Thursday, October 03, 2013
Sirota already did it: Bye bye 'Bad' Part II
that STILL has yet to watch Breaking Bad in its entirety, close this story now.
By Edward Copeland
When envisioning the epic farewell I felt I must write upon the conclusion of Breaking Bad, I didn't anticipate an important section of the tribute would begin with a South Park reference to The Simpsons. (If, by chance, you missed Part I, click here.)
Now, anyone with even a smidgeon of understanding of the basic tenets of comedy knows that if you need to explain a joke, you've failed somewhere in the telling. Despite this rule of humor, forgive me for explaining the title of the second part of my Breaking Bad tribute, but I can't assume that all Breaking Bad fans reading this also hold knowledge of specific South Park episodes. Way back in that animated series' sixth season in 2002, poor Butters' alter ego, Professor Chaos (six years before any of us knew Walter White and his inhabiting spirit Heisenberg), finds every scheme he devises greeted by some variation of the episode's title: "The Simpsons Already Did It." I just spent a long way to travel to the point of my headline, which refers to the great columnist David Sirota's article, posted by Salon on Sept. 28, the day before "Felina" aired, titled "Walter White's sickness mirrors America." (If you didn't understand before, I imagine you comprehend now how explaining a joke tends to kill its punchline.) In his piece, Sirota posits:
the specific pressures and ideologies that make America exceptional at the very moment
the country is itself breaking bad.
The most obvious way to see that is to look at how Walter White’s move into the drug trade
was first prompted, in part, by his family’s fear that he would die prematurely for lack
of adequate health care. It is the kind of fear most people in the industrialized world
have no personal connection to — but that many American television watchers no doubt do.
That’s because unlike other countries, Walter White’s country is exceptional for being a place
where 45,000 deaths a year are related to a lack of comprehensive health insurance coverage.
That’s about ten 9/11′s worth of death each year because of our exceptional position
as the only industrialized nation without a universal public health care system
(and, sadly, Obamacare will not fix that)."
Aside from the fact the Sirota misses the mark a bit concerning Walt’s original motives for entering the meth-making business and makes it sound as if his family encouraged the idea and raised money concerns before he even started to cook (more specifics on that later), Sirota’s piece covers ground that I always planned to discuss as well. Sirota might not be the first person to voice this hypothesis, but I’ve only seen and read his article (post finale, as I purposely tried to avoid other pieces to make mine my own as much as possible). I also saw the funny package envisioning how Walter's tale would play out if set in Canada. Health care costs in the U.S., significant in Breaking Bad, secured itself as a crucial aspect of my retrospective since the first half of season five given that I’ve
existed as a permanent patient for nearly the exact same time period as Breaking Bad’s television run. Unfortunately, my experiences give me much in the way of first-hand knowledge on the subject through which to view the series' take. While Sirota argues that Walt began his criminal career to pay for his exceedingly costly cancer treatments and White indeed used his ill-gotten gains toward those bills, he never expressed a desire to make a load of money to keep himself alive. Walter White already resigned himself to the idea of his impending death. The meth money’s only purpose originally, according to Walt, merely meant leaving behind a nest egg for Skyler, Walt Jr. and his as-of-then unborn child. He said as much in the great scene from the first season episode “Gray Matter” (written by Patty Lin, directed by Tricia Brock) where the entire family gathers at Skyler’s behest to stage a pseudo-intervention of the health care variety, passing around the “talking pillow” to take the floor and address Walt as to why he should accept the Schwartzes’ offer to pay for his treatments. The scene turns particularly grand
when Marie surprises (and pisses off) her sister by agreeing with Walt about not wanting to suffer through the chemo treatments and succeeds at changing Hank’s mind as well. A wonderful example of how the show (as all the best dramas do) successfully mixed levity with tragedy. One of the funniest moments in the history of The Sopranos came in its fourth season episode “The Strong, Silent Type” (story by David Chase, written by Terence Winter, Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess, directed by Alan Taylor) when Tony’s crew attempts a drug intervention on Christopher with disastrous and hilarious results. The night that episode aired, the premiere of “The Grand Opening” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (directed by Robert B. Wiede) followed it, with Larry David’s own singular attempt at an emergency intervention for his new restaurant’s chef (Paul Sand) who had Tourette syndrome. My stomach hurt from laughing so hard that night. What makes interventions so easily comical? When Walt agrees to treatments and uses his meth money to pay (while lying to Skyler that he accepted Elliot and Gretchen’s offer to help), what motivates him isn’t (at least consciously) a sudden desire to fight the cancer but the need to live longer and build up a bigger bequest for his family. While the insanity of medical costs floats around the series at this time, this isn’t where Breaking Bad truly takes aim on our broken system.
As I wrote in my sole previous piece on Breaking Bad prior to this post-series wake/celebration, I came to the series late and only began watching it live in the third season that premiered March 21, 2010, and ended with Gale Boetticher opening his apartment door to an emotionally fragile and gun-wielding Jesse Pinkman on June 13. As
proved to be the case with each season of Breaking Bad, each new season topped the one that preceded it, even though no bad seasons or mediocre episodes exist. Breaking Bad tackled the high price of medicine, if not as an overriding concern, or motivation, in the first two seasons not only through the obvious costs of Walt’s cancer treatments, but also when Heisenberg first appeared and marched into the headquarters of the psychotic Tuco, demanding not only advance payment for his “product” but reparations as well to cover Jesse’s hospital bills from Tuco beating poor Pinkman within an inch of his life. For myself (and, admittedly, this came from overidentifying with someone losing the use of his legs, albeit not because of an assassination attempt by vengeance-seeking lookalike cousins), the series’ most direct discussion of the flaws in this country’s health care system came in the hospital scenes dealing with the aftermath of Hank’s shooting. In the early days, when Walt coughed up cashier’s checks for cancer bills
since his health insurance coverage through his school district didn’t approach the needed benefits to pay for his treatments, viewers saw some of the costs, but we never received a final bill, especially after Walt went the surgical option, handled by Dr. Victor Bravenec, played by Sam McMurray. McMurray also played Uncle Junior’s arrogant oncologist, Dr. John Kennedy, in the classic Sopranos episode “Second Opinion” (written by Lawrence Konner, directed by Tim Van Patten), where Tony and Furio used some not-so-friendly persuasion on the golf course to convince Kennedy to treat Junior right. (When McMurray showed up on Breaking Bad as an oncologist, part of me wondered if his character wasn’t Kennedy, having relocated under a new name to Albuquerque out of fear of mob repercussions, unaware that his new patient might be deadlier than anyone in that northern New Jersey crew could be.) Back to Hank. We know the extra needed to get Schrader on his feet again. That even came up again in the final eight episodes: $177,000. Pretty pathetic that a loyal public servant such as Hank Schrader, whose job constantly required him to put his life on the line, didn’t get the kind of catastrophic coverage he required when he needed it. For all the times, she could annoy him and cause him grief with that little kleptomania problem, Hank Schrader could not have chosen a better mate than the former Marie Lambert. Marie might only work as an X-ray technician, but she spoke the truth as she yelled at the various people in the hospital that Hank had to begin work on regaining the use of his legs immediately because a delay of even two weeks would be too late. I actually cried when I watched the episode where Betsy Brandt spoke those lines as Marie because I’d yelled those words myself at people in the hospital when I went in there in May 2008. (For those unfamiliar with my personal plight, click here.) I already had limited use of my legs because of my primary progressive multiple sclerosis. Two weeks stuck in bed can do irreparable damage to a marathon runner. Quite some time ago, I was able to make contact with Ms. Brandt and shared my tale with her about how I wish that I’d had someone like Marie back then to fight on my side. She graciously wrote back, “Edward, Marie would have definitely been your champion…and we all need a champion at times.”
So much more to say. Who knows when I will get them posted? As I posted on Facebook, odds are this is psychosomatic or coincidental, but my M.S. symptoms have spread to parts of my body they had avoided before since Breaking Bad ended. Perhaps sheer force of will held them at bay until I saw the series until its conclusion. I haven't written all I planned to yet, but this makes for a good stopping point for Part II.
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Labels: Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm, David Chase, Larry David, South Park, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, TV Tribute
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Monday, May 21, 2012
"Tests take time. Treatment's quicker."
