Starting tonight the Hallmark Channel is presenting a week of Perry Mason movies, each weeknight at 9 p.m., to kick off the station's August "Month of Mystery." Between 1985 and 1993, Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale, who played Perry Mason and Della Street, respectively, in the long-running TV series, reprised their roles in a series of more than two-dozen TV movies. The films are entertaining and diverting, though not nearly as interesting as the original TV series, with its interesting, often noirish atmosphere and sharply drawn characters. The Mason movies are rather reminiscent of Matlock, which is not a surprise given the involvement of Matlock creator and longtime TV mystery writer-producer Dean Hargrove. They're worth watching and are enjoyable if you can accept that they don't greatly resemble the TV series.

 

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OK, forgive me for being a little late with this, but Turner Classic Movies is showing films featuring the great William Powell all day today, including two entries in the delightful Thin Man series.

Powell was a witty, urbane leading man in 1930s Hollywood who starred in numerous films, some of which are true classics of their forms. The Thin Man films and his performances as detective Philo Vance (whom he manages to make quite likeable, as opposed to the obnoxiously smug Vance of the S. S. Van Dine novels on which the movies are based) are fun mysteries; Libeled Lady, My Man Godfrey, Love Crazy, and I Love You Again are among the greatest screwball comedies; The Great Ziegfield is a splendid biography with music, Manhattan Melodrama is a superb crime and morality drama, and his performances in Life with Father and Mister Roberts are standouts.

Powell was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Kansas, and as the photos here indicate, he was not a conventionally handsome movie-star type by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, he started out in films by playing villains in silent movies. However, his class, sophistication, and innate gentility soon became evident with the rise of sound films, and he became one of the greatest stars of Hollywood's Golden Era. He was often paired with Myrna Loy, whose pert wit played well against Powell's charming affability. Throughout his career, Powell showed how good character and fine manners could make a person much more appealing than physical characteristics ever could.

Powell was one of the greats, and the films on TCM today (which include two in the Thin Man series) provide a good overview of his 1930s work.

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Those who complain that Hollywood seldom depicts religion as a normal and good part of films' and TV's central characters' lives are correct that the incidence is much lower in the media than in society as a whole. This is another reminder that it's important to be careful what you pray for. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which runs Thursday nights on the FX Channel at 10 EDT and is available on ITunes, follows the lives of four post-college slackers who run an Irish bar in the title city, and religion, specifically Christianity and more specifically Catholicism, keeps popping up in the characters' lives. The overall tone of the show is fairly spicy, and the humor is both funny and often deliberately edgy, but the treatment of religion is pretty realistic given the characters' situation. It is also both irreverent and basically positive.

The religion the principal characters were taught as a child in working-class Philly often comes up in conversation as they discuss, for example, some of their more shameless schemes. In addition, situations and characters with religious significance arrive on a regular basis. Last Thursday such a character arrived in the form of a priest who had served as the butt of the gang's practical jokes during childhood and adolescence. He provides a conscience figure in response to another of the gang's awful schemes, and then provides a further lesson as one of the group, a young lady on whom he once had a crush, brings disaster on him.

The episode concerns a scheme by the group to make money from donations by Christians after a water stain shaped like the Virgin Mary is discovered in a back room of their bar. Both the scheme and the situation go rapidly downhill from there, and it is all very funny. Yet the wrongness of their quest is never in doubt, and one character's religious qualms about the scheme keeps the story firmly grounded.

In this zany, backhanded way, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia depicts Christianity in a basically positive way even as it plays mercilessly with its conventions and surfaces.

And as I said, it's definitely funny, as when would-be conman Charlie, pretending to be an evangelist, addresses a small group of pilgrims sitting in the bar:

"Here's a confession: I'm in love with a man. What? I'm in love with a man. A man called God. Does that make me gay? Am I gay for God? You betcha!"

Funny stuff. 

