and sometimes that’s enough.
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Labels: 10s, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, K. Carradine, Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell
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Sunday, June 12, 2011
It's Not the Age, It's the Mileage
By J.D.
There’s no disputing that Raiders of the Lost Ark, which opened 30 years ago today, is one of the greatest action/adventure films ever made, featuring some of the most memorable action sequences ever put on celluloid. Who can forget part-time archaeologist, part-time adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) outrunning a giant boulder at the beginning of the film? Or the exciting gun battle in a Nepalese bar? Or Indy being dragged behind a truck full of Nazis? However, the older I get, the more I appreciate the quieter moments in Raiders — the downtime between action set pieces. These scenes convey exposition and develop the characters. The credit for them working so well should be given to the film’s screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who also wrote the screenplays for such noteworthy films as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983) and many others. He’s written some of the best scripts ever committed to film and knows how to write witty dialogue and create engaging characters.
Kasdan’s ability to engage us in the obligatory exposition scene is evident early when Indy and his friend Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) meet with two military intelligence officers about the location of an old colleague of Indy’s — Abner Ravenwood — who might have an artifact — the headpiece of the Staff of Ra — that will reveal the location of the Ark of the Covenant, which the Nazis are eager to get their hands on. Indy and Marcus give the two men a quick history lesson on the Ark and its power. Marcus concludes with the ominous line about how the city of Tanis, that reportedly housed the Ark, “was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm which lasted a whole year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.” The way Denholm Elliott delivers this last bit is a tad spooky and is important because it lets us know of the Ark’s power, his reverence for it, and why the Nazis are so interested in it. This dialogue also gives us an indication of the kind of danger that Indy is up against.
This segues to a nice little scene right afterward at Indy’s home between the archaeologist and Marcus. He tells Indy that the United States government wants him to find the headpiece and get the Ark. As Indy gets ready they talk about the Ark. The camera pans away from Indy packing to a worried Marcus sitting on a sofa and he reveals his apprehension about what his friend is going after: “For nearly 3,000 years man has been searching for the lost Ark. It’s not something to be taken lightly. No one knows its secrets. It’s like nothing you’ve ever gone after before.” Indy shrugs off Marcus’ warning but his words, accompanied by John Williams’ quietly unsettling score, suggest the potential danger Indy faces messing with forces greater and older than himself.
Kasdan also does a great job hinting at a rich backstory between Indy and his ex-love interest, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). When they are reunited at a bar she runs in Nepal, she is clearly not too thrilled to see him, giving Indy a good crack on the jaw. Marion alludes to a relationship between them that went bad. She was young and in love with him and he broke her heart. To add insult to injury, her father is dead. All Indy can do is apologize as he says, “I can only say sorry so many times,” and she has that wonderful retort, “Well say it again anyway.” Harrison Ford and Karen Allen do a great job with this dialogue, suggesting a troubled past between them. In a nice touch, Spielberg ends the scene with Indy walking out the door. He takes one last look back and his face is mostly obscured in shadow in a rather ominous way as he clearly looks uncomfortable having had to dredge up a painful part of his past.
Indy and Marion have another nice scene together after they’ve retrieved the Ark from the Nazis and are aboard the Bantu Wind, a tramp steamer that will take them to safety. Marion tends to Indy’s numerous wounds and says, “You’re not the man I knew ten years ago,” and he replies with that classic line, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” It starts out as a playful scene as everything Marion does to help hurts Indy’s world-weary body. In frustration, she asks him to show her where it doesn’t hurt and he points to various parts of his body and in a few seconds the scene goes from playful in tone to romantic as they end up kissing. Of course, Indy falls asleep — much to Marion’s chagrin. Kasdan’s dialogue gives Spielberg’s chaste, boyhood fantasy serial adventure a slight air of sophistication in this scene as two people with a checkered past finally reconnect emotionally.
For me, Raiders of the Lost Ark still is the best film of the Indiana Jones series. The pacing is fast but not as frenetic as today’s films. There are lulls where the audience can catch its breath and exposition is conveyed. In many respects, it is one of the best homages to the pulpy serials of the 1930s and a classic example of when all the right elements came together at just the right time. This film has aged considerably well over time and each time I see it, I still get that nostalgic twinge and still get sucked in to Indy’s adventures looking for the lost Ark.
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Labels: 80s, Harrison Ford, John Williams, L. Kasdan, Movie Tributes, Spielberg
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Friday, November 19, 2010
Finally: Back to Larry Part 1: Season 1
By Edward Copeland
My long national nightmare is over. Given any excuse or opportunity, I've whined for years that a complete set of HBO's first great series, the comedy The Larry Sanders Show, wasn't available on DVD. Years ago, when the first season came out on DVD, I snatched it up immediately, but no further seasons followed. Then, about three years back. they released a boxed set called Not Just the Best of The Larry Sanders Show that included a sampling of episodes from all six seasons plus many bonus features produced just for the set. Other fans urged me to get it, but I remained a stubborn asshole, especially since it included several first season episodes I already had on DVD.
I heard a myriad of excuses: the lack of interest in the first season made them reluctant to release the rest, problems with the musical rights pertaining to the performers who played themselves and even that Garry Shandling's own neurotic tendencies made him believe that no one would be interested in ALL of the episodes. One time on Facebook, I even bitched to SHOUT! Factory, even though I knew they didn't have the rights to the show, but knowing what great jobs they did preserving Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared I complained to them anyway. I don't know if I put a bug in someone's ear, but now SHOUT! Factory has released a 17-disc boxed set of the complete Larry Sanders Show that contains all the bonus features from Not Just the Best of The Larry Sanders Show plus some more new features. Since I ordered it off the SHOUT! Web site, I got a discount (It is pricey) as well as a Larry Sanders baseball cap.
Now, as I slowly make my way through the series again, I plan to review it, season by season, starting with the 13 episodes of the first season. Of course, this time of year also bubbles over with new movies to review, so I probably won't finish all six seasons until well into next year.
For some mysterious reason, a lot of TV's best shows don't hit their strides until about their fourth episode. This was definitely the case with Deadwood. I mention this because on the commentary for this episode by Shandling and writer-producer Peter Tolan, they admit to the same truism and acknowledge that this episode actually was the fourth one filmed (or, more accurately, filmed and taped) though it was the first episode aired. The decision was a good one as it launched the series with a memorable outing when its three main characters: Larry Sanders (Shandling), Artie (Rip Torn) and Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor) all were well-formed.
This episode focuses on one of the most frequent and recurring conflicts that would pop up throughout the course of the show's six seasons: network hassles. Larry's talk show supposedly airs on a network, though since through the course of the show they mention ABC, CBS, NBC and even FOX as competition, we presume it's a fictional one. Given that The Larry Sanders Show stands as one of the best not to mention the longest-running, satires on television, I always liked to fantasize that it airs on UBS, the network Paddy Chayefsky created for his prescient skewering of television in 1976's Network.