By Edward Copeland
Sigh…if only Gregory House were my doctor. I think we'd get along well. We're actually very much alike, minus the Vicodin addiction, but I am willing to learn. (In truth, most every pill and patch I've been prescribed over the years to deal with my various pains, anything that works on the excruciating torture my nonworking legs inflict on me I eventually build up a tolerance t0, so I've wondered why that hasn't happened to House at some point. As you all know, very shortly (about 90 minutes), we'll be getting our last new visit with him. First, an hour-long retrospective then the last episode titled "Everybody Dies," a play on one of his favorite truisms "Everybody lies." I haven't seen it. I've heard rumors that many former cast members will pop up somehow, perhaps even Kal Penn as the late Dr. Kutner.
I didn't watch House, M.D. from the beginning. (Does anyone really use the M.D. in the title? We know what show we're talking about.) In fact, I became addicted to the show, or more accurately Hugh Laurie's character, while stuck in two hospitals for a total of three-and-a-half-months in 2008 when USA seemed to show House marathons most days and at least one day of the weekend. I didn't get to see the show in order so it took a long time before I ever saw the episode that even explained what happened to his leg. Whenever anyone describes Gregory House as a jerk, I feel like Larry David does on Curb Your Enthusiasm whenever anyone tells him that the George character on Seinfeld was a loser and Larry gets all defensive. At least when it comes to how he treats the medical side of things, he's being a jerk for the right reasons. As I lay in my hospital bed watching him defy the Princeton-Plainsboro's evil new corporate owner Edward Vogler (Chi McBride) while I endured the cost-cutting tactics of real-life hospital administrators for whom patient care ranks low on their priority list, how could I not cheer House? If only more doctors valued their patients above their portfolios the way Gregory House does.
Admittedly, House the show hasn't lived up to the quality of its early seasons for quite some time, but I've stayed with it because of Laurie. He's created a character too great not to watch. It isn't the same as it was with Homicide: Life on the Street, a series I watched past its prime solely because of Andre Braugher's Frank Pembleton. However, when Braugher decided to leave the show, I followed him right out the door. If Laurie left House, no conceivable scenario would allow the show to carry on without him — especially since, as of a couple weeks ago, Omar Epps' Foreman and Robert Sean Leonard's Wilson serve as the only other original cast members standing.
I wanted to write a bigger advance piece before the finale aired but, as you can tell, I ran out of time. Hopefully, after I see how it ends I can comment on the ending itself as well as talking a bit more in detail about the show as a whole and picking my favorite episodes. Until then, a fun YouTube package I found that built a montage of some of the best House clinic moments.
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Labels: Braugher, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Homicide, House, Larry David, Seinfeld, Television
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Monday, December 05, 2011
Like seeing your dreams in the middle of the day
By Edward Copeland
Throughout my years of reviewing, when the time came to write about the latest Martin Scorsese picture, I always felt compelled to try to craft the best piece my capabilities allowed. With Hugo marking the first time the director has used the advancements in 3D technology, I not only owed Hugo the best prose I could muster, but it required seeing Hugo the way Scorsese intended. However, because of the physical limitations that have burdened me since 2008, trips to a movie theater have become a daunting task that requires literal heavy lifting by others and a substantial expenditure of energy on my part to accomplish such a journey, even with my good friend Adderall's help. Because of the logistics involved to get me out of my bed and my home, I usually only get out for doctors' appointments and unplanned trips to the emergency room. However, when Martin Scorsese releases a new film to theaters in 3D, I had to do my damnedest to get there physically. I had to wait to see Shine a Light and Shutter Island on DVD. Hugo happens to be the first film I've seen in a movie theater in more than a year (and only my fourth since 2009) as well as my first in "real D" 3D ever. If Marty's name weren't attached, I wouldn't have made the effort, not just for any 3D movie. This creates perhaps the oddest start to a review of a Scorsese movie I've written, but when your life undergoes as massive a change as mine has in the past three years, it feels appropriate to begin my Hugo review by focusing first on what it took to get me to the movie in the first place.
As frequent readers of this blog know, I am bedridden. I won't repeat the details of what put me here, but you can read this if you don't know. To get out of bed requires at least two people setting me up on a sling and attaching it to our electric lift. For a trip that isn't to a doctor, some additional steps have to be taken. For those journeys, I can go in my usual hospital gown attire. To visit a more public place such as a movie theater, I first have to be helped to put on a semblance of clothing, which isn't the easiest task in the world when your legs don't move and you have to work the pants and shirt around a suprapubic catheter and its attached collection bag. When that's out of the way and I'm centered on the sling and its straps are attached to the hooks of the lift, one person uses the lift to raise me off the bed while the other stands behind my wheelchair to guide me in and make sure I'm tight against the back and won't slide out during transport. We strap belts around my chest and legs to help me maneuver the chair from my bedroom through the house, into the garage and up the ramp of our specially equipped van where I perform a 180 degree turn in a limited space. Then four tethered hooks and a seat belt are attached to me. Assuming all of this has gone OK — and sometimes it takes quite a bit of trial and error to make certain that I'm centered on the sling and that I'm firmly against the back of the wheelchair. Then we can ride. For trips to doctors, we receive the help of the local ambulance service that provides free "lift assist" support, sending one of their paramedic units to help my aging father get me up. Unfortunately, this service only applies to medical-related jaunts. So, unless I lied, we couldn't have them come out and help get me up so I could go see Hugo.
Three mornings a week, I have caregivers who help to give me baths, etc., from 8 a.m. to noon. According to the national website for Hugo, the theater closest to me would have its first 3D showing on the Monday after it opened at 10:15 a.m. So I decided to make my first plan be that my caregiver would come an hour later than usual and I'd eat breakfast before he got here. He'd help get me dressed and get me up and into the chair and go see Hugo with us and we'd take the bath afterward. Unfortunately, the website was incorrect and when I checked the actual theater's showtime, they weren't having a 3D showing of Hugo until 2:30 in the afternoon, which wouldn't work because of other commitments the caregiver had in the afternoon not to mention how much that would cost me in overtime. With Monday blown, I started looking at the other theaters showing Hugo in the city. The earliest 3D showtime for Hugo in the city was 11:30 a.m. at a different theater. Wednesday couldn't work for the caregiver because his son had a doctor's appointment during the time the movie would be playing. Finally, I hit upon a plan: Thankfully, the caregiver's Thursday was free so he came just to help me get dressed, out of the bed and into the wheelchair and to accompany us to the theater for Hugo.
I had been to this theater many times, but not since I'd been forced to use a wheelchair (which occurred prior to my bedridden status) so I didn't realize how piss-poor their seating arrangements for wheelchairs were. Because of my nearly constant leg pain, when I did go to the movies in the chair, to make things as comfortable as possible, I tilt-raise the chair and recline the back so the footrests can be folded to extend my legs out straight. At the other two theaters in the city I'd usually frequent, it was never a problem as handicapped seating would have recessed openings adjacent to them allowing plenty of room for this to take place. At this theater, the space between the ground level rows of seating and the start of the stadium seating is very narrow and I barely had enough room to do much of the recline or lifting of legs without smacking into either the railing behind me or the seats in front of me. I arranged myself the best I could and anxiously awaited Hugo's start.
Of course, first I had to endure the trailers, which in the non-3D portion previewed a film set for the January dumping ground co-starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton called Joyful Noise. The trailer even includes a joke about Parton's plastic surgery, which they really had to include since her mouth now resembles Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman when he puts the flesh makeup over his disfigured visage. They then told us to put on our glasses for the 3D previews. All the animated films designed and made in the process such as The Lorax, The Adventures of Tintin and The Pirates: Band of Misfits looked impressive. However, the previews of re-releases of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and James Cameron's Titanic, both retrofitted to appear to be in 3D, looked like shit. Both should carry the tag line: Think They Stunk in Two Dimensions? Wait Until You Catch a Whiff in Three! Finally, it was time for Hugo.
I can't underestimate how excited I get when I'm about to see a new Martin Scorsese picture unfurl in a movie theater. I used to feel that way when I'd see the white-on-black titles of a Woody Allen film before he hit his slump and started repeating himself in the '90s. With the exceptions of Shine a Light and Shutter Island, I've seen every Scorsese feature in a theater starting with The King of Comedy. That includes After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ (which required driving to another state and standing in a line in the rain since no Oklahoma theater would show it), "Life Lessons" from New York Stories, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence (which I also drove out of state to see, but only because I was impatient), Casino (which I saw on a New York junket where I briefly spoke to Scorsese), Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed. I even saw A Personal Journey Through American Movies With Martin Scorsese when it was shown in a New York theater and was able to see The Last Waltz in a 20th anniversary theatrical re-release. Now, Hugo joins that list. That's 17 films. I may have seen more films in a theater directed by Scorsese than by any other director if it weren't for Woody Allen's prolific nature and my earlier start with Steven Spielberg (beginning with Jaws), though Hugo puts Scorsese ahead of Spielberg by one. When I worshipped Woody, I stuck with him well into his doldrums. My first Allen in a theater remains my choice for his best, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I saw them all that way through Curse of the Jade Scorpion. After that, I didn't have to see them and then it required too much work to see them. I've only seen one Allen in a theater since — Whatever Works — and that had as much to do with Larry David as with Woody. Still, that adds up to 20 films in a theater. It's been Spielberg's later years when I've been skipping out on theatrical showings (even when I could have attended).