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The way to make a great genre film is not to try to "transcend the genre," as is the temptation for so many ambitious filmmakers. On the contrary, the way to make a great genre film is to make a genre film and just bring great creativity and insight to it. That's what makes Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo one of the greatest Westerns of all. Hawks's film does what Westerns do, but it does it better than the others. Hawks doesn't try to add extra significance to the story, but it takes on great meaning because of the superb plotting, excellent characterizations, and surehanded visual presentation. The same is true of Hitchcock's best thrillers, Ernst Lubitsch's greatest comedies, and Frank Borzage's most moving dramas. They're great because each embodies its form at its best.

Would that Michael Mann had been content to do likewise with his film version of his 1980s cop show Miami Vice, now playing in theaters. In great contrast to the TV show, which was both serious and fun, the film version is extremely serious, and not fun at all. In fact, it's really rather boring.  Most of the film is shot in near-darkness, as is the fashion with cop films lately, under the extremely mistaken impression that gloomy visuals will somehow impart significance to the wooden actors scowling at us.

The story is exceedingly simple, yet the film takes well over two hours to play out, as Mann drags out scenes in an evident attempt to force the viewer to ponder the significance of the situation. This is a mistake because the significance is already there, in that the cops are trying to stop drug pushers who kill lots of people and sell addictive drugs to poor slobs who would otherwise be entirely free of the need for them. That is significance enough, and we don't require any further reasons to care. In addition, while we're sitting through these long scenes, the characters confront very few truly difficult moral choices, and it is obvious what the characters will decide to do, well in advance of their actually doing so.

The greatest weakness of the film is precisely in the area where these more ambitious efforts are always claimed to be superior to more ordinary efforts in the field: characterization. The Crockett and Tubbs of the TV series had a few standard effects they would do, but there was some variety to them. There were occasional laughs in the show, for example, and the two lead characters seemed to have fun driving the fastest cars, riding the sleekest speedboats, wearing the coolest clothes, and pursuing the most beautiful women.

The program was a great example of the Swingin' Heroes style of crime program. Miami Vice was more serious in intent than Hart to Hart, for example, but the effect was the same:  they made doing good look really cool. Crockett and Tubbs looked cool, acted cool, and were cool, and it seemed as if it would be fun to be them, as long as you didn't get killed or get tortured too often or lose too many loved ones.

In the Miami Vice film, by contrast, the two central characters (and all the others) are perpetually somber and seem to take no joy at all in life. Instead of making their situations more important to us, however, the flatness of the characterizations keeps us from caring very greatly about the people on the screen. Director Michael Mann takes such great pains to make the film important that it loses its interest for us and becomes little more than an overproduced by-the-numbers genre film, the very thing he was trying to avoid.

Sure, it's watchable, and it's reasonably entertaining, but Miami Vice could have been so much more—if only it's creator had been content to let it be a lot less.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Volume 1 of the satirical animated TV series Pinky and the Brain is now available on DVD.  

The program, which first ran in syndication during the mid to late 1990s, follows the adventures of two escaped lab mice, one a genius and the other insane, who are on a mission to take over the world, planned and led by the genius one, the Brain. The show was a spinoff of the Steven  Spielberg-produced Animaniacs, and was a good deal better than its parent program.

What made Pinky and the Brain so effective was its superior writing. The program was full of satire and parodies, and the scripts were  top-notch.  The show's puckish mockery of schemes to run other people's lives gives it a nice, understated political and social relevance, and the absurdity of Brain's schemes for doing so points up the emptiness of his ambitions. Instead of achieving success by doing some good for people (or at least for other lab mice), Brain simply craves power. In this, Brain is a part of ourselves exaggerated to highly comic proportions. Pinky and the Brain is a funny show that actually manages to remind us of some basic truths about ourselves.

But above all, it's funny.