Larry runs into conflict with the exec in charge of late night programming, Melanie Parrish (Deborah May), a hard-ass who Artie swears "he killed in the Korean war." When Artie says it to Larry a second time, Larry tells him he's used that line before. "It's not a line, it's a real concern," Artie tells him. The focus of the conflict between Larry and Melanie concerns one of his sponsors, the maker of The Garden Weasel, who want him to do live commercials for their product during the show. Larry hates the idea and tries to sell them on the idea of having Hank do it, since Hank basically never has met a product he wouldn't endorse, however, feel that Hank suffers from overexpoure. When Larry raises the issue of the ethics of the idea to Artie, Artie responds, "Don't start pulling on that thread. Our whole world will unravel." Though they didn't do it when the series was on the air, someone should have published a book called The Wit and Wisdom of Artie because you could just read all the great lines Rip Torn got and laugh for hours. (I do want to know if Harrison Ford does impressions, particularly Carol Channing.)
Larry caves and does it, but he ends up making jokes the company doesn't appreciate, escalating the conflict. The entire episode is funny and perfectly sets the tone of a behind-the-scenes look at a late-night talk show. It also establishes its unusual technical approaches such as filming all the off-show scenes while videotaping all the scenes of the talk show. It's also the first show to really use the tracking shot of people carrying on a conversation while walking down a hall.
In the DVD commentary, Tolan, who wrote this episode, and Shandling agreed how much they hated having to write the monologue parts of the show and those are the only parts that do seem really dated. There are other cultural references that indicate the time of the episode, but the jokes in the talk show's monologue do definitely trap it in a certain era. It doesn't matter though, the entire show is so brilliantly funny, that that's a tiny part of it. The laughs are so frequent that I think this is the comedy that finally killed my ability to watch new comedies that had laugh tracks or studio audiences where every joke seemed to get the same laugh, with no variance in size in relation to the joke.
Shandling and his creative collaborators couldn't have picked a more ideal time to launch The Larry Sanders Show than when they did. It was at the height of the talk show wars, when NBC pushed Johnny Carson out to an early retirement, Jay Leno stole his throne, a peeved David Letterman jumped networks, an unknown named Conan O'Brien leaped into the fray, Arsenio Hall had syndicated success and Chevy Chase had a Fox talk show for about a minute-and-a-half. Part of the fallout of all these shows were fierce competition for guests and booking wars and that guided the premise of "The Promise."
A pre-Saturday Night Live David Spade still eking out a living as a stand-up is preparing to make his fifth appearance on Larry's show and Sanders feels as if he sort of discovered him. Unfortunately, the night before his scheduled appearance, Larry and Artie are surprised to see Spade doing the same jokes on Leno's show. Making the matter worse, he was doing his pre-interview with Paula (the great Janeane Garofalo, who didn't really come into her own until the second season) AFTER he'd taped Leno, but he didn't tell anyone at The Larry Sanders Show. Larry's hurt, but it's also against protocol with some shows making guests sign contracts that they won't appear on other shows within a certain time span. Artie convinces Larry to give Spade the boot.
The episode also includes a very funny sideplot involving Hank taking the regional presidents of The Hank Kingsley Fan Club on a tour of the studio. There's also an underlying theme involving the general false front that Larry always puts on. When Spade is running through his act with Paula, he stops by and off-handedly tells him to stop by when he's finished. When Spade actually does come into his office to see him, Larry is horrified. He realizes he'd told him to drop in, but he didn't expect him to actually do it. At the show's beginning, Dana Delany is a guest on the talk show and as the show ends, he explains that they are supposed to pretend like they are still talking until the cameras stop rolling. Larry asks Delany how her house is coming and she starts to tell him about a lawsuit that she's had to file against the contractor, but then the cameras stop and Sanders disappears midconversation leaving Delany looking puzzled. "The Promise" has plenty of laughs and priceless Torn and Tambor moments, but it's a bit of letdown after the series premiere.
The third episode aired became what may be the first classic episode of The Larry Sanders Show, the first to have a big star doing a guest appearance and the one that made people who only liked the show become rabid fans like I was. It's generally thought that in movies, the more names credited with writing the film, the more likely it was a troubled production that will suck. That certainly isn't the case with "The Spider Episode" which credits four writers: Shandling, Tolan, Paul Simms and Rosie Shuster. The episode and all four writers were nominated for an Emmy for outstanding writing in a comedy series. The guest star in question, Carol Burnett, also would earn a nomination as outstanding guest actress in a comedy series.
The storyline completely revolves around Larry's skittishness about a bug handler set as a guest for the next night who is going to place tarantulas on each of Larry's arms in a race to see who can get to a dead fly on Larry's head first. Needless to say, Larry is less than excited at the prospect, despite Artie's urging. "It's a showbiz tradition. Gigantic fuzzy insects crawling on your body. Lions crapping in your lap. Great television."
He carries his worries home where he's taken that night's guest, Jon Lovitz, and his girlfriend for dinner with Larry and his wife Jeannie (Megan Gallagher). I haven't had the chance to mention the domestic side of Larry's life yet. In the commentary side on the first episode, Tolan says that most of the writers didn't want Larry to have a wife but Shandling insisted. Jeannie's annoyance at the intrusion of the talk show on their married life will grow as the season does.
The one plus of the episode that has Larry excited is that they he is going to get a chance to perform in a skit with Burnett, though the sketch is badly written and he's so distracted by the spiders that he can't even concentrate during rehearsals. He tries to pawn the stunt of on Hank, who's always grateful to be in the spotlight until the spider handler informs him that the worst thing that could happen is a slight allergic reaction and he always carries something with him to counteract the effects should one occur, though he didn't this time. Needless to say, they scrap the lousy skit and the spider stunt goes out of control in a scene of hilarious chaos.
Hank Kingsley, without exaggeration or embellishment, is quite simply one of the greatest creations in the history of television comedies thanks to the magnificent performance of Jeffrey Tambor. We've already seen parts of what makes Hank so wonderful in the first three episodes, but in "The Guest Host" we really get a glimpse into the full-fledged, dark side of Hank Kingsley.
As it happens, this doesn't even occur in an episode where the focus is on Hank. The story concerns Larry taking a week off for a vacation and Dana Carvey (nominated for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series) coming in to guest host. From the very first night, Carvey is a resounding success, which, of course, brings out Larry's always-near-the-surface insecurity. It's quite telling when you consider, with the exception of the time David Letterman was off for an extended time having and recovering from his heart surgery, NO talk show hosts today use guest hosts. Call it The Leno Factor. (Or would that be The Joan Rivers Factor, since she was Carson's first permanent guest host who went off to do her own talk show.)
Larry gets so nervous, he wants to call off his vacation and come back early. It gets further complicated by rumors that Carvey might be developing a late-night talk show deal at another network as Larry's competition. Artie, for the second time in the episode, says he saw it coming and Larry asks why he didn't say anything. "If I said I saw this coming every time I saw something coming, we'd never get anything done."