Hugo starts with an awe-inspiring image that serves well as an introduction to live-action 3D for a skeptic who has felt, based on what he has read and heard, that 3D was little more than a gimmick to pump up movie ticket prices. With the exception of a couple of IMAX shorts in its early days, the last (and only) 3D movie I had ever watched in a theater was 1983's hokey-as-hell Jaws 3-D, back when the glasses were those cheap cardboard spectacle with plastic lenses of red and blue (or cyan if you want to get technical). In Hugo, we open on an FX shot that evokes an overhead shot of the entirety of a snowy Paris in the latter half of the 1920s, gliding past familiar landmarks until we arrive at its central train station and one of its huge clocks, only instead of the Arabic numeral 4, a boy's face peers out at us. The shot reminds me of young Henry Hill looking out his window at the gangsters' arrival at Tuddy's cab stand in Goodfellas. What Hugo shows us only gets more enthralling from there.
We learn that the 12-year-old boy is Hugo Cabret (played by the engaging Asa Butterworth, whose penetrating blue eyes might carry him far), who lives inside the walls of that Paris train station, winding all those clocks to make sure they keep running on time. It is a job that he inherited by default when his father (played by Jude Law in flashbacks) dies and his only living relative, Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone), takes him in. Uncle Claude is a drunken lout whose job is winding the train station's clocks so — at the cost of Hugo's education — the uncle jerks Hugo out of school and makes him his apprentice at the train station, learning his job and living there as well. Soon, Uncle Claude vanishes and Hugo takes it upon himself to perform his uncle's duties. Since he's doing the job unofficially, Hugo must filch whatever he can for sustenance as well as parts to finish repairing the automaton that his father found languishing at the museum where he worked and brought home to restore. Hugo has continued working on the unusual piece, convinced that if he fixes it, he will find a message left behind by his much-missed father. Hugo creates his own universe within the train station, though he must be careful to escape the notice of the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), whose main joy in life appears to be apprehending unattended children and shipping them off to orphanages. Separate from the use of 3D, once the movie takes us inside Hugo's world of the train station, the film proves to be a true triumph of production design that I imagine dazzles just as much in the 2D version. Dante Ferretti (Oscar winner for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and The Aviator) serves as production designer, the eighth time he's worked with Scorsese, and the sets for Hugo prove so elaborate that the credits list 10 art directors who assisted Ferretti. Francesca Lo Schiavo performed the role of set decorator, her 18th collaboration with Ferretti (she won her two Oscars for the same two films he did) and her fifth with Scorsese. Together, all the crafts people, their meticulous work filmed through the lens of master cinematographer Robert Richardson (Oscar winner for JFK and The Aviator and whose credits also include Inglourious Basterds, The Doors, City of Hope and Eight Men Out), create a visual feast that's a wonder to behold and would make a remarkable moviegoing experience even if it lacked sound, appropriate given its underlying subject matter.
Hugo has been adapted by John Logan from the unusual children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. The book, which Selznick (a first cousin, twice removed of the famous producer David O. Selznick) wrote and illustrated, is historical fiction that runs more than 500 pages long of which nearly half of those pages contain illustrations. Published in 2007, the book Selznick describes as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things" won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first for a "novel" since the prize goes to picture books. No wonder it attracted Scorsese.
In the train station, one of the main places where Hugo finds parts to swipe for his automaton is the toy shop, run by a very grumpy man (Ben Kingsley, always good, but giving another memorable performance in a career full of diverse roles). Believing he's dozing, Hugo reaches up to pinch some parts when the man grabs him and harangues him for being the thief who has been stealing from
him. He demands that the boy empty his pockets and Hugo complies on the right side containing all the pilfered pieces, but avoids his left pocket until the toy shop owner insists. Hugo reluctantly removes his father's notebook, which elicits a strange reaction from the man, who demands to know if Hugo made the drawings in it. A desperate Hugo begs the man to let him have the notebook back since he didn't steal it, but the toy shop's owner refuses, forcing Hugo to run along before he calls the Station Inspector. Later in the day, Hugo makes a new acquaintance — Isabelle (the ever-versatile Chloë Grace Moretz), who turns out to live with the toy shop owner, whom she calls Papa Georges, and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). Hugo tells her about his notebook and how important it is to him, but refuses to say why. He waits for Isabelle's Papa Georges to close for the day and then starts to follow him, again pleading for the return of the notebook. The bitter man tells Hugo he plans to go home and burn it. Isabelle, who is listening nearby, promises Hugo that she'll keep watch over it so nothing happens. The next day, he returns to the toy shop. Georges says he expected to see Hugo again and hands him a cloth full of ashes, sending the boy fleeing in tears. Isabelle overhears the exchange and tells Hugo not to cry, but she again wants to know what's in the notebook because Papa Georges and Mama Jeanne talked and argued about it all night and Papa Georges cried as well, but he didn't burn it. He just did that to try to get Hugo to stop bothering him.Since Hugo opened prior to Thanksgiving and was being discussed in detail long before that, it's doubtful that many readers interested in the film don't already know the basics of the story and this isn't the type of movie where one needs to worry about spoilers. (If there exists in the world a person outraged that a Hugo review ruins the movie's revelation that Papa Georges is actually filmmaking pioneer Georges Méliès, I want to meet that person to find out how they knew who Méliès is but hadn't heard or read about Hugo's plot yet.) Martin Scorsese does have an unfortunate tendency to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker, when he may be the most eclectic great director we have working today — and he's been that way for a long time. In a way, you could say he resembles the Howard Hawks of his generation, working in practically every genre yet leaving his distinctive stamp on all his works. Granted, Scorsese possesses more
sophistication than Hawks — in terms of both visual style and subject matter. Hawks also didn't run back and forth between fiction and documentaries the way Scorsese does. Hugo, while it's perfectly suitable for kids to see, really works best for a special kind of kid — the type of kid Scorsese was or that I was or many of my friends were — budding film buffs. Hugo, at its core, isn't really the story of two kids trying to solve a mystery as they do in many tales that enchant young people, though that's there. It's not merely the story of an orphaned boy living alone inside a place that seems magical to him but who's pursued by a pseudo-villain, though that element exists in Hugo as well, primarily in the form of Sacha Baron Cohen's Station Inspector stalking the corridors with his Doberman. It isn't even the story of how a boy teaches a bitter old man to love life again, but that common children's story not only exists in Hugo, the main strand builds from it to accomplish what Scorsese really aims to do: pen a cinematic love letter to movies. Because of all the great directors working today, it's doubtful that any filmmaker loves movies more than Scorsese does — and it isn't just making movies that he loves. He loves watching them, helping to preserve them and just sitting around enthusiastically talking about them. Hugo, in its own way, allows him to accomplish all those film-related gerunds at once and address them to a new audience. I bet in the back of his mind somewhere, he hopes that someone born in 1999 or so sees Hugo and the experience births a new serious film fan, one who goes home and asks his or her parents about seeing a silent movie, wanting to start at the beginning of film history. If we had a title of filmmaking laureate as we do poet laureate, would there be any other American worth nominating? He's our country's film professor. They often pose the question to people about any career they might have, "Would you still do this if you didn't get paid?" I think we know what Marty's answer would be, but how would someone like a Michael Bay answer?With Hugo, Scorsese begins the film moving at a pace equal to the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning. Hugo starts leisurely with that overhead shot of Paris, but it picks up speed as it enters the train station and takes off like the famous Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas on crystal meth, zooming through those wide corridors packed with people, following Hugo through the innards of the station, sending him up and down ladders and traversing halls lined with pipes exhaling steam. Much of Hugo zips along at this pace when in the station, but Scorsese knows when to slow things down as well. In the production design, I'm sure they purposely built
the set's features to evoke silent films such as the many large mechanisms that run the station's clocks that look straight out of Chaplin's Modern Times and the clocks that reminded me of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last from the beginning, long before Hugo takes Isabelle to see Lloyd's movie and Hugo ends up hanging from a minute hand for real when fleeing the Station Inspector. By this time in his directing career (21 feature films since 1967, not counting his short films, documentaries, music videos, commercials and TV work), Scorsese has employed every filmmaking technique there is except for the 3D he's using for the first time here. It also seems to me that he utilizes more shots from high and low angles in Hugo than he usually does for a single movie. The big question comes down to how he handles the 3D, which puts me in an awkward position since I have nothing to compare it against except those coming attraction trailers. For me at least, I thought it was used very well for the first half-hour or so and isolated moments after that. After about 30 minutes though, I found the 3D to be somewhat exhausting and it wore out its novelty with me. When Hugo reaches its emotional climax, with Méliès embracing his legacy and parts of his films and A Trip to the Moon restored in its entirety, I found the 3D to be a distraction. Having seen that Georges Méliès film, I know it wasn't in 3D, so why was the moon coming toward me? I imagine that entire sequence affects the viewer more emotionally in the 2D prints.