 

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Tonight on Turner Classic Movies: two excellent movies with the word Blonde in their titles: at 8 p.m. EDT, Raoul Walsh's delightful 1941 comedy The Strawberry Blonde stars Rita Hayworth as the alluring title character in Gay '90s New York City, and features excellent performances by Jimmy Cagney and Olivia DeHavilland; and at 10 p.m EDT, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks's delightfully cynical film of Anita Loos's delightfully cynical novel. The Strawberry Blonde is a charming, heartfelt comedy from the superb action director Walsh. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell star as two golddiggers on the make in Paris, and the film includes some excellent scenes of Hawks's characteristic farcical comedy. It also has a great performance by Charles Coburn as wealthy marital target "Piggy."

Both of these are must-sees for any serious film enthusiast.

These two films are followed at midnight EDT by Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble (1944), one of the later and less-effective entries in the highly appealing "Andy Hardy" series of films MGM produced largely in the late 1930s and early '40s. I'd recommend that those who have yet to see an Andy Hardy film skip this one and wait for TCM to show an earlier film in the series, as the channel does quite regularly.

 

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I'm ambivalent about the BBC-TV series Hex, which runs on Thurday nights at 10 p.m. EDT on BBC America. Yes, it can be seen as a ripoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as it is set at an elite English boarding school and deals with spiritual warfare surrounding and involving the student body of oversexed teens and their clueless and/or evil overseers. And yes, the premise of the program  is based on a mixture of Christian theology and odd bits of superstition, other religions, and simple chaos. Plus, the first few episodes are rather slow going, with a good deal of unnecessary meandering and chitchat. Plus there is a heck of a lot of venery going on, all of it outside of marriage, which many religious people don't like to see on their TVs.

Nonetheless, the show is interesting and entertaining. Cassie, an attractive but shy young student, finds out that she is descended from witches and is at the center of a plot by demons to bring back the Nephilim, a race of giants mentioned in the Bible (e.g., Genesis 6:2) that was created when human women mated with demons (as one understanding has it). This is an actual Biblical concept, and Hex presents it in a fairly straighforward manner, while of course sticking to the most melodramatic and exciting way of seeing it.

The story line, as mentioned earlier, is basically about spiritual warfare seen from an essentially Judeo-Christian point of view with the addition of ghosts, embodied demons, juju, and other spicy bits. As such, it's sometimes a bit of a muddle spiritually and will cause fits for some of the more literal-minded fundamentalists, but ultimately the producers' hearts and minds seem to be in the right place, and it's worth watching and sticking with.

At this point BBC America is about halfway through the 18 episodes that have been shown in Britain so far. (First-run showings in Britain concluded last December.) BBC America will be showing a marathon of Hex this Saturday night beginning at 9 p.m. EDT. The channel's website does not specify which episodes will be running, so you'll have to tune in to find out. It's definitely worth a try, as the series is interesting, provocative, and entertaining.

 

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An art-film documentary on young Christians has been picked up by Magnolia Pictures for distribution to theaters around the nation. The Hollywood Reporter writes,

Magnolia Pictures has nabbed North American rights to "Jesus Camp," a documentary about a retreat for born-again Christian children.

The project revolves around three youngsters who attend the Rev. Becky Fischer's "Kids on Fire" summer camp in Devil's Lake, N.D. It details their training to "take back America for Christ" and hone "prophetic gifts" in a mission as political as it is religious. The film was directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.

According the Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles as quoted in the story, "One of the great strengths of the film is that it doesn't come with this prepackaged point of view." To buttress this claim in hopes of making the film palatable to Christian audiences, Bowles pulled the film from its scheduled showing next week at Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival.