What makes Hank so great is that he's always believed that he should guest host when Larry is gone, going so far as to force the network president and Artie watch him do a fake interview with one of the writers, Phil (Wallace Langham). When that goes nowhere, he keeps trying to intimidate Carvey in the form of "tips." Kingsley is an idiot and asshole, but you still somehow always end up liking him thanks to Tambor's deft portrayal. The fact that he never won an Emmy is another in that award's long history of outrages.
Re-watching these episodes for the first time in a long time, I'm surprised by how well I remember them. I'm also surprised that of the first season's batch of episode, the one I liked best isn't one that I remember as my favorites from before. Shandling gets story credit but the script itself is credited to Dick Blasucci, Paul Simms, Howard Gewirtz and Chris Thompson.
Inspired by an event few of the younger readers out there even remember known simply as "The Katzenberg Memo," the story actually starts when an emergency appendectomy puts Artie out of commission for awhile and Jonathan Litman (Ian Buchanan), an old friend of Larry's, has come in to serve as acting producer, only he has plans to take the job on a permanent basis. Working with one of the network suits, he even has a higher-up co-conspirator and he writes a memo with his suggestions about changes that could be made in all the various aspects of the show to lure a younger audience and boost ratings. Somehow a copy of the memo gets carelessly left out and the entire staff sees it and makes copies, going ballistic.
The scenes with the pissed and fearful staff are funny enough as Larry, without Artie there to comfort him, tries to calm them all down assuring them that the memo does not reflect his views. Larry's been kept in the dark and, quite on purpose, was not criticized in Jonathan's memo. Larry is just worried that Artie will see the memo, but he should know better, because Artie knows everything.
One of the funniest reactions, as you'd expect, comes from Hank, who gets an earring to try to appeal to that youngest area. Larry, having fun with his sidekick, tells him he has it in the ear that means you're gay and that he better be certain a professional did the job or he might get a serious infection and teases Hank that he thinks he might see pus.
As Hank makes a beeline for his office, telling his assistant Darlene (Linda Doucett) to call an ambulance, he finds a drunk Artie waiting inside with a copy of the memo in his hand, convinced that he's out. Hank asks how he found out. "If someone farts in the Xerox room, I hear it."
Artie rants about show business (but honestly, he could be talking about any industry: newspapers, Web sites) that it's all change for the sake of change. Hank can't focus because he's still obsessing about his ear. "I can hear something inside my head," Hank tells Artie. "I can guarantee you that there's nothing in there."
Artie then insists that Hank drink with him. Hank's reluctant, because he's certain he'll be on several antibiotics later. "Drink it or I'll knock you down on the floor, put my foot on your neck and piss in your good ear," Artie shouts.
Rip Torn's drunk scenes are always a highlight and this one with the added plus of a drunken Hank as they burst into Larry's office, is a keeper, as is the entire episode.
This is really the first episode where Jeannie plays a major role. It all starts when Mimi Rogers guests on the show and very openly flirts with Larry, who gets so wrapped up in the flirting he returns the banter. He even makes the unprecedented move of inviting her back for the next night's show, despite the fact that because her segment ran over they had to bump Michael Richards.
One of the running gags on the show in the home scenes is that Larry is so obsessed with himself that he has to watch himself every night, even though he taped the show just a few hours earlier, much to the annoyance of his wife Jeannie. That night, of course, is a bit different. He's not so eager to watch, but Jeannie wants to see it and when she watches him invite Rogers back, she's naturally concerned.
Larry already had been feeling guilty since immediately after the show wrapped, since frequent affairs broke up his first marriage and he'd been working hard to make this one work. He tries to reassure Jeannie that she has nothing to worry about. "Larry, I trust you. I just don't know if I trust him," she says as she points to the TV set.
At the second show, he tries to cool things down, even having Paula tell Mimi Rogers not to flirt, but others such as Hank try to tempt him as in the old days by dangling the keys to Kingsley's Malibu pad in front of him in case he needs it for a tryst.
Another Jeffrey Tambor showcase as Larry's sidekick's contract is set to expire and Hank, always convinced that he's more vitally important to the show than he is, has engaged in very public negotiations with the network, making huge demands that no one takes seriously because no one ever takes Hank seriously in general.
At one point, he even blows up at Larry asking about why people find things he do so funny (as when Wynonna Judd appeared solo and he introduced her as "The Judd") "What about the time I broke a tooth on a urinal? Tell me what was so funny about that?" "It was a back tooth, Hank." He even lies and says he has an offer to be Dick Cavett's sidekick on his new CNBC show. Artie asks what CNBC is and Hank says it's on cable. "My TV stops at 13 the way it's supposed to," Artie tells him.
Eventually, Larry has to step in and save Hank from himself to save his job and get him some of what he wants.
Head writer Jerry (Jeremy Piven) is carrying on a torrid affair with a new intern on the show and he can't keep his hands off her, boinking her anywhere, anytime, even in the sacred land behind Larry's talk show desk. Everyone knows about this, except for Larry and when he finds out, he decides that he needs to be more "in the loop." Artie advises him against it, but Larry insists and soon everyone feels free to come to him with their problems such as Paula with her relationship problems and her indecision over whether to place her mother in a nursing home. Still, it's Jerry's fling that dominates, especially when they go at it on a platform above the studio audience during taping, distracting guest Peter Falk. Eventually, Larry's begging Artie to remove him from the loop once again.
This is by far the most Jeannie-centric episode, only it takes place at the office rather than home. Shortly before airtime, Larry and Jeannie are having a rather subdued fight and she hits him with the news that she's planning to go home to Chicago. Larry goes into panic mode, but the show must go on, so at every break, he's rushing backstage to try to continue the conversation, though he's either getting interrupted there bumping into guests such as Catherine O'Hara or being so distracted on the show with guests such as Billy Crystal that instead of asking him about his new movie he's going back to old SNL skits and Jack Palance at the Oscars. It's quite a change-of-pace episode and while certainly interesting in terms of playing wth the series form, not big in the area of laughs and not one you really want to return to to that often. They use this format much better in a comic mode when Larry spends an entire taping tryng to get to a bathroom during every break.
This continues the Jeannie problems, but moves it to the home setting and in a much more entertaining context. Jeannie complains to Larry that they never have anyone over, so Larry invites Artie and his wife over to dinner, but somehow it metastasizes into a large-scale party with the entire office coming as well as next-door neighbor Martin Mull dropping by to see why there are so many cars.
It's another occasion for a great Rip Torn drunk scene (Really, any episode with an Artie drunk scene should be watched while you drink salty dogs). During the middle of the party, Larry and Jeannie end up in a huge fight and she locks herself in the bedroom with all the guests' coats. It's a fairly funny outing.