Fortunately, the eventual 3D fatigue didn't sour me on the film itself which I enjoyed overall, thanks not only to Scorsese's still-visible mastery and his right-hand woman, film editor Thelma Schoonmaker and all the other behind-the-scenes talent. Most importantly, Hugo succeeds on the strength of its cast (though why everyone in Paris has a British accent I have no idea). Since the movie rests primarily on the shoulders of young Asa Butterfield, if his casting had been off, they'd been sunk, but he does quite well, holding his own with performers of all different levels of experience. His Hugo and Chloë Grace Moretz's Isabelle make a good team of young amateur detectives and friends who each compensate for something the other lacks. Isabelle's book smarts help their research (and con their way out of a run-in with the Station Inspector) while Hugo introduces Isabelle to the wonders of the movies, which Papa Georges refuses to let her see. Until that point, Isabelle has been the adventurer, but Hugo sneaks her into the theater to see the movie free. "We could get in trouble," she warns Hugo. "That's how you know it's an adventure," Hugo tells her. Moretz truly has proved herself an amazing young actress, putting on a British accent here, playing the young vampire last year in Let Me In and as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wise-beyond-her-years younger sister in (500) Days of Summer.
Also turning in fine, brief appearances are the previously mentioned Jude Law, Ray Winstone and Helen McCrory as well as Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Emily Mortimer and Christopher Lee playing various inhabitants of the train station. Sacha Baron Cohen provides ample comic relief as the Station Inspector who suffered a wound in World War I that requires a mechanical hinge on one of his legs so that it comes off as sort of an homage to Kenneth Mars' Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein. One of Cohen's funniest scenes involves Madame Emilie (De la Tour) trying to get him to show her his best smile so he can talk to Lisette (Mortimer), the girl who sells flowers that he's developed a crush on but is too shy to approach. One other performance worth noting is Michael Stuhlbarg as Rene Tabard, the film professor who wrote a book about Méliès and restores his legacy. I don't know if Scorsese met Stuhlbarg on the set of Boardwalk Empire, which he executive produces and Stuhlbarg gives one of the series' best performances as Arnold Rothstein, or if he saw him first in a completely different role as Larry Gopnik in the Coens' A Serious Man, but Stuhlbarg's chameleon-like ability astonishes.
The credit for what ultimately makes Hugo work as well as it does belongs to Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès. Kingsley has been excellent for a long time in many roles since he first captured our attention in 1982's Gandhi, showing he's equally adept in all genres and time periods in the years since. His work in Hugo may be his best since his incomparable turn in Sexy Beast, though the two parts couldn't be more different. There is neither flash nor fire in his Méliès, but you see the loss lurking beneath the man's surface as well as the joy in flashbacks to his filmmaking days. Kingsley's acting stands out better in 3D than all the other effects in Hugo combined.
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Labels: 10s, Boardwalk Empire, Books, Cameron, Chaplin, Coens, Fiction, Gordon-Levitt, Hawks, Kingsley, Larry David, Nicholson, Scorsese, Selznick, Spielberg, Star Wars, Tim Burton, Woody
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Friday, July 22, 2011
He's yelling for society
By Edward Copeland
Having seen the first three episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm's eighth season now, no arc has developed yet that Larry David will carry through the 10-episode season, unless this year's theme is the pursuit of laughs at any cost and pushing the envelope of good taste even further than Curb has gone before. It appears to be paying off in the ratings: Its premiere was the highest-rated episode in the show's history and the second episode got higher numbers than that. If your sphincter muscles have tightened to the point that any sense of humor you might once have had now needs life support machines to survive, Curb is not the show for you and I'll be too busy laughing frequently and loudly to hear if you voice any objections to my praising David's ballsy genius. The new season's first two episodes have been very good, but the episode that airs Sunday night may end up in the pantheon of classic Curbs.
"You know what you are — you are a social assassin," Larry's manager and best friend Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin) tells Larry in Sunday's episode "The Palestinian Chicken." Jeff bestows this new title upon Larry after he
shares the story that when he went to pay Ron (Jason Kravits), a mutual friend and member of their five-member club golf team, for accidentally backing his car into the front of Ron's Lexus, Ron asked him to pay him back in a different way. Ron's wife Ilene (Maggie Wheeler), you see, who Larry says "could be Susie's twin" in the way she constantly berates Ron to the point that he barely speaks around her, has a particularly annoying habit that whenever someone says something funny she verbally says, "LOL." It drives Ron up the wall, but he was so impressed by how Larry speaks his mind about things during a dinner party for the members of the golf team ahead of the club's championship, Ron offered to pay for his own repairs if Larry would confront Ilene on how annoying the habit is the next time she says, "LOL." That thread is just one small part of the hilarity of Sunday night's episode, the third of a season that began with a very funny premiere and has escalated in terms of laughs with each subsequent installment. The season's premiere, "The Divorce," picks up exactly where season 7 left off where it looked as if Larry and Cheryl might be reconciling when Larry realized that Cheryl had left the cup ring on Julia Louis-Dreyfus' table that Julia had blamed Larry for ("Do you respect wood?") and Larry was calling Julia to get Cheryl to
admit her culpability as Cheryl asked him not to do it. The scene continues with Cheryl telling Larry that he never listens to her and she storms out. A title card indicates that it's ONE YEAR LATER and Larry sits across from his divorce attorney Andrew Berg (Paul F. Tompkins) making the final arrangements on his divorce. Larry is going to get to keep the house and it sounds as if he's getting a pretty good deal. As he emphasizes to Berg, Larry wants to look like he's being a good guy, but he doesn't want to be a good guy. I do wonder if this episode marks Cheryl Hines' swan song on the show. In the closing credits, she's listed as also-starring as usual but in the following two episodes in which she doesn't appear, her name is absent. At the same time, Susie Essman's name remains in the credits though Susie Greene doesn't appear in the second episode. Even though Larry David plays a fictionalized version of himself, you have to think that Hines has become a victim of circumstance given David's real-life, well-publicized divorce from his wife Laurie.That, however, merely sets up the laugh-filled, taboo-breaking hijinks to come in "The Divorce." Among the jaw-dropping "I can't believe they're doing that" moments in the episode:
Watching Larry David fumble with a tampon while reading instructions through a bathroom door to a freaked-out young teen has to be one of the show's most sustained set pieces of awkward and uncomfortable comedy. You aren't sure if you're laughing at the scene's content or its audacity. Throughout the long run of Curb Your Enthusiasm (now HBO's longest-running comedy or drama series), while the series seldom has failed to deliver the laughs, after awhile the mechanics of its formula had become a bit predictable. While so far the eighth season continues to follow the broad outline of the formula where all the various strands come together at the end, so far this season seems to be much looser, with the comedy taking precedence. As a result, it is strengthening the underlying skeleton because that's not what's being emphasized any longer.
Some other highlights from "The Divorce": A classic Susie Greene moment when Larry, the Greenes and the Funkhousers have brunch together and Jeff tells her that if they ever split up, he'd just divide everything 50-50 and give her the best of everything to which Susie replies, "What are you fuckin' kiddin' me? You think we're gonna have a nice divorce if we ever get divorced? I'm takin' you for everything you've got, mister. I'm taking your balls and I'm thumbtackin' them to the wall." Bob Einstein always has been a delight as Marty Funkhouser when he has appeared, but he's hitting it out of the park in all three episodes so far this season. In "The Divorce," he announces at the brunch that he's going on a business
trip to London and Larry innocently asks why his wife Nan isn't going, only to get the dirtiest look from Marty when Larry sells Nan (Ann Ryerson) how wonderful London is this time of year. Later, Marty confronts Larry about how he's ruined his getaway because all they do is stare bored at each other or she'll talk over him. Larry asks why he doesn't get divorced. "I'm lazy," Marty admits. Later, he drops by Larry's elated as Leon (J.B. Smoove, still hanging around), Larry and Jeff are playing pool to announce that he's getting a divorce too. He asked Nan for one and she said yes. Leon suggests he tie strings of cans to his car like you do when you get married that say JUST DIVORCED. Jeff is terribly jealous — Larry and Marty are getting divorces, Leon doesn't need one and he's stuck with Susie. It's just a warmup for what Einstein gets to do in the second and third episodes. 