Given the film's openly arch title and Magnolia president's strenuous claims that the film is objective, one suspects that it will make its young subjects look rather ridiculous. That is not at all difficult to do if one looks at some of the more florid varieties of Christian enthusiasm out there, and to suggest that this is what Christianity is all about would be a reprehensible falsehood. In addition, all children—and indeed all human beings—look rather ridiculous when viewed at certain moments. However, a real attempt to understand these children would make for some enlightening cinema. We shall have to see the film before drawing any conclusions about its likely effects, of course, though the initial signs are not overly encouraging.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sharman Networks Ltd, the makers and distributors of the hugely popular file-sharing network Kazaa, have settled a lawsuit brought by the music and movie industries, agreeing to pay $115 million.

Most of the money will go to the music industry, and a smaller portion to the movie companies, according to the AP story. Kazaa will become a pay-to-download service along the lines of ITunes.

 

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Computer software giant Microsoft is about to bring free, commercial television to the Web, AP reports. Several online sites have experimented with offering commercial programs commercial-free on a pay--per-view or pay-to-download basis. Most notable among these, of course, is ITunes. What Microsoft is about to do, by contrast, emulates commercial television while improving convenience, by providing content for free but on an on-demand basis to consumers. The programming will be paid for by advertisement revenues rather than direct fees.

The effort will begin with three episodes of the Fox comedy Arrested Development, the AP report notes. This marks the first time the program has been made available online. Microsoft has acquired exclusive "portal syndication" rights to all 53 episodes of the program for three years.

Arrested Development was canceled at the end of the just-passed television season after three years. The G4 network will air the program on basic cable beginning this fall.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MGM has just released a new Collector's Edition DVD of Billy Wilder's classic 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, which starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon in a brilliantly farcical story set in the Roaring '20s.

Curtis and Lemmon play two penniless Chicago dance-hall jazz musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and hotfoot it out of town to escape the gangsters who are out to silence them by means of a hail of bullets. Naturally, the only way out of town
is as musicians in an all-girl band on its way to Florida, and they transform themselves into Josephine and Dapne and join the band on a train ride to Florida. Just as naturally, they run into beautiful Sugar, played by Marilyn Monroe, and naturally Josephine, er, Joe, falls in love with her.

Once arrived safely in sunny Florida, Joe woos Sugar in the guise of a rich oil heir who speaks in a very poor imitation of Cary Grant—of whom, incidentally, no one had ever heard at the time of the film's setting, February 1929. Just as naturally, a real millionaire, played by Joe E. Brown, falls in love with Daphne, aka Jerry. And to top it all off, it just so happens that the very gangsters who are looking for Joe and Jerry are in town at the time for a gang powwow, and are staying in the same hotel at which the disguised witnesses' band is playing.

It's truly one of the funniest movies ever made. It's also intelligent, occasionally moving, and full of wicked satire. Plus, it has the funniest closing of any film, ever. Wilder was one of the greatest of all writers of film comedies, and he directed most of the films he wrote, as in the present case. In fact, Wilder was a rather sophisticated thinker, as I note in the post below.

Some Like It Hot is a must-see and a must-have for all serious film enthusiasts.

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In recognition of MGM's release of a Collector's Edition DVD of Billy Wilder's brilliant comedy Some Like It Hot, here are my thoughts on the great writer-director composed shortly after his death in October 2002 and published in the Hudson Institute's American Outlook magazine:

Wilder in Retrospect

by S. T. Karnick

Filmmaker Billy Wilder—winner of six Oscars and countless other awards, and widely respected as one of the greatest directors of the American cinema—died earlier this year, at the age of 95. Wilder was sometimes vilified as shallow and cynical, and even several obituaries remembered him this way. In fact, he was neither. He was a great satirist whose true motives were often misunderstood. Among other attributes, Wilder’s patriotism has received insufficient notice, especially because it stands in such stark contrast to the attitudes of so many of today’s Hollywood celebrities.

Wilder began his career in the 1920s in Vienna, Austria, as a newspaper reporter, but he was attracted to the cinema and began to write films in Germany in the early 1930s before trying his luck in Hollywood. The acclaimed German expatriate director Ernst Lubitsch teamed Wilder with a genteel American writer, Charles Brackett, and the two soon whipped up a series of witty, sophisticated screenplays including Midnight, Ninotchka, and Ball of Fire. In 1941 Wilder began to direct the films they wrote, creating hits such as The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo, and The Lost Weekend.