A new demographic report the network hits Larry's desk rating personalities' likability and it puts him into a panic. He runs through the list comparing himself to everyone. "Where's Rush Limbaugh? Oh, he's below Mengele." He even asks Jeannie if he's likable and she responds that he is, in a way. "People watch your show because you're partly an asshole."
Despite Artie warning him that he'll drive himself crazy like Arsenio does in trying to please everyone, Larry agrees to hold a focus group. In another subplot, Hank is doing an on-air weight loss challenge which prompts a visit by the always hyper Richard Simmons.
My other favorite episode of the first season perfectly encapsulates the ability of the media to make a mountain out of a molehill, something that has only grown worse in the 18 yaars since the episode aired. Larry, suffering from tunnel vision and a bad headache, goes to a grocery store to buy some over-the-counter medicine and artichoke hearts and because he doesn't see her, knocks another shopper in the checkout line into the magazine stand, an incident caught on video tape and which becomes a media juggernaut.
Larry feels awful because he really didn't see her while a network P.R. guy (delightfully played by David Paymer) sees it as a wonderful opportunity for publicity that they can milk into ratings gold, suggesting that they invite the shopper onto the show so Larry can apologize to her in person. The idea excites him so much that he tells them, "I think I'm wetting myself," which becomes his catchphrase. Even Artie can see the wisdom of his plan while Larry just wants it all to go away. At one point, Larry calls Paymer's character "a sick fuck" and he takes it as a compliment.
Larry grows so despondent that he locks himself in his office, just sighing and pacing. Another great member of the ensemble I haven't praised yet is Penny Johnson as his no-nonsense assistant Beverly who tells Artie that Larry has even refused an Excedrin. They finally get him to unlock the door by bringing Jeannie in and having her threaten to tell everyone his pet name for his penis. It's a hysterical episode that's even timelier now that it was then.
The final episode of the season is actually the first one that was shot and the only other episode that season to earn an Emmy nomination for outstanding writing in a comedy series for Shandling and co-creator Dennis Klein. It concerns friction between Larry and Hank, when Larry catches Hank napping during the middle of the show.
Larry and Artie blame it on Hank overextending himself by playing pitchman to anything to the detriment of the talk show, so much so that Larry takes it out on Hank's trademark catchphrase "Hey now" and tells him to stop using it. The tension is so palpable, it even makes guest Robin Williams feel nervous.
By show's end, they've reconciled and Larry admits that he's turned into a real asshole the past few years. Hank adds that he's become a real moron and he should just go with it. It was a great start for a classic comedy, but the best was yet to come.
At the Emmys, it scored a lot of nominations, but lost comedy to the fourth and best season of Seinfeld, Shandling lost lead actor to Ted Danson on Cheers, Tambor and Torn both lost to Michael Richards on Seinfeld, Dana Carvey lost to David Clennon on another HBO comedy, Dream On, Carol Burnett lost to Tracey Ullman on the long-forotten series Love and War and "The Spider Episode" and "The Hey Now Episode" lost comedy writing to Larry David for writing the Seinfeld classic "The Contest," which no one can really argue about. The Emmys do get some things right.
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Labels: 90s, Awards, Carson, Chayefsky, Deadwood, Harrison Ford, HBO, Larry David, Larry Sanders, Letterman, Rip Torn, Robin, Seinfeld, Shandling, Tambor, TV Recap
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Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Finding New Life on the Big Screen
By J.D.
In 2002, Joss Whedon was enjoying considerable success writing and directing episodes for three television shows that he created: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. The latter was his new show and pet project — a funky hybrid of the science fiction and Western genres. Firefly was about the misadventures of a small, rag-tag group of mercenaries operating on the fringes of the galaxy 500 years into the future. In other words, what if Han Solo decided not to help Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan rescue Princess Leia? It was a fantastic blend of Whedon’s trademark dry humor, moving drama and exciting action.
Firefly lasted less than half a season before Fox pulled the plug, Buffy ran its course and Angel was cancelled just as it started to fire on all cylinders. Fortunately, Firefly had accumulated a small but dedicated following, much like the crew of the Serenity itself, which campaigned tirelessly to save the show. Whedon returned the favor by shopping it around to other studios and Universal Studios agreed to resurrect the show in the form a feature film called Serenity (2005).
“Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is an ex-soldier and captain of the Serenity, a small spacecraft with a handful of crew members who scavenge, smuggle and steal for profit. Along the way, they picked up a brother and sister, Simon (Sean Maher) and River Tam (Summer Glau). He is a doctor and she is some kind of secret weapon, a deadly sleeper assassin a la Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). She was created by the all-powerful Alliance who rule the galaxy with a benign façade to cover their ruthless methods. They want her back and send a deadly and very methodical assassin (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to retrieve her and eliminate anybody who gets in the way.
The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent. It is like the show had never been cancelled as everyone slips effortlessly back into their respective roles again. Nathan Fillion does a fantastic job as Mal, a character who is clearly cut from the same cloth as Han Solo, a selfish rogue who has lost his faith. He has all the charisma and charm of a young Harrison Ford only with more depth. Adam Baldwin is a real scene stealer as Jayne, the gruff, gun-toting strong man. He gets to deliver some of the film’s funniest lines in what is easily his best role since Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Inspired by the dirty, grungy look of Alien (1979), Serenity also features a spacecraft that actually looks like our heroes live in it as opposed to the glossy, immaculate Enterprise of the Star Trek films. This is a great looking film shot by Clint Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Jack Green. He helps Whedon give his show a more cinematic look. Like he did with the series, Whedon bucks the typical trend of having sound in space — explosions, lasers blasting and spacecraft engines roaring — for a more realistic take by opting for a nicely understated score by David Newman.
It is a credit to Whedon’s skill as a writer that he is able to make you care about these characters even if you have not seen the show. He takes the time to show the dynamic between them and their motivations which pays off later on when they are thrown into life-threatening situations because we have invested so much in them that it makes what happens so effective emotionally. There is a distinctive ebb and flow quality to the overall structure of the film. It never feels forced; rather there is a sense urgency as early on he sets up what is at stake and then executes some genuine, white knuckle moments where you do not know what is going to happen next. There is even a moment late in the film where it seems like the entire cast is going to be killed off and this is so refreshing because most films are so predictable that you know exactly who is going to be killed and who will not (the big name stars).
Whedon has pulled off an impressive feat with Serenity. He has made it accessible enough for people who have never seen the show and included all kinds of references and revelations for the fans. With a quarter of the budget of the last Star Wars movie, Whedon beats George Lucas at his own game by crafting a science fiction film that has the perfect balance of character development and plot and effortlessly blends science fiction with a horror edge. Serenity is everything a space opera should be and proof that a smart, engaging popcorn movie is possible.