That second episode, "The Safe House," ramps up the laughs even higher. So often, Larry ends up getting punished for his actions or his "rules" as how society should function. Too often what gets overlooked is that Larry either has good intentions or he's just right. The opening scene of "The Safe House" offers a perfect illustration of this. Larry is minding his own business, walking down the wide aisle of a grocery store to pick up a carton of a certain ice cream he wants. In front of the case holding the flavor he seeks are two women — one (Miriam Flynn) comforting the other (Tymberlee Hill) who is crying and visibly upset about something. The aisle contains no one else but the three of them and Larry tries his best to coax them to move over just so he can get his ice cream and be on his way, but the woman doing the comforting turns on him — insisting she's done her best to be polite and ask him to give them a minute. Larry appears to leave and the woman tells the bawling woman not to pay any attention to
"that jerk" then we see one of the best sight gags ever as Larry's arms creeps through the freezer as the women continue to stand there. Of course, Larry was right. Why should anyone have to wait to get one item when the other two, one of them upset or not, could have easily moved elsewhere? Later in the episode, Larry arrives home in time to catch the woman (Michaela Watkins) who has been walking her dog and letting him go on his yard. Larry yells at her for not bringing a plastic bag with her. "A dog without a bag is incomplete," he tells her. She claims forgetfulness, but he counters that she forgets every time. "You didn't have to yell," she says. "I'm not just yelling for me. I'm yelling for society!" Larry shouts. Honestly, don't we all want to yell for society sometimes? It turns out that both the crying woman and the dog walker are battered women who now reside in a "safe house" a few doors down from Larry which he learns when the other woman knocks on his door and introduces herself as Margaret. She wants Larry to come to apologize to the women to give them "a positive male" image. Larry doesn't think he has anything to apologize for, but agrees to do it anyway, though he's puzzled when one of the women living in the house, Dale, turns out to be a big gal that he thinks is pulling a scam because she looks as if she could take care of herself. If she looks familiar, she's played by Jen Kober, with a different look and demeanor than her role as Melissa Leo's friend Andrea on Treme. As has been a recurring topic throughout the run of Curb, "The Safe House" also touches on racial issues with no one wanting to leap to conclusions when a laptop Larry was supposed to be watching appears to be stolen after having asked an African American to watch it for him when Larry has to leave. More disturbingly, it gets Leon to regret how it gives his race a bad reputation as he proceeds to rattle off all the personal information
he knows about Larry that he's never used but he could have to rip him off if he wanted. Suddenly, Larry begins to wonder why it is that Leon still lives with him. The purely comic thread of "The Safe House" gets launched by Funkhouser in a scene where he's a veritable one-liner machine. He informs Jeff and Larry over a meal that Richard Lewis has yet another new girlfriend and that she's a burlesque dancer with quite impressive breasts. Lewis joins them briefly, but says he has an audition that he is running late to because of a phone call. Lewis finds it annoying that Funkhouser told the others what his girlfriend did for a living and denies that her breasts were the attraction, going on to defend the tradition of burlesque, saying that without burlesque we wouldn't have Chaplin. "Chaplin was a great pole dancer," Funkhouser comments. Lewis swears that it's her inner beauty and spirituality that attracted him. After a pause, Funkhouser asks him, "Have you set a day aside when you're finally going to look at her face?" Jeff and Larry can't stop laughing and since this is an improvised show, who knows if that laughter was in character?"The Divorce" and "The Safe House" turn out to be mere appetizers for the meal that is Sunday night's episode "The Palestinian Chicken." The episode takes its title from a restaurant run by Palestinians which Larry and Jeff have heard nothing but great things about and decide to try after finishing a practice round with Ron and Eddie (Larry Miller), two of the other three members of their five-man club golf team. For some reason, their fifth member and best golfer, Funkhouser, has been mysteriously scarce of late. This does bring up one criticism that I do have of Curb on occasion. They so
frequently have actors and comedians play themselves, that it throws me off when they are supposed to be a character. They've done this before with Michael McKean and Tim Meadows, here they do it with Larry Miller. As soon as I see him, I assume he's supposed to be himself so it takes a little acclimating to realize that he's playing a completely fictional character. The food at Al-Abbas' Original Best Chicken turns out to be as great as its word-of-mouth indicated, but it's definitely not a Jew-friendly place with lots of anti-Israel posters lining the walls. Larry tells Jeff that if someone who's Jewish wanted to cheat on their spouse, this would be the place to go because they wouldn't get caught. Larry spots an attractive Palestinian woman (Anne Bedian) and suggests to Jeff that perhaps she could be the next Mrs. David, but Jeff thinks that if she's going to get over her anti-Semitism, Larry wouldn't be the man to bring her around. Larry admits that is part of the attraction. "You're always attracted to someone who doesn't want you, right?" Larry says. "Here, you have someone who not only doesn't want you, but doesn't even recognize your right to exist."
When they have the dinner party where Ron's wife annoys with the "LOL" and Larry hits the Lexus, they finally learn where Funkhouser has been hiding. He tells them that he has had a midlife crisis and rededicated his life to Judaism, meeting with this new rabbi every day and wearing his yarmulke all the time. The Greenes have puzzled everyone by bringing daughter Sammi (Ashly Holloway, the same actress who has played her since the second season classic "The Doll" in 2001). During the dinner, it comes up that Al-Abbas plans to open a second location — next to Goldblatt's Deli. Susie decides to organize a protest. Some argue that they have a right in the U.S. to open where they want to but, as they've done before, Curb has sneaked some parallels to a real controversy, in this case the whole Ground Zero mosque brouhaha, into a story, but for laughs. I'm not going to spell out in detail all the twists and turns in this week's episode just so you can enjoy it all the more, but I have to say that they do give Sammi Greene more than she has ever had to do before and, as Larry says to her, "Boy, you're really your mother's daughter, aren't you?"
There aren't many series that you see churning out episodes at this high of quality in their eighth season, but so far this season Curb Your Enthusiasm is three for three with "The Palestinian Chicken" destined for inclusion on the list of their best.
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Labels: Chaplin, Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO, Larry David, Melissa Leo, Television, Treme
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Saturday, July 09, 2011
My Enthusiasm Builds
By Edward Copeland
If you are as big a fan of Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm as I am, your excitement probably has nearly reached its boiling point with its eighth season premiere about to debut Sunday night on HBO at 10 p.m. Eastern/Pacific and 9 p.m. Central time. Imagine how frustrated you would be if you were lucky enough to be sent a preview DVD of three of this season's episodes, except they aren't the first three episodes. They are the third, the fifth and the ninth out of the season's 10-episode run. Since David always tends to have an arc that spans the entire season, how could I in good conscience watch episodes out of chronological order? As much as the DVD tempts me, I can't give in. I did get a release describing the first two episodes and the fourth and I know this season will take Larry to New York for much of the season, but I don't know much beyond that.
From the release, despite the ending of season 7, it doesn't sound as if a Larry and Cheryl reconciliation looms on the horizon. Many of the best guest stars of the past will be turning up again this year including Richard Lewis, Wanda Sykes and the greatest discovery of recent years, J.B. Smoove as Leon. Some of the big names making appearances on season eight, which I didn't realize until I read the release makes Curb the longest-running comedy or drama in HBO history, are: Bill Buckner, Michael J. Fox, Ana Gasteyer, Ricky Gervais, Michael Gross, Harry Hamlin, Larry Miller, Aida Turturro, Mookie Wilson and Jo Anne Worley.
Since I can't cite specifics of what's to come this season, thankfully HBO has uploaded previews onto YouTube to provide some glimpses in case you haven't seen them already. First, their season 8 trailer.
They've also aired a brief "Invitation to the set."
I had thought about trying to do a list of my 10 favorite Curb episodes so far, but since my friend Matt Zoller Seitz is doing a slideshow of his at Salon, I didn't want to appear that I was copying. I started perusing YouTube for favorite moments and I just grabbed a few by virtue of what was available.