With Raymond Chandler, Wilder cowrote and then directed Double Indemnity (1944), one of the most intelligent and morally complex entries in the film noir style that it helped popularize. Wilder classics from the late 1940s and ’50s included A Foreign Affair, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, The Seven Year Itch, The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon (with new collaborator I. A. L. Diamond), Witness for the Prosecution, and Some Like It Hot. His only musical, The Emperor Waltz (1948), was not a box-office or critical hit, but it is still well worth watching.

It is also a good illustration of Wilder’s American patriotism. Wilder had loved America since childhood—the name Billy (his first name was Samuel) was reportedly taken in honor of Billy the Kid—and he said that the day he became a U.S. citizen, in 1939, was the most important moment in his life. He served in the U.S. Army in Berlin just after World War II. Wilder tends to be cynical about the nation’s big cities, as in The Lost Weekend and the crime and scam films, but highly respectful of small-town American life, as in The Major and the Minor. In The Emperor Waltz, Wilder directed Bing Crosby as an itinerant American gramophone salesman in beautiful pre-World War I Austria who shows a countess (Joan Fontaine)—and the Emperor—that the American way, with its respect for entrepreneurship, individual freedom, and the family, is the best thing going.

Similarly patriotic but with rather more sophistication, Stalag 17 depicts a group of American POWs in Nazi Germany, trying to discover who among them is a spy—and learning exactly what it means to be an American. Cynical hustler J. J. Sefton (William Holden) reminds his fellow prisoners that financial success is no sin and that the politics of envy can have disastrous consequences. The Spirit of St. Louis presents Charles Lindbergh (Jimmy Stewart) as a model American. In Sabrina, the all-work, prototypical American businessman played by Humphrey Bogart proves more attractive to the elegant young lady played by Audrey Hepburn than does playboy William Holden, and a romance undertaken to further a business merger blossoms into true love.

Wilder’s vision soured significantly in the 1960s, as so many other things did. Wilder had always been known as something of a cynic, and Sunset Boulevard and his 1950 film, Ace in the Hole, certainly cemented that impression. But even his most apparently cynical films upheld bourgeois values, usually by showing the consequences of their absence. In The Apartment (1960), junior executive Calvin Baxter (Jack Lemmon) makes it in the world of big business in New York City by lending his apartment to higher-ups so that they can conduct their extramarital affairs safe from discovery. Ultimately, however, he and elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), his boss’s mistress, decide to change their ways and get married. In Irma La Douce (1963) and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), marriage and sexual fidelity are once again at the center, so much so that the Catholic Legion of Decency banned the latter film. Nonetheless, the central assumption of both of these films, however appalling the supposedly humorous events depicted in them, is that marriage and fidelity are good things that are lamentably undermined by circumstances and the characters’ weaknesses. In The Fortune Cookie (1966), a photographer (Jack Lemmon) injured during a football game fakes serious injuries and sues the team, persuaded by his brother-in-law, a sleazy lawyer known as Whiplash Willie (for which Walter Matthau won a well-deserved Oscar). But his real motive is to get his ex-wife back, and in a further twist, we know that she has never been faithful to him, can never do so, and has no intention of doing so, wanting to get back with him only for the money.

Given that America had become more grotesque than even a brilliant satirist such as Wilder could depict in films without driving audiences away in horror, it is little surprise that the director’s career began a steady decline in the late 1960s.

In his prime, however, Wilder was one of the greatest of all filmmakers, and in my view the greatest American satirist of the twentieth century. Wilder recognized that to be truly effective, satire has to have a core of decency to which to compare the manifold evils of the world. For Wilder, the Austrian immigrant who achieved wealth and fame in America, this core of decency was ordinary, bourgeois American life. That life was far from perfect, as Wilder well knew, but it was the best thing on offer, and those benighted souls who thought themselves too good for such an existence and tried to escape it paid a heavy price in his films.