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Labels: 00s, Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Lucas, Star Wars, Television
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Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The Music of the Prequels: A Conversation
By Matt Zoller Seitz
and Ali Arikan
Matt Zoller Seitz: We gather here today to celebrate the talent, longevity and all-around wonderfulness of John Williams, whose work is being examined in a blog-a-thon. We're focusing on the Star Wars prequels because, after talking pretty extensively about Williams' long and prolific career, we mutually concluded that his work on the prequels represents his greatest conceptual achievement, and very possibly the summation of everything he knows about traditional film scoring.
And I suppose we should specify what we mean by traditional. I don't believe we're talking, Ali, about his more subtly colored, modernist work on such films as The Long Goodbye, or his historical spelunking in Steven Spielberg's historical epics (Schindler's List especially). We're talking about Williams in full-on Erich Korngold/Franz Waxman/Max Steiner mode, although personally I think Williams is more versatile and imaginative than any of them. More specifically, though, we're talking about what Williams does with that talent. We all know he's a master of a certain type of brash, rousing film score, the kind of score that's deployed in the service of what score composers often refer to, often disparagingly, as "Mickey Mousing." You know, Mickey Mouse sneaks across the screen and the score plays "sneaky" music. This composer (and conductor) is the absolute king, the Satchmo, the Hendrix, the Satchel Paige of Mickey Mousing. Nobody in film history can touch the guy. But what's different about the prequels is that he's doing what could be called, for a lack of a phrase, postmodern Mickey Mousing. He's doing what he did in the original Star Wars movies, even revisiting certain themes, but he's doing so with a really specific intent, you know?
Ali Arikan: One of my favorite moments in the history of the Oscars is the soundtrack medley of 2002 conducted by John Williams. In a fairly low key ceremony, the grandeur and awe of classic Hollywood cinema was briefly captured as Williams played a host of classic themes by Bernard Herrmann, Malcolm Arnold, Elmer Bernstein, etc. When it came to Alfred Newman’s 20th Century Fox fanfare, everyone knew exactly what piece of music it would be followed by: the main theme from Star Wars. To this day, every time I watch a Fox film and hear those magnificent horns, the nerd in me expects (hopes?) that it would be followed by Williams’ most famous Wagnerian fanfare. It is unrelenting, brash, and cheeky. Has any modern film composer been so bold with the brass section?
Interestingly, the theme begins almost in media res, which is fitting since so does the “first” film. Williams usually has a way of building up the melody, building up the eventual motif, but he forfeits this for the Star Wars Main Theme. In contrast, his Welcome to Jurassic Park, for example, has a lengthy and gentle piano, woodwind and string intro that eventually gives way to those majestic horns. Not so here. John Williams’s work in Star Wars is not just a part of the film, it is almost a metatextual narrator.
And this becomes even more apparent during the prequels. The way he manages to work in motifs from the original trilogy to new pieces of music is almost like the way Puccini played around with various themes in his operas. I think it’s safe to say that we can call the Star Wars scores — and I believe he scored around 15 hours of music for the entire saga — his magnum opus.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe before we go deep-dish on Williams' contribution to the prequels, we should establish that in no way is this article meant to suggest that the prequels themselves are without flaw, or even especially consistent. On the micro level, they pretty much suck, in the way that the original Star Wars movies pretty much sucked.
Weak dialogue, wooden performances, too obvious symbolism. Harrison Ford's complaint to Lucas, "You can type this shit but you can't say it," was painfully true in a lot of cases. Where the original films excel is in creating an imaginative space, a mythology that plugs into nearly every culture and belief system — which is to say they excel at the macro level. That's no small achievement, and I don't think George Lucas gets enough credit for it. That's the pinnacle of popular art, creating something that enters the minds, the experiences, of hundreds of millions of people and becomes a reference point for, well, their lives. (Just the other day my son was asking me how long he would have to go to school and study science to learn how to build his own lightsaber. He's 25. I'm kidding, he's six.)The prequels have even more problems at the micro level than the originals. In my New York Press review of Revenge of the Sith, I described Lucas as a filmmaker for whom the impossible seems to come easily, yet who can't seem to master, or else has no real interest in, the basics. I compared him to a prophesied sci-fi manchild who can levitate entire continents with his mind but can't master the use of a knife and fork. That said, there's some heavy-duty world creation, some heavy duty mythologizing, going on in the prequels, and if anything the films are much more conceptually sophisticated than the originals, and frankly more conceptually sophisticated than any other sci-fi or fantasy series, in terms of how they're constructed and what they're trying to accomplish. The trilogies mirror each other in all sorts of ways. And the mirroring is not only intentional, it's fiendishly exact.
To give you just one example, the scene in Revenge of the Sith where Mace Windu, the Emperor and Anakin have a three-way showdown in the emperor's throne room, the scene where Anakin turns to the dark side by turning against Mace.
The situation and the characters' predicaments evoke the throne room scene that ends Return of the Jedi: Vader's redemption. But if you watch the two scenes in succession, you'll see that Lucas hasn't just mirrored the throne room showdown from Return of the Jedi in Sith at a narrative level — the compositions and blocking often mirror Jedi's as well. Williams' score contributes mightily toward strengthening Lucas' mythic architecture. It sells the whole thing, makes it more energetic and heartfelt and persuasive. Williams does this by raiding his own cues for the original trilogy — doing with music what Lucas does pictorially. He doesn't just do it in the two big throne room scenes. He does it all through the prequels. He takes you down memory lane and says, "This scene is the cousin of another scene from the original series, or an ironic inversion of it, or contains elements of it, or is an answer to it." It's like he's superimposing the trilogies on top of one another by way of his own score.Ali: Definitely. Especially to the point that the main character, Anakin Skywalker, has two funerals. One, in Revenge of the Sith, when he is robbed of his former self by being turned into Darth Vader: we witness the fear in his eyes as the mask is lowered onto his face. The next is in Return of the Jedi, when, outwardly, he is Vader, but he has redeemed himself: the funeral pyre, lit by his son, signifying a sort of latter-day baptism with fire. Separately, both scenes work wonderfully well — together, they have a mythic quality.
The prequels were always going to be a hard sell. One of the most enigmatic lines from the original trilogy is Vader’s “Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father.” When I hear that, I think of grandeur and dragons and knights and all that good stuff. I don’t think of “YIPPEE!” Even though I do enjoy The Phantom Menace more than anyone I know, it was definitely not what I was expecting. Then again, and this might be a lot of fanwanking on my part, maybe that was the point.