First, the surprisingly touching and funny end to Season 6 when Cheryl finally left Larry.
Second, just one brief clip from the classic second season episode "Trick or Treat," which had so many funny things going on that every scene was a winner.
Finally, the hysterical season three closer "The Grand Opening" that was one of the memorable nights of funny television, starting with The Sopranos' fourth season episode "The Strong, Silent Type" that started with a zonked-out Christopher accidentally sitting on Adriana's dog and then had the gangsters stage their version of a drug intervention. When I'd stopped laughing at that, we get to Curb with the restaurant finally opening with Paul Sand as the French chef with Tourette's. This was the climax, with Larry saving the day.
Now, I just have to wait until Sunday night and see what Larry, after trying to do a new TV show, open a restaurant, star on Broadway, learn if he was adopted, decide whether to donate a kidney, take in a family made homeless by a hurricane and have his wife leave him and concoct a Seinfeld reunion to try to win her back, has in store for us next. I'm sure it will be prettty, prettty good.
Of course, next week will be the real heartbreaker: New Curbs will air opposite the long-awaited fourth season of Breaking Bad.
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Labels: Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO, Larry David, Seinfeld, Television, The Sopranos
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Saturday, January 15, 2011
Let's not be that careful out there (so great TV can be made)
By Edward Copeland
Three days ago, I celebrated the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking comedy series All in the Family, which not only addressed issues unheard of for a television comedy, but also introduced dramatic elements to the half-hour comedy format. Ten years and three days later, a drama premiered that almost did the reverse, upending what an hour-long dramatic series could be and injecting a healthy dose of humor, often of the darkest variety, into its story. That series was Hill Street Blues and 30 years later, it's still as strong as it was when it premiered.
When Hill Street Blues debuted, I was in sixth grade and had little use for what passed for hour-long drama at the time. Police dramas were pretty formulaic: crime committed, cops solve crime. Big hour-long shows when I was growing up contained too much goody-goodiness for me (see The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie). The only hour-long show I can recall liking much that wasn't a detective/mystery show was Lou Grant. I didn't tune in to Hill Street Blues
right away, but a classmate sang its praises so I started watching, albeit late, though I caught up with the early episodes in reruns. I was enthralled. The series came to me around the same time that I was discovering Robert Altman in general and his film Nashville in particular. As I've written before, I'm a sucker for large ensemble casts because they seem more realistic to me. My life has lots of people in it, not just a manageable handful. When I saw Hill Street Blues with its opening credits that began with 13 regulars and countless recurring characters (in later seasons, the opening credits would get as high as 17), I knew television had changed. (The photo I used includes Ed Marinaro, though his character, Joe Coffey, didn't appear until the 14th episode of the first season's 15-episode run and he didn't make the opening credits until season 2.) You almost can trace the bounty of quality dramas (albeit non-network ones) that we enjoy on TV today back to Hill Street Blues. Thankfully, it hit the airwaves at a time when the NBC executives in charge then (Fred Silverman, Brandon Tartikoff) actually had patience and kept it on despite miserable ratings. When it swept the Emmys in its first season, the audience began to grow. In fact, Mike Post's memorable instrumental theme became a hit sooner than the show itself, hitting No. 10 on the Billboard Top 100 singles and No. 4 on Billboard's adult contemporary chart in 1981. As much as the Emmys are a joke now, they always will have to earn kudos for saving one of the greatest shows in the history of television.
One type of television series did use large casts (and had been doing so for decades) and while that genre is often mocked, it doesn't get the credit it deserves, not only for its influence on what made Hill Street Blues different but for what makes most of the finest dramas that have come in its wake so involving. That genre is the soap opera. When Hill Street Blues premiered, nighttime soaps were making a comeback with Dallas, its spinoff Knot's Landing, Flamingo Road and Dynasty, which debuted three days before Hill Street Blues did. (On the comic side, there also was Soap, which I also loved and had a huge cast, though like daytime dramas, its credits were at the end.) In the same time period, networks were reaping big rewards from another format with large casts and continuing storylines: the miniseries. With hits that varied in subject matter as widely as the soapy Rich Man, Poor Man; the fictionalized look at the Nixon White House in Washington: Behind Closed Doors; the historical Backstairs at the White House following eight administrations from the point of view of the servants; and the landmark adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots tracing his ancestors from Africa through slavery until emancipation. These precursors seem to make the time ripe for a series such as Hill Street Blues.
The police drama created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll was the first to take the elements of a soap — large casts, continuing storylines, cliffhangers — and transfer them to a different setting. Instead of the standard relationship drama that you'd find on a soap, Hill Street Blues was the first to camouflage those
aspects in a police story. As Bochco said in a DVD commentary recorded five years ago for the series' premiere episode, "Hill Street Station," he wanted Hill Street Blues not only to be true to the real spirit of police work but to examine the emotional consequences of the job as well. Prior to Hill Street, networks resisted the idea of stories that continued beyond one episode except for special two or three-part episodes for fear that viewers wouldn't make appointment television and the series wouldn't play well in syndication. Once the nighttime soaps showed they could be ratings hits and miniseries showed that audiences would make commitments for an entire week, let alone one night each week, it made the creation of a Hill Street Blues that much easier. Now, more shows, even comedies, contain continuing stories than don't. Some series would mix the continuing stories with standalones such as The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Comedies such as Cheers would end each season with a cliffhanger just like Dallas. Larry David would have standalones within season-long arcs, first on the Seinfeld season about Jerry and George writing the TV show and then every season on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Other comedies such as Friends were basically soap operas with laughtracks. All of them, to some extent, owed that freedom to the ground broken by Hill Street.As I mentioned in my All in the Family tribute (and other pieces), it usually takes about four episodes for new television series to work their way to what they want to achieve. Hill Street Blues happens to be one of the exceptions as it seems to almost have been born into perfection. Watch its very first episode, "Hill Street
Station," today and it's all already there. According to Bochco on that commentary, many of the series' trademarks that were there from the very beginning weren't planned to be things that would occur in every episode. They didn't originally have a plan to begin every episode with the morning roll call, led in those first three seasons and the early part of the fourth, until actor Michael Conrad's death from cancer, by Sgt. Phil Esterhaus. Neither was it planned for him to end each roll call with what would become the catchphrase, "Let's be careful out there." Some things did get decided based on that excellent template of an episode. Robert Butler, who directed "Hill Street Station" as well as the three episodes that followed, had originally wanted to film the entire episode using hand-held cameras, but Bochco felt it would make it look "too self-conscious." It was agreed though that from that point forward every roll call would be filmed that way. Another decision that was made before the series even hit the air was that each episode would cover one day. Bochco said part of the reasoning for that was to make continuity easier, but it was another nice touch, something that another of my all-time favorite series, Twin Peaks, did (for the most part) during its brief run. Despite its precarious beginnings, ratingswise, Hill Street Blues would go on to last seven seasons and 146 episodes. When I mentioned before that the Emmys helped save it, that was no exaggeration. The size and scope of its impact on the Emmy race the first year it was eligible to compete was so gigantic, that viewers simply couldn't ignore what the Emmy voters were saying. Granted, it helped that this was back when award shows and networks still had sway. Cable still was a fairly small blip and FOX didn't exist, so it basically was
ABC, CBS or NBC or you could read a book (unless you were one of those PBS types). The Emmy broadcast itself drew bigger ratings and when it showered such lavish praise upon Hill Street Blues, it convinced those watching to give the show a chance. It did the same trick a couple years later for a low-rated NBC comedy called Cheers because that network in particular then nurtured quality shows, giving them the time they needed to find their audience instead of killing them quickly when they underperformed. Let me get back to that first Emmy year for Hill Street Blues to illustrate how it basically swallowed most of the nominations (and deservedly). It received 21 nominations and won eight awards including best drama, best lead actor, best lead actress, best supporting actor, best writing and best direction. Its dominance was so great that it took three of the directing, supporting actor and film editing nominations. However, this was nothing compared to what it accomplished in its second season, when it took four out of five of the writing nominations and five out of five of the supporting actor nominations. The first year, its series competition was Dallas, Lou Grant, Quincy and The White Shadow. That second year, it was up against Dynasty, Fame, Lou Grant and Magnum, P.I. Needless to say, in those first few years it wasn't exactly a fair fight, but as other producers and writers saw what television could do, more quality dramas would appear and the network landscape would get markedly better because of the changes brought about by Hill Street Blues. Over its seven seasons, Hill Street Blues earned 98 Emmy nominations and won 25, including four consecutive Emmys for outstanding drama series. Actors who won were Daniel J. Travanti as Furillo (two in a row), Michael Conrad as Esterhaus (two in a row), Barbara Babcock as Grace Gardner, Bruce Weitz as Mick Belker, guest star Alfre Woodard and Betty Thomas as Lucy Bates (who had the unusual situation of an imposter who tried to accept on her behalf and steal the award as she was crossing the stage to get it herself).