Wilder rightly saw himself as a realist, and he should be remembered as one, but he was no materialist. Happy endings may seem a cliché to sophisticated people who pride themselves on their realism, but Wilder knew that life does provide happy endings for those who live honestly, decently, and right. Wilder said, perhaps rather surprisingly, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles isn’t a realist.” This greater, deeper realism is the one that Wilder strived for and surprisingly often achieved. That America makes such a natural home for people of Wilder’s abilities and tenacity is a miracle that Wilder himself appreciated, exemplified, and depicted on film for all the world to see. For all their surface ugliness and cynicism, Wilder’s movies are a sustained love note to America and its way of life.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Those who like mid-'60s rock and roll music (and who doesn't?) should toddle over to Turner Classic Movies (TCM) today. My favorite band from that era, The Dave Clark Five, is featured in the 1964 film Get Yourself a College Girl, showing on TCM at 1:15 pm EDT today. That is followed by two films featuring Herman's Hermits, Hold On (1966) and Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter (1968).

After that, we have Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret in what is for me the King's most appealing film, Viva Las Vegas.

The mid-'60s were a fun and interesting time, from what I can tell based on the music, movies, TV shows, etc. that remain. (I was very young at that time.) It's a nice place to visit.

For those of you stuck at the office, I apologize for the late notice regarding these films and will give greater advance notice in future whenever possible.

Here are the TCM descriptions of the films:

1:15 p.m.: Get Yourself A College Girl (1964)
A music publisher courts a student songwriter at a ski resort.
Cast: Chad Everett, Mary Ann Mobley, Nancy Sinatra. Dir: Sidney Miller. C-87 mins, TV-PG

2:45 p.m.: Hold On! (1966)
Rocket scientists consider naming a space ship after Herman's Hermits.
Cast: Peter Noone, Herman's Hermits, Shelley Fabares. Dir: Arthur Lubin. C-85 mins, TV-PG

4:15 p.m.: Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter (1968)
Herman's Hermits travel to England for a high-stakes greyhound race.
Cast: Peter Noone, Herman's Hermits, Stanley Holloway. Dir: Saul Swimmer. C-110 mins, TV-G

6:15 p.m.:Viva Las Vegas (1964)
A race-car driver falls for a pretty swimming instructor who wants him to slow down his career.
Cast: Elvis Presley, Ann-Margret, Cesare Danova. Dir: George Sidney. C-85 mins, TV-14

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The Reebok shoe company has announced that it has signed young actress Scarlett Johansson to sponsor a new line of "retro-chic" footwear and clothing, Scarlett "Hearts" Rbk, E! Online reports. The shoes will reportedly take advantage of the starlet's "Old Hollywood-style glamour," as E! breathlessly puts it. A respect for stylishness seems to me a very nice thing, although mass-marketing such a thing would seem a sure means of defeating the purpose, given that originality and expression of a strong, interesting personality were the hallmarks of that old-style Hollywood glamour. That is the sort of thing money cannot buy.

That said, a move from the Britney/Christina Desperate Slut look to a more stylish, presentable look based on Ms. Johansson's more tasteful approach would be a welcome change indeed.

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The critics have largely savaged M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Lady in the Water. Many seem to be so annoyed by the film's depiction of a snotty newspaper movie and book critic as to be constitutionally unable to appreciate it at all. If so, they are being astoundingly petty. The film has much to recommend it.

Yes, it's a bit slow at times, and the plot often seems something of a shaggy dog story. However, Lady in the Water also contains some very moving scenes depicting characters' great longing for love and meaning. That is something Shyamalan has always been very good at providing, and it characterizes his films at least as strongly as the plot twists, imaginative ideas, and suspense scenes for which he is better known. That is a very good thing and not at all common among current-day filmmakers. In this way Shyamalan reminds one more of Hollywood Golden Era directors Sam Wood and Frank Borzage than of anyone today.