Allow me to argue this from a musical point. John Williams obviously tried something different with the prequels. He wrote three overriding themes for each: Duel of the Fates for The Phantom Menace, Across The Stars for Attack of the Clones, and Battle of the Heroes for Revenge of the Sith. Nonetheless, I think if we were to name a secondary theme for the saga – the first one being the Force Theme — it would be Duel of the Fates. When the soundtrack for The Phantom Menace was first released, and I heard it, I remember thinking: “This sounds nothing like a Star Wars score, and yet it sounds exactly like a Star Wars score.” It was bizarre: first of all, you had that intimidating chorus in Sanskrit: “KORAH MAHTAH, KORAH, RAHTAMAH.” Apparently it means “Under the tongue root a fight most dread, and another raging behind, in the head,” but either Sanskrit is terribly economical, or that’s an apocryphal interpretation. Either way, even though Williams had used choral arrangements in Star Wars scores before (most notably during Luke’s final assault on Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi), never had they been in such prominence. Then you have this sense of inevitability, a sense of dread. Even though Duel of the Fates represents a constant struggle between good and evil, nonetheless, it seems rather certain that the bad guys will win: it’s no wonder that the only time it plays during the second prequel is when Anakin is searching for the Tusken Raiders who kidnapped his mother, and just before he massacres the lot of them. The way the strings and the horns crescendo is nothing short of breathtaking.
But I especially love the way it seems to end — and then doesn’t. Both the strings and the chorus continue subtly, as they give way to a final, much more violent crescendo, as if to reinforce Mace Windu’s rhetorical question to Yoda after the death of Darth Maul: “But which one was destroyed? The master or the apprentice?” Once again, Williams has worked into the music pieces from the narrative: you think this is over, but it’s only just begun.
Matt: Speaking of Duel of the Fates, one of my very favorite Williams moments is in the opening action sequence of Revenge of the Sith, maybe Lucas' peak as a choreographer of large-scale mayhem.
Anakin has rescued the Emperor, or at that point in the story the Chancellor, from General Grievous, and he has briefly saved Obi Wan as well. And now the chancellor's ship is crashing, burning up in the atmosphere, and Anakin has to pilot it safely down to a landing strip as it's crumbling. It's an amazing sequence in itself. But what pushes the whole thing up a notch — what makes it intelligent as opposed to just spectacular — is Williams' music. He's doing what I talked about earlier, superimposing one trilogy on top of the other. As you can see at the 10:38 mark in this clip, as the ship is making its final ascent, when we're seeing Anakin at the peak of his physical prowess and bravery, and he's saving the life of the man who will later rule the galaxy, and him, what do we hear? Duel of the Fates, which as you say is about the push-pull between the dark side and the light, and layered over that, The Force Theme, which I believe we heard for the first time in A New Hope in that iconic shot of Anakin's son Luke, the one who was really prophesied to restore balance to the force (sorry, Mace Windu!), staring out at the twin suns of Tattooine. 
The Force Theme is such an optimistic, hopeful piece of music. It indicates great promise. And Williams is using it ironically and knowingly here, as if to say, "All the promise this kid displayed is about to cause untold harm to the galaxy — and this is it, folks. You're seeing the exact moment when everything turned to shit. It was the moment when he saved the chancellor."Ali: I’m glad you bring up The Force Theme, because I’d love to hear your take on its significance over the entire saga. I would argue that this is the primary leitmotif of the films, and its appearance throughout the films triggers almost a sense memory. The first time we hear it is my favorite scene in the entire saga: Luke gazing into the binary sunset, as the melancholy motif subtly gives way to a perpetually progressive melody (it’s evocative of Jean Sibelius’ Symphony Number 4, the way it seems to tiptoe between joy and sorrow). It’s the epitome of the saga, isn’t it? The hero’s quest: not being content with the vagaries of life, the hero looks to the horizon, and the worlds unseen. What does Yoda say in The Empire Strikes Back: “A long time this one have I watched. All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing.” Luke wants more from life, he wants to be freed of the shackles of his surroundings: he seeks adventure. Despite being scolded by his uncle, despite his belief that he is never leaving Tattooine, despite the burden of mediocrity weighing down on his shoulders, a lingering feeling still remains in Luke as he gazes and imagines endless possibilities, and that feeling is hope. The hope that tomorrow will be better; that when adventure calls, he will prove his mettle. Ultimately, The Force Theme represents hope. Well, a new hope.
Matt: Yeah, and it's that hope that gets dashed in the prequels. That yin-yang you talk about in Duel of the Fates, the push-pull, is the thrust of the series, all six films. Nearly every major setpiece in the original trilogy is revisited in the prequels with a different conclusion, a different meaning. The original trilogy is the light side, the prequels are the dark side. And looming over all of it is Williams.
You know, in Japanese cinema there was a tradition, during the silent era, of this person called the benshi, or the explainer. He'd stand up at the front of the theater and interpret or almost mediate, if you will, between the story happening onscreen and the receptive audience out there in the dark. Williams is the benshi of the Star Wars movies, the explainer. He's not just italicizing and underlining things to make sure we get them — although this is a very old fashioned type of film storytelling, so there's an aspect of that in his mission. He's also teasing out deeper resonances, and perhaps — though a part of me hates to say this because I've already stated that I don't think Lucas gets enough credit as a mythmaker — maybe Williams is adding a lot as well.
There are times when I feel like he's the second editor on the series, perhaps over and above the editing team that put the footage together. He's an editor in the publishing sense — an eye in the sky who isn't trying to make a writer into a clone of himself, but who appreciates the writer for what he is, and wants to help him be the best him that he can possibly be. Williams' music helps Lucas be Lucas. I feel almost as if Williams figured out what Lucas was trying to say in particular moments and sequences and found a way, musically, to say it for him.
Ali: Funny you should mention the benshi, because the piece of music that plays as the Federation cruiser crashes into Coruscant is the same one that does during the final salvo of the space battle in The Phantom Menace. Whereas Anakin infiltrated the belly of the beast to destroy it in the first prequel, in Revenge of the Sith, he is saving the very beast that orchestrated the whole thing. Once again, the theme, the modern-day benshi, is doing the narration.
Another favorite is the aforementioned Across The Stars theme from Attack of the Clones. As Anakin and Padme are being wheeled into the Geonosian arena to be executed, Padme admits her love with the clumsiest dialogue in the entire saga (which is a feat, in itself): “I truly, deeply, madly, other-pointless-adverbly love you,” she says, and kisses Anakin. Despite the shortcomings of the dialogue, it is, nonetheless, a magnificent shot: the camera stays behind the two prisoners, who are initially obscured in the shadows, as they emerge into the sun-drenched arena. The camera then follows Anakin’s pov as he surveys the insectoid crowd voracious for their bloody demise. Across The Stars, in D minor (saddest of all keys), plays throughout the scene, and lends it a sense of tragedy: not because of any instantly impending doom (since we know they get out of this alive), but because of how their love will end: one will turn into an evil cyborg, the other will perish. Unlike the love theme from The Empire Strikes Back, Across The Stars has no hint of frivolity: it is a tragic theme for a pair of star-crossed lovers. So sad. It’s a classic.
On the whole, the prequels represent something truly bizarre: a seemingly child-like tale that ultimately gives way to despair. The most colourful locales, juvenile characters, and — on the surface, at least — whimsical stories end with total destruction. Lucas is a master storyteller, and, obviously, the Star Wars saga is his life's work. But he would not have been able to create such a universal fable out of it were it not for his most consistent lieutenant: John Williams.
