News You Can Bruise for 2013 March

(1) Mon Mar 04 2013 14:38 February Film Roundup: The second in the 2013 series, as promised. Note: I draw no distinction between information about a movie that's a "spoiler" and information that's not.

• Roots (1977): I'd never seen Roots. We watched it so we could reasonably go to a reunion interview at the museum featuring Levar Burton, Louis Gossett Jr., Leslie Uggams, and Ben Vereen. Here's Sumana's take. Non-surprise: Roots is really good! I have only one complaint: it was disconcerting to see Levar Burton abruptly replaced by John Amos in a "nine years later" flash-forward, since we now know that age cannot change the essential Levar Burton-ness of Levar Burton.

  My other complaint was going to be that some (not all) of the villains were one-dimensional villains defined entirely by their hatred for the main characters. I'm actually okay with this in certain kinds of pieces, and Roots definitely qualifies, so my criticism was going to be somewhat muted. But then something magical happened that cancelled my criticism altogether.

  You see, in a decision that probably made sense to whichever ABC exec was trying to backpedal from having greenlit Roots in the first place, it was decided to cast "television's most likeable white actors" in the roles of the villains, to sort of tone it down a little. At least that's what it said in the little mini-documentary on Roots that they showed before the reunion interview. If an actor's natural "likeability" tones down the evil of their character, that means they're not a very good actor, so it's a good thing that the whole "likeability" thing was a bust.

  But then! The most despicable villain of the entire show, the final boss of Roots, the very face of evil, was played by genial, honey-voiced Burl Ives. Amazing! It was like watching Burl Ives play Saruman. I don't think that's what they were going for, but it was great. And I can confirm that Roots as a whole deserves all the praise given to it over the years. Ben Vereen, in particular, is amazing.

• Killer of Sheep (1979): A sad movie about a man so beat-down by the grim meathook future that he can't appreciate the odd moments of grace when they pop up. It's always been tough for me to stay engaged in a movie that has no through-line, but after the first half of Celine and Julie Go Boating I've learned to treat it as the dramatic equivalent of sketch comedy. And although this movie is not a comedy, its brand of existential despair gives it something in common with sketch comedy, so it wasn't as much of a mismatch as you might think.
• Metropolis (1927): The first of several movies we saw on Hulu when they made their Criterion movies free to watch over the course of a weekend. I'd seen it before; Sumana had not. My current opinion is an amplified version of my old, uninformed opinion. As a story, Metropolis is terrible, but if you treat it as an opera it's a pretty good opera, with lots of awesome stuff to look at. And the robot's wink is one of my favorite film shots ever.
• Modern Times (1936): Sumana has zero tolerance for protagonists whose incompetence is supposed to be endearing. Since endearing incompetence is the Little Tramp character's stock in trade, I probably should have anticipated her reaction to Modern Times. I wouldn't say I have zero tolerance for such protagonists, but I don't have a lot, and it really dampened the mood of the movie. Bright moments include the feeding-machine scene, the Tramp getting high on coke, and the one line of silent-film dialogue that redeems his incompetence (paraphrased): "I'll do whatever it takes to get you a home, even if I have to work for it!"
• Diabolique (1955): The cream of Criterion Weekend, an exciting thriller that Hitchcock wanted to direct but Henri-Georges Clouzot got there first. So the authors of the novel on which Diabolique was based wrote another novel with a similar twist but which was probably a lot worse, because that novel became Vertigo. I guess back then you couldn't just write a screenplay, you had to try it out as a novel first.

  While watching this movie we noticed that it's effectively a Columbo episode. A little while later we watched the movie that serves as the pilot episode of Columbo, and there were quite a few similarities to Diabolique! Coincidence? I really don't know. The play that introduced the Columbo character premiered in 1960.

  Bonus: Hulu kept interrupting the movies with commercials, creating the bizarre experience of watching subtitled French films on a local TV station in 1993. They've clearly got an algorithm for determining how many commercials they can cram in before people stop watching, because near the end of Diabolique the commercial breaks started coming once every six minutes. It's so suspenseful, they know no one's going to tune out.

  It was the same three or four commercials the whole weekend, and one of the commercials included the perfect iambic-tetrameter line "In every segment we compete," which we mashed up with Sydney Smith's Answer to an Invitation to Dine at Fishmongers Hall.