As you probably know, the film tells the story of a water nymph who appears in a Philadelphia-area apartment complex and sets in motion a series of events from an ancient Korean bedtime story which Shyamalan has invented for the film. The future of the world hangs in the balance, and multitudes of people's lives will be changed greatly for the better if the characters succeed, and much for the worse if they fail. There are malevolent creatures out to stop the nymph from her appointed good works, and some lawkeeper critters who are apparently asleep at the switch through most of the story.

The film includes numerous allusions to spiritual concepts, and the story as a whole— with its premise that humanity is in the midst of a great battle among beings we cannot ordinarily see—suggests an interesting consideration of the Judeo-Christian idea of spiritual warfare. Yet it's not at all heavy-handed; Shyamalan includes enough quirky humor to keep the proceedings on an even keel, and his ability to elicit convincing performances from his cast remains strong.

Lady in the Water depicts a world in which human beings are buffeted about by forces we cannot usually see, but in which our choices are meaningful and intensely important and every person's life has a purpose and great meaning. The inclusion of a snotty film and book critic is therefore not a snide, angry slap at the writer-director's critics—or at least not only that. It is a critique of people who claim life has no deeper meaning and that everything is determined by events outside human control.

Although far from perfect, Lady in the Water does successfully convey that meaning, and that is an accomplishment indeed.

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Those who have an interest in the meanings behind the Charlie Chan films are cordially invited to take a look at my December 31, 2001/January 7, 2002 article on the topic in the Weekly Standard. Subscribers and potential subscribers can read it here, and others may read a longer version of it here. The article explains why so many politically motivated persons have taken such an intense dislike toward this exemplary character, and it shows the rich layers of meaning we can find in seemingly simple genre fiction. For example:

In his best films, Charlie is an almost ideal human being, in terms of personal character: wise, calm, observant, humble, polite, patient, affectionate, and generous, but also, when necessary, crafty, devious, and merciless. He frequently uses subterfuge to trick the killer into revealing his or her guilt, as in Charlie Chan at the Circus, where he sets up a fake operation on an injured circus performer to lure the murderer into trying to finish the job. Comedy helps the films avoid sappiness. Near the beginning of Charlie Chan in Egypt, we see the great detective awkwardly riding a donkey and unceremoniously falling off. In Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940), Jimmy Chan, mistaking his father for a wax figure, kicks Charlie in the backside.

Chan's great knowledge and wisdom are, of course, at the center of the narratives. It is Charlie, after all, who solves all the mysteries, through the most ingenious insights the writers can devise. In Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936), he figures out that two horses have been switched when he observes how the stable boy's pet monkey reacts to them. In that same film, he deduces that a man claiming to have received an anonymous threatening note actually wrote it himself, because he does not use his glasses to read it and thus must already be aware of its contents.

As befits a successful police detective, Chan is highly observant. When he walks into a bank in Charlie Chan in Paris, his eyes rove as if by long-ingrained habit, examining everything, and he even checks his watch against the bank's clock. "You've certainly got an eye for detail," says a man helping him later in that film, to which Chan sagely replies, "Grain of sand in eye can hide mountain." He is adept with the use of technology, saying, "Good tools shorten labor," in Charlie Chan at the Circus, but he is not overly dependent on it. His detection techniques blend both ancient and modern ways of thinking, a major theme of one of the earliest and best of the films, Charlie Chan in Egypt.

Also of great value in Chan's work is his remarkable patience. He always takes his time in following the evidence and deducing its meaning, whereas the other police, and Charlie's well-meaning sons, inevitably rush around trying to do everything too quickly, jumping to absurd conclusions. Charlie observes patiently until he has enough facts to draw valid inferences: "Theory like mist on eyeglasses - obscures facts," he says in Charlie Chan in Egypt. In Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, he says, "Suspicion is only toy of fools."