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Labels: Blog-a-thons, Harrison Ford, John Williams, Lucas, Music, Spielberg, Star Wars
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Friday, May 21, 2010
When the son bested the father
— Horace, "Odes," III, 6, l. 1.
— George Lucas, talking about his father, 2008
They may not mean to, but they do."
— Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
By Ali Arikan
The interwebs was abuzz last week with the news of a letter George Lucas sent to the producers of TV’s Lost. In it, Lucas apparently stated that he had made up the whole story of the Star Wars saga as he went along — a nonadmission, really, but one on which the fanboys pounced anyway, as if a meticulously detailed trope from the start were automatically greater than a naturally evolving one in service of its characters (it isn’t). Since Lucas is the great pariah when it comes to genre fiction, the backlash — such as it was — was hardly unexpected, but most definitely unfair.
The unjustly despised prequel trilogy has had such a retroactive fallout on the original three and their reputation that Lucas’ involvement in the Star Wars saga (and, to an extent, the Indiana Jones films) can be boiled down, by many, to ultimate responsibility for all the saga’s missteps, and none whatsoever for its triumphs. Spectacularly unfair, this claim, nonetheless, has become a shibboleth amongst the most ardent fans of the saga, as well as its saner aficionados. One doesn’t need to be well versed in Star Wars lore or Lucas’ biography, however, to see how major an influence the latter had on the former (and, naturally, vice versa) — even in the two films that he did not direct. In fact, it is in the beloved first sequel that the saga reached its philosophical apex, and it was because of Lucas’ direct involvement. The Empire Strikes Back is not just the finest chapter of the Star Wars saga, it is also the most personal.
On this day in 1980, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was unleashed on movie screens in the United States to almost universal acclaim (for the sake of brevity, and sanity, from this point on I shall abbreviate the film’s full title to the colloquial ESB). Coming on the heels of the previous film’s unprecedented — and unexpected — success, the second chapter of the saga (retconned to serve as the fifth within the in-movie chronology) had a completely different feel from its predecessor, and this narrative contrast was hammered home during the film’s first few minutes.
Whereas 1977’s Star Wars (re-titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 1978) opens on the desert planet of Tattooine (after the initial space age shenanigans, natch), ESB sets the action on the ice planet of Hoth. Even though both environments are extreme wastelands, the direness of the situation is made more explicit by the expository opening crawl (“It’s a dark time for the rebellion”) as well as the dialogue: there is almost no life on this planet, and what there is of it, is hostile. On the run from the Empire following the destruction of the Death Star at the end of the first film, the Rebel Alliance has taken refuge here, but they are soon discovered by Darth Vader (body by David Prowse, voice by James Earl Jones) and the Empire, and have to flee for their lives. The heroes are separated: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) goes to the swamp planet of Dagobah to train under the tutelage of the impish Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz), while Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) end up going to Cloud City, where the betrayal of Han’s old friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams – Billy Dee! Billy Dee! Billy Dee! Billy Dee Klump!) will have dire consequences for everyone involved.
The first Star Wars was admittedly more a cacophonous, albeit endearing, hodgepodge of boys’ own and pulp stories of yesteryear than a holistic tale. Auteurist touches were sprinkled like fairy dust, haphazardly, and not
coherently. It was in ESB that this earlier promise was fulfilled: multifaceted and rich, George Lucas’ sequel, directed by his film school mentor Irvin Kershner, implied to the world just how personal an affair these films would end up being, from a philosophical as well as psychological standpoint. I recently struggled through the film while suffering from a particularly bad spell of food poisoning (not that there are good spells of this messiest of ailments), and was struck by the fiendishly systematic way themes and motifs are built up to culminate in one of the most depressing, yet hopeful, finales in the history of genre storytelling. One fully comprehends the gravity, and sheer precision, of both those notes only after seeing ESB’s 1983 sequel, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi; but to contextualise it, appreciation — or, at least, experience — of the Prequel Trilogy is also equally crucial.Of all the movie brats, George Lucas is commercially the most successful one and also the most maligned; and I doubt the two are completely unrelated. Even though people with short memory spans tend to make a direct connection to the auteur’s general deprecation with the prequels, they are wrong: as far back as 1977, people were upset with Lucas for daring to opt for levity rather than portent. Recently, the inimitable Girish Shambu published on his Facebook feed a quote he discovered of Lucas, which originally appeared in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Sight and Sound review of the first film:
“Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film, I realized there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps — that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures.”
Then came a number of comments that chastised Lucas, some going as far as pitching him as some sort of a modern Pied Piper, leading an unsuspecting audience to piffle (because, obviously, if it weren’t for Lucas, we’d all be lining around the block for the new Kiarostami); until Glenn Kenny The Wise sagely offered these words of observation:
“Let us remember, however, that 'angry' and 'socially relevant' do not automatically equal 'good.' In fact, more often than not, in art they tend to equal 'strident,' 'obvious,' 'condescending,' etc.”
This conversation was nothing new. Lucas was ostracized by a bunch of his contemporaries, and a fair few of the critical establishment, in 1977, for breaking from the pact, and having the audacity to discover edge, and profundity, through subtext rather than text. Art is subjective, and if any work of art, be it a film, or a book, or a piece of music, doesn’t work for one, it just doesn’t work for one, but secondguessing the reasons why is silly, and is a direct road to mind-numbing vacuity and conformism. It wasn’t the Ewoks wot killed Lucas’ reputation, and it wasn’t Jar Jar. It was because he did not make THX-1138: he made Star Wars.
Even though disapprobation of Lucas is relatively old news, a recent trend, which could be dated back to the lukewarm (boom, boom) reception of 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, is the attribution of the saga’s failures to Lucas, while crediting its triumphs to his collaborators. Since ESB is generally regarded as the finest chapter, it’s no wonder this oversimplification applies to it the most.
A period of De-Lucasisation began around 1999, the gist of which was, “Irvin Kershner and Lawrence Kasdan (ESB’s writer) did all the hard work, and made the film what it is while Lucas crunched numbers in Marin County.” It is unfair to downplay the importance of Kershner and Kasdan, but to completely write Lucas off is egregious. However, blame, in this case, also rests with Lucas.
According to Laurent Bouzerau’s 1997 book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, work began on a sequel to the first film almost right away. Lucas put together a number of story conferences with friends, and then hired Leigh Brackett to write the first draft of the script (which was recently leaked on the interwebs).
These initial conferences show some major diversions from the final film. First of all, Darth Vader and Luke’s father, by the later drafts that bear at least a modicum of resemblance to ESB, are two very separate people. In fact, records show that Lucas came up with the idea of their being one and the same well into the development of Empire. From the first transcript of the story conferences between Lucas and Leigh Brackett, entitled Chapter II: The Empire Strikes Back, through to the two subsequent treatments written by Lucas, to the imaginatively titled first draft, Star Wars Sequel, Vader is most definitely not Luke’s father (in fact, even the concept of Ben Kenobi’s (Alec Guinness) Force-ghost only appears in the first draft — in all the previous treatments, Luke uses a talisman that used to belong to Ben to find out about Yoda).