Not only was Hill Street Blues unlike any drama that had aired on network television before, its large cast lacked anyone who could be called a star or a household name and that's because the show was the star. No one really knew who Daniel J. Travanti was before he appeared in our living rooms as police Capt. Francis Xavier Furillo, assigned to try to keep a handle on the chaotic Hill Street precinct. They couldn't have cast a better center for the show for Travanti was magnificent, miraculously adept at handling both the most dramatic and comic of scenes. In fact, his skills as a deadpan comic on the series may have been unsurpassed. His two consecutive Emmys as outstanding lead actor were quite deserved as he played Furillo, trying to keep peace between rival street gangs, dealing with his ever-present and annoying ex-wife Fay (Barbara Bosson, Bochco's then real-life wife), his own status as a recovering alcoholic (and some falls off the wagon) as well as countless administrative headaches dumped on him by his superiors, especially the recurring character of the politically ambitious Chief Daniels (Jon Cypher).
Travanti's revered Furillo sat at the top of a very talented pyramid of actors playing a collection of diverse and distinctive characters. For those first three seasons and part of the fourth, his right-hand man was Conrad's Esterhaus, his dispatch sergeant and a true original from the moment he appeared, winning him two
consecutive Emmys. Esterhaus' prosaic use of language set him apart from the other characters, though he could be just as rewarding not speaking at all. One of my favorite moments occurred in that first episode as he took Frank's ex Fay aside to try to calm her down after another argument with Furillo. Fay tries to make small talk, asking Phil how his wife is and learns that they also have divorced, but that he's found someone new and she's turned his life around. Fay asks if they plan to wed and Phil tells her that they might after she graduates. Naturally, Fay jumps to the conclusion that Phil, a man well into his 50s, is now dating a college student, but he has to correct her misconception by telling her that his new lady is a senior in high school. Fay collapses in tears and the silent reactions and moves of Conrad's head are hysterical. Phil and the high school senior won't last though, because he will soon meet Grace Gardner (Emmy winner Barbara Babcock). Grace arrives at the precinct by order of Chief Daniels to redecorate the place. At first, Phil finds her a nuisance, but an attraction develops between the sergeant and the widow of a former police officer and before you know it the sexually voracious Grace has enveloped Esterhaus' life.
I know I may sound as if I'm repeating myself, but the "Hill Street Station" episode's excellence on so many levels almost makes it worth writing about alone in this tribute. It's a perfect introduction to nearly all the characters (only Betty Thomas' Officer Lucy Bates basically gets silent background shots), it's wonderfully constructed with not one, but two big twists that almost guaranteed the small but discerning number of viewers who were there from the beginning would return for episode two. It's also almost entirely played on a humorous level until more than half the episode is over even though the story has included a tense hostage situation at a convenience store, but before any moment of the standoff can get too serious something always restores the levity. You've got the serious with the conscientious Lt. Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano) trying to talk the two young gang members into releasing their captives and leaving the store and with Furillo back at the station
trying to get their gang's leader Jesus Martinez (the late Trinidad Silva, another wonderful recurring character whose arc through the course of the series amazed) to help the situation. For the funny side, you could always count on James B. Sikking as the pseudo fascist buffoon Lt. Howard Hunter, leader of the precinct's tactical unit. He always recommended overwhelming force no matter what and, without authorization, with Furillo on the scene trying to get the teens to surrender, Howard brings in helicopters that blow everything to hell as his team storms the store and decimate the place. Fortunately, no one dies or is hurt but the store's owner berates Hunter for the destruction. Howard's response is to tell one of his men to check on the owner's immigration papers as he taps his almost-always present pipe against the shop's display window and it shatters. Howard could easily have been a cartoon as could other characters, but as the series went on, they all became terribly and vulnerably human. Howard in particular became multidimensional in later seasons' episodes that found him trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building with another officer (and ugly hints of what he might have done to survive) and when a mistake he made as young officer returns to haunt him and label him as corrupt and he puts a gun to his head, pulls the trigger and the episode ends with the sound of a shot.
Howard was hardly the only member of the ensemble that risked being a caricature, but Bochco, Kozoll and their team of talented writers and actors took that gamble and that's how they made characters so distinctive from that very first episode and no one proved to be more of an original creation than my own personal favorite, Detective Mick Belker as portrayed brilliantly by Bruce Weitz, who did eventually win an Emmy for the role. Belker looked completely unkempt with his tossled hair and bushy mustache and he often acted as something beyond human, prone to growl to show his displeasure. He took great joy pouncing on perpetrators, often sinking his teeth into them as part of his detention technique. His preferred epithets for people were dogbreath, hairball and dirtbag. Belker had his tender side though, befriending a mentally unbalanced man (Dennis Dugan) who believed he was a superhero from outer space named Captain Freedom (one of many misfits who seemed to be drawn to him over the years) or keeping a pet mouse in his jacket pocket. When it
counted, he still could be a convincing undercover cop and when he was at his desk hunting and pecking out an arrest report on his typewriter, he turned into the good Jewish son when his mother inevitably called to complain about his aging father. (His people skills also turned out to be a family trait, based on the time we met his sister.) In "Hill Street Station," we get to see the first "Hi ma" call with his usual collar and we also get to see the absolute glee on his face when he leaps off a desk to join a pile against a suspect gone mad, even though Furillo warns him, "No biting!" You can see his disappointment as he tells his captain that it isn't fair. "One lousy nose and I'm branded for life." Eventually, without losing his color, he managed to get a wife and child too. I even confess: When I was exiled in seventh and eighth grade in an awful northeastern Kansas town (but isn't seventh and eighth grade hell no matter where you are?), I often growled like Belker at the jerks in junior high.
According to Bochco's DVD commentary, part of the reason Weitz won the part was that during the audition he leaped off a desk shrieking and growling and he scared the late Grant Tinker, whose production company MTM produced Hill Street Blues, so much that he didn't want to tell him if Weitz didn't get cast. If you recall, the MTM production company logo was a cat (like MGM's Leo the Lion) in a circle meowing. For Hill Street Blues, the kitty wears a policeman's cap. For St. Elsewhere, the cat would have a doctor's surgical cap and mask (and in that show's final episode, the cat would be hooked up to a heart monitor and then flatlined when the credits finished). For Newhart, Bob Newhart would do the meowing.
I loved this show so much that I could probably write lengthy paragraphs about all its characters, including recurring ones, but then this piece would likely never end (or even more likely I'd miss my own deadline of the show's 30th anniversary), so I'm going to keep concentrating on that "Hill Street Station" installment to focus on the characters most pivotal to its developments. The main representatives of the beat cops on the show were the partners Bobby Hill and Andy Renko (Michael Warren, Charles Haid). Bobby was a laid-back, African-American officer who in the second season is upset when the black policemen's organization elects him vice president in absentia. He doesn't want anything to do with politics, but the other black members of the group tell him they picked Bobby precisely because of his nonthreatening demeanor that they feel they can use to pressure the department into promoting more black policemen. Renko always seems to have a run of bad luck and, though Hill Street Blues takes place in an unnamed urban
city (Bochco says it was loosely based on Pittsburgh, but second unit scenes were shot in Chicago), seems to have a redneck air about him. One of the calls the partners answer in the premiere is a domestic disturbance where a mother prepares to wield a knife on her towel-wearing teen daughter because she caught her bedding her husband, who is hiding in the bathroom. Bobby manages to defuse the situation, but when he and Renko return to the street, they find their squad car stolen. They search in vain for a working pay phone to call it in and then comes the most shocking and dramatic moment of the show. As they enter a building, they stumble upon some drug dealers who open fire, leaving Hill and Renko lying bleeding on the floor. The original plan was for Renko to die, but the pilot Charles Haid had filmed didn't get picked up, so they made a change and he lived. It's an interesting parallel to Bochco's later series NYPD Blue where Dennis Franz's character Andy Sipowicz (Renko and Sipowicz had the same first name. Weird.) also got shot in the premiere and was slated to die but they changed their mind then too. (Franz, by the way, played two characters on Hill Street: the corrupt Detective Sal Benedetto and later as a regular, the colorful Detective Norman Buntz.) It was an easier fix than Joe Coffey though. They not only shot him in an episode, they showed a chalk outline where his body had been only to bring him back to life.
Two regulars actually weren't playing cops. The previously mentioned Barbara Bosson as Furillo's ex-wife Fay became a regular at the urging of Fred Silverman who suggested that the series needed a character who was a civilian so there would be a viewpoint unrelated to the legal system. The other was Veronica Hamel as public defender Joyce Davenport. In his commentary, Bochco says Hamel was the last person cast — they'd already started filming the first episode without a Joyce when Hamel walked in and saved the day. When we meet Davenport, she's storming in to hammer away at Furillo about the treatment of one of her clients who has been lost somewhere in the system. She's a fierce advocate for her client and fiery at what she sees as constant abuse by the actions of overzealous officers. That's why the ending of "Hill Street Station" comes as such a surprise when you see that Frank and Joyce, who have exhibited nothing but rancor at each other throughout the episode, are secret lovers. In fact, most episodes of the series ended with the two in some sort of steamy sexplay. Hamel also got some of the most dramatic moments of a series that tended toward the darkly humorous, ranging from the murder of a
colleague that made her rethink her chosen profession to an episode involving the execution of a client who was convicted and headed to death row and sought her as a witness to his last moments. Travanti and Hamel had great chemistry and one of the biggest mysteries to me since Hill Street Blues went off the air is where did these talented actors go? IMDb shows that Travanti has done a lot of one episode shots on other series, the most recent being the new version of The Defenders with Jim Belushi and Jerry O'Connell, but he's never had a role post-Hill Street that came close to Furillo. Hamel's career has followed a fairly similar path, with her most recent work being three episodes of Lost. Sadly, some of the cast members are no longer with us. Michael Conrad of course died during the show's fourth season. Robert Prosky, who joined the show as the new dispatch sergeant, Stan Jablonski, died in 2008. Kiel Martin (Detective J.D. LaRue) died of lung cancer in 1990, the same year Rene Enriquez (Lt. Ray Calletano) succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Trinidad Silva (gang leader Jesus Martinez) died in a car wreck in 1988.The show also was blessed with many guest stars or near regulars playing roles before they achieved fame elsewhere. Some of those actors included: two Larry Sanders Show alums Jeffrey Tambor as a shady lawyer turned cross-dressing
judge, and Megan Gallagher as an officer; David Caruso as the leader of the Irish street gang The Shamrocks; Jane Kaczmarek as an officer; Pat Corley as an overworked and incompetent coroner; Jennifer Tilly as a gangster's moll who dates Henry; Frances McDormand as a public defender with a drug problem; Dan Hedaya as a crooked cop; Lindsay Crouse as a lesbian officer accused of sexual harassment by a hooker; Linda Hamilton as Coffey's girlfriend who is raped; Danny Glover as a former gang leader who returns under the guise of a social reformer; Edward James Olmos as an apartment tenant being harassed by a landlord trying to force his dwellers out so he can raise rates; Alfre Woodard (who won an Emmy for her work) as the mother of a little boy shot to death by mistake by an officer; Ally Sheedy as a senior criminology student that J.D. takes a shine to despite the age gap; and legendary character actor Lawrence Tierney (best known to younger readers as Joe in Reservoir Dogs and Elaine's dad on Seinfeld) as the night shift dispatch sergeant who got the last line of the series, answering the phone and saying, "Hill Street."Lots of television shows had good and great acting, even if the series themselves weren't that special. What set Hill Street Blues apart was what went on behind the scenes. Its creators, writers and directors who changed the medium with its structure and storytelling. It doesn't seem like that radical an idea to have story
arcs that ran over multiple episodes, but bringing that form to a police drama was revolutionary. It paved the way for the technique to be used in other Steven Bochco series such as L.A. Law which took the format to a law firm; the short-lived Bay City Blues which tried it out on a minor league baseball team; and Murder One, which attempted to cover a single murder trial over the course of an entire season. Other non-Bochco shows that found the freedom to embrace the large cast/dark humor/multiepisode arc in the medical world (St. Elsewhere) or much later to paint a portrait of an entire city (The Wire). Some of the writers who worked on Hill Street would go on to make their own cultural landmarks such as Anthony Yerkovich, who would create Miami Vice; Mark Frost, who would co-create Twin Peaks; Dick Wolf, who birthed the Law & Order empire; and, of course, David Milch, who would not only create NYPD Blue for Bochco but the incomparable Deadwood. Even Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet wrote an episode, "A Wasted Weekend," an unusual entry for the series where the bulk of the action concerned Jablonski, Goldblume, Hill and Renko on a hunting trip.On a more general level, what I've found fascinating in the post-Hill Street era is how durable and versatile the police show genre is. When I become a fan of a certain type of show, it's pretty difficult for me to sample another in the same genre because they don't live up. Take the medical drama for example. I loved St.
Elsewhere and so I never understood how anyone could say they liked it and then watched ER, Chicago Hope or Grey's Anatomy. It took Scrubs (which as a comedy was different anyway) and House to break my bias on that and that's because House has a completely different approach to the medical show. It's the same thing on the comedy side. It baffles me how anyone who has ever seen the brilliance of The Larry Sanders Show and its behind-the-scenes look at an entertainment TV show can then watch the terribly overrated 30 Rock and not see it for a pasty pale imitation much in the same way Tina Fey's movie Mean Girls was a defanged Heathers lite. Both pull their punches. The police drama didn't take as long as the medical drama did to find new quality examples after Hill Street that weren't just copies: Cagney and Lacey, Miami Vice, Crime Story, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, all the variations of Law & Order and CSI, The Shield, The Wire (even though its scope was much wider than merely police, that's how it was essentially sold in Season 1) even the short-lived such as Boomtown and much-maligned such as Cop Rock. In its twisted way, Dexter is essentially a police drama. I'm even leaving out ones I've never seen or that I don't care for but others do such as The Closer.
Hill Street Blues' lasting legacy remains as the starting point for the higher level of quality drama that has continued to get better to this very day. Television always has been good at comedy, if not challenging or topical until All in the Family, but the best TV dramas before Hill Street usually were anthologies such as The Twilight Zone with different stories each week or just generally entertaining such as Columbo (on which Bochco served as a writer and story editor in the early seasons) or The Rockford Files, but hardly challenging. Lou Grant did get into some issues, but imagine how interesting a newspaper drama made in the Hill Street template could have been. Since Hill Street Blues hit the air, even though it slipped in its last couple of seasons, it seems as if there's always been some quality drama on and when cable exploded, it's been a smorgasboard where now the situation is reversed and television (non-network at least) does drama better than it does comedy. Perhaps this is because Hill Street Blues showed artists that you didn't have to be only purely drama or purely comedy and series such as The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc., satisfies the audience's need for both.
Hill Street Blues, aside from the technology, hasn't aged much when you watch it today because it tells stories about people you care about and spins tales that capture your attention and seldom lets go. Except in the weaker later years, I can't recall any storylines that were real duds as is often the case in the best of
shows (think Donna and Medavoy on NYPD Blue, the "D Girl" episode of The Sopranos, James' noir excursion in season 2 of Twin Peaks). Re-watching some of its key episodes, I still marvel at the ability of Hill Street to shift emotional gears so fast and so smoothly, cracking you up in one scene then touching your heart in the next. Not every show can treat death as both profound and absurd like Hill Street did, going serious with an execution or certain murders and then having a character drop dead in his plate of food at a fundraiser or a politician plunging through a high-rise window screen while trying to score points by taking the press on a tour of the building's deplorable conditions. It could even combine them, taking the comic team of Belker and the crazy Captain Freedom and breaking your heart when Freedom dies while staying in his dementia until the end. Remember, the power is in the glove. It always was. Even Sgt. Esterhaus didn't get a break. It must have been heartbreaking to the cast and crew to lose the actor Michael Conrad, but that didn't prevent them from letting Phil check out while having another session of strenuous sex with the insatiable Grace.What makes me sad is how you don't see reruns of Hill Street Blues on TV anymore. TV Land used to show both it and St. Elsewhere back-to-back until it made the decision to fill its schedule with as much crap as possible. Only the first two seasons are available on DVD, though you can see later episodes for free on IMDb. It's a damn shame. Greatness such as Hill Street Blues must be available for future generations.
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Labels: Altman, Bochco, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, Homicide, House, Larry David, Larry Sanders, Law and Order, Mad Men, Mamet, McDormand, Milch, Seinfeld, Tambor, The Sopranos, The Wire, Twin Peaks
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