This composure clearly flows from the character's great humility. When a dignitary raises a toast to him in Charlie Chan in London, saying, "To the greatest detective in the world!" Chan demurs: "Not very good detective, just lucky old Chinaman." In that same film, a British policeman repeatedly calls him Chang, but Chan seems to take no notice of it. In Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, he is forced into a public debate with a celebrated criminology professor, and when his opponent continually brags - "I have a photographic memory!" - and insists on taking the seat reserved for Chan - Charlie does not respond in kind. "Kindness in heart better than gold in bank," the detective says in Charlie Chan in Paris.

Such selflessness affords Chan an extraordinary but undemonstrative courage. In Charlie Chan at the Circus, Lee says, "It's kind of creepy here in [the murder victim's] room," to which his father replies, "Then recommend you brush teeth, say prayers, and go to bed." After an attempt on his life shortly thereafter, Chan tells Lee that they can go back to sleep: "Enemy who misses mark, like serpent, must coil to strike again." When Chan receives warnings that his life is in danger, as in Charlie Chan in Shanghai and Charlie Chan in Paris, he persists in seeking the truth, and he frequently enters dangerous situations - cursed Egyptian tombs, forbidding ghost towns, the Paris sewers, etc. - without trepidation.

Chan's humility also makes him a model for the virtues of bourgeois conventionality and self-control. Short and plump, soft-spoken, always well-groomed and well-dressed but never ostentatious, Chan typically wears simple dark suits or plain white suits befitting his tropical home. He invariably says "please" and "thank you" when making even the most minor requests, often rather comically, as when he asks, "If you will honor other room with your presence?" in Charlie Chan in London. He neither smokes nor drinks, and he always shares his money with the poor: "Is always good fortune to give alms upon entering city," he says in Charlie Chan in Paris....

My conclusion:

Hence, ironically for a man of Chinese descent, Chan not only works to strengthen the Western, Christian, bourgeois moral order but, perhaps equally important, he exemplifies it.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My current piece on National Review Online is about "The Business End of Ethnic Politics," telling how the Fox companies' treatment of the charming Charlie Chan films of the 1930s and '40s shows the increasing tendency of corporate America to find it necessary to give in to political protesters:

Political correctness has largely fallen out of the news, but it is just as prevalent as ever. In fact, it has spread from the capitol buildings and campuses to corporate conference rooms, as businesses increasingly bow to pressure from ethnic, sexual, and political groups. Even old B movies and American heroes aren’t safe from the strictures of today’s culture czars.

This is all too evident in the fate of Charlie Chan in recent years.  . . .

[W]hy haven’t you seen Charlie Chan on TV lately? As I reported in National Review Online in 2003, the company that owns the TV rights to the best of the Chan films, Fox Movie Channel, refuses to show them and won’t license the rights to anybody else. The reason the network gave at the time was that ethnic groups had complained:

Fox Movie Channel has been made aware that the Charlie Chan films may contain situations or depictions that are sensitive to some viewers. Fox Movie Channel realizes that these historic films were produced at a time where racial sensitivities were not as they are today. As a result of the public response to the airing of these films, Fox Movie Channel will remove them from the schedule.

Fox has decided to release four Charlie Chan films on DVD, finally, but the bad news is that the quality of the presentation is not that great and Fox refuses to mention them at all on their website. Clearly, they have dumped these on the market in virtual secrecy, hoping to make a little money from the series fans without enraging the ethnic political interest groups. That's sad and ugly. My conclusion:

I suppose we might be grateful that these films are being released on DVD at all, however secretive and slovenly the presentation, but the travails of Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto tell us a lot about the way the culture and corporate America work today, and it is not a happy message. Increasingly in the business world as well as in the political and educational realms, the current American elites are willing to take conservatives’ money, but not their