The notion of Vader’s being Luke’s father appears in the second draft. Lucas nowadays argues that that was the idea all-along, and that he kept it quiet. Through five separate treatments and a full first draft of the script? OK, from Leigh Brackett maybe, but from himself? Eh? That’s either bullshit, or batshit insane. Besides, it makes no sense whatsoever as, in the earlier treatments and the first draft, Luke contacts Ben during his training, and the latter brings along with him Luke’s father from the netherworld for an interplenary father and son tête-à-tête.
Hell, the possibility of romance between Luke and Leia, already pretty icky, is full-on in the earlier drafts. And even though Yoda says, in ESB, that “there is another,” Irvin Kershner explains in the DVD commentary that it was a later addition to unsettle the audience with regards to Luke’s apparent invulnerability. It’s clear that Lucas never thought ahead to the third film, and this, too, attests to Lucas’ aversion to coming up with an overall storyline (even though Star Wars lore argues otherwise).
Fans have used this to wag their fingers at Lucas, for not having figured out the plot to the saga when he first sat down to write it in 1972. I’d like to invoke a favorite quote here from Stephen King: “Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story that results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story.” Plot, obviously, is different from story — and while Lucas worked out the plot as he went along, he must have known the story, subconsciously, from the start. And that’s because the films have all been so deeply personal to him. And, albeit directed by Kershner, in retrospect, ESB is the most personal film in the saga, and betrays a true auteurist touch.
First of all, certain motifs are delicately worked in to the narrative like subtle melodies in a symphony. Take, for example, the cave motif, one that figures out in all drafts going as far back as the first story conferences. Earlier in the film, Luke gets attacked by a Wampa, and is dragged into its cave. When he comes to, he is suspended, head down, from the ceiling: it is in this cave that his world is turned upside down for the first time. Luke’s lightsabre has fallen off his belt, resting gently on the snow a few feet away. Luke can’t reach it. Finally, he closes his eyes; and as the “Force Theme” — the true leitmotif of John Williams’ Star Wars scores — begins, Luke starts to concentrate, uses the Force, and, for the first time, wills an object to his hand. The transformation to his true self has begun.
Later, Luke confronts the image of Darth Vader in a cave in Dagobah, and, after a brief clash, decapitates the mirage, as the exploding mask reveals Luke’s own face underneath. Similarly, Han and Leia first kiss while hiding from the Imperials in a cave (which turns out, literally, to be the belly of the beast), and what is the Carbonite Chamber in Bespin but a metallic cave: one where both Luke and Han pay the heaviest price. Cave allegories go all the way back to Plato, and Lucas, having immersed himself in the Campbellian idea of the monomyth, employs it to splendid thematic use in this film.
Further, Lucas (and Kershner) play around with masks, scars and revelations: when we first see Luke, he has his face covered to protect him from the blizzard: he looks like an outlaw. After the attack, as he heals in the Bacta tank, an iron lung of sorts is attached to his face, and, in hindsight, gives Luke a sort of proto-Vaderesque look. On a practical level, masks not only act as a way of hiding one’s identity, but also as protection against damage. Or, once that damage is done, to conceal its effects. The way Darth Vader’s helmet is lowered over his scarred, corpse-like head, and the way Luke gets pulled out of the bacta tank, work as mirror images: in the former the helmet hides Vader’s scars, and, as we know from the next film, his true identity. The latter learns from his scarring experience, and has an epiphany to set off on his journey. The Wampa attack leads Luke on his way to Damascus.
Of course, there is a more obvious reason why Lucas went to all that trouble to underline the contrast: in one of the most memorable scenes in the history of cinema, Darth Vader reveals to Luke that he is, in fact, his father. The revelation comes after Vader bests Luke in a lightsabre fight (“The Force is with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet”), and chops off his right hand. For all intents and purposes, this is emasculation at the hands of the father. Lucas’ uneasy relationship with his own father, especially as he was growing up, rears its head.
Lucas said in an interview in 2008 that, “(My father) wanted me to go into his business. I said, 'I'm absolutely not going to do it. He sold office equipment in a store. I said, 'I will never go to work every day doing the same thing day in and day out.'” As Anthony Breznican of USA Today noted at the time, “It sort of gives a new perspective to all Darth Vader's talk of, "Join me and together we can rule the galaxy!" Lucas’ father hated his love of fast cars, and chastised him when he got into an almost-fatal accident. Later, he was less than enthusiastic when his son decided to become a filmmaker, and not a businessman (though he ended up being both, which is also interesting).
Unable to receive support from his father, Lucas sought other paternal figures, fathers, if you like, by proxy. Francis Coppola was one of them, and their master-apprentice relationship is analogous to that of both the Jedi and the Sith. Kershner was another paternal influence: Lucas’ hiring of his old mentor to make a film about rising up against the legacy, the sins, of the father was no coincidence.
Nonetheless, ESB never offers a true black-and-white view of Luke and Vader’s relationship — the dichotomy of good father vs. bad father is not clear in any of the films, especially with regard to Luke. For one, Luke’s proxy parents all lie to him, from his aunt and uncle in the first film, to Obi Wan and Yoda in this one. They, too, want to use him for their own ends: to destroy Vader and to destroy the Empire. The latter is also Vader’s ultimate objective. Both parties want power, and they want Luke to help them get it. But, Luke is not the only one to suffer from the sins of his father. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Darth Vader becomes a slave to the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid), his “bad father,” but only after being betrayed — according to him — Obi Wan and the Jedi Order (his “good father”). And Obi Wan is forsaken by his “father,” Qui Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), who, in The Phantom Menace, takes on the responsibility to train Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) when the Jedi Council refuses to do so. It is only after the murder of Qui Gon that Obi Wan is handed the burden to train Anakin, something he’d initially protested. “Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Indeed.
ESB shows that the old guard, good or bad, are intrinsically manipulative: that the children live with their parents’ sins, and end up having to atone for them. By the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke becomes a tragic figure; as Robin Cross put it in his 1985 book Science Fiction Films, “Like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956), he has saved those around him, but can find no peace for himself.” Since Lucas identifies so much with Luke (Luke-Lucas, etc), is this how he sees himself? I wonder. Even when taking a stand against his father, and redeeming himself through his actions, does he, nonetheless, become a slave to his past? The answer is ambiguous.
Note: Some parts of this essay were appropriated from the author’s previous writings on Star Wars.
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Labels: 80s, Coppola, Criticism, Guinness, Harrison Ford, J.E. Jones, John Williams, L. Kasdan, Liam Neeson, Lost, Lucas, Movie Tributes, Sequels, Star Wars, Television, Wayne
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