  In every segment we compete
  The monsters of the deep to eat

• Shoot the Piano Player (1960): Hulu called this "Truffault's most playful film", and I misinterpreted this statement as implying that the movie would be a comedy. It is not a comedy, but it's not bad. I dunno about this whole French New Wave thing, though. I just don't know.
• I Married A Witch (1942): This was a comedy, and it was terrible. You know how sometimes a movie gets into Criterion more because it's representative of a genre than because it's good? I suspect that happened here. This is the perfect "stupid black-and-white non-musical comedy." After a decent opening it went downhill fast, and by mutual agreement Sumana and I skipped the middle 45 minutes of this 77-minute movie. Fortunately, this movie ends with a witch stealing a gubernatorial election through brainwashing and magical vote fraud! Stupendous! But please don't take that as an endorsement of the movie as a whole. I Married A Witch has an IMDB rating of 7.1, a rating that rightfully belongs to Ishtar.
• Foreign Correspondent (1940): Hitchcock's propaganda thriller. I was definitely caught up in it but I don't have a lot to say about it in the cold light of day. Some of the twists were not that surprising, others were good examples of Hitchcock thinking outside the cinematic box. E.g. most of the main characters get on a passenger plane to America and you're in the middle of some piddling drama that pits Group A against Group B, but then the real twist happens which is the plane is shot down by a German submarine!
• The Great Dictator (1940): I rewatched this after Sumana went to sleep, in an effort to get one more free Criterion movie out of Hulu. I remember really liking The Great Dictator and I wanted to bring my recently honed film-watching skills to bear on it. And it's... uneven. Chaplin's tramp-like character is as genially incompetent as ever, and his author-mouthpiece speech at the end, which expresses a lot of nice sentiments, makes no sense in terms of plot and does nothing to fulfil the incredibly tense dramatic situation that the rest of the movie has been building up. (Compare the speech at the end of Foreign Correspondent, in which Hitchcock puts away all his cinematic tricks and gimmicks and simply begs the American audience for help.) So I guess I have zero tolerance for sappy melodrama in comedies, especially comedies about horrible wars.

  But when Chaplin plays Hitler it's amazing. This is the portrayal I can imagine getting under the dictator's skin. "Adenoid Hynkel" is a petty, insecure, puffed-up, blustering asshole, the opposite of Chaplin's tramp, a man whose legendary incompetence threatens to ruin the world. You can tell that Chaplin wasn't aware of how evil Hitler really was (or else you can understand why he claimed he hadn't been aware). Even though this is the most scathing satirical portrayal of Hitler I've ever seen--and well-timed to boot--you'd always feel bad for even deploying satire as a weapon instead of buying more government bonds.

• Emma Mae (1976): Kind of an unintentional pun on "MMA" there. Director Jamaa Fanaka tried to make a funny action film for a black audience, only to see it dubbed "blaxploitation" and released on DVD as "Black Sister's Revenge". Well, it's a very fun movie, but if you're expecting "Black Sister's Revenge" you're gonna be disappointed.

  IMDB trivia says Fanaka was a fan of Billy Wilder, and it shows in this story of a country girl who comes to L.A. to live with her aunt and uncle. The plot, the action and the comedy are all driven by Emma Mae's tendency to take the most direct approach to any problem. A guy calls Emma Mae a hick, so she hits him. Her boyfriend gets arrested, so she starts a car wash to raise money to pay his bail. Someone else thinks a car wash is a dumb idea, so Emma Mae hits her. The Man shuts down her car wash, so Emma Mae robs a bank. And so on.

  Jerri Hayes, who played Emma Mae, came to the showing and said that before Fanaka died last year, they'd been talking about doing a sequel to Emma Mae. That would have been really fun to see.

• J.S.A.: Joint Security Area (2000): March bonus! I don't have the stomach for Oldboy, so I'm skipping most of the Chan-wook Park festival, but I figured I could handle a thriller about the Korean DMZ. I mean, the worst that can happen is nuclear war. And it was pretty good! I was analyzing the movie while watching it (occupational hazard) and thinking how its use of symbolism and callbacks was corny and heavy-handed, but then the very last shot of the movie tied together two earlier scenes, which initially seemed to be nothing but comic relief, into the movie as a whole. Tied it all together in a way that made those scenes transcend comic relief to create something moving. The very last shot changed my opinion of the movie from "pretty good" to "very good". I didn't think that stuff happened in real life.

  My attempt to explain this experience to Sumana revealed that this is very much a "you had to be there" thing, but if you have the chance to be there, I think you should take it. I'm not gonna say there's no disturbing violence in this movie, but it's no Oldboy.

Tue Mar 26 2013 08:00: From an interview with Ken Liu, recent Hugo/Nebula/WFA winner:

I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.

And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments. The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."

I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing—and amazingly, my stories began to sell.

Case closed, I'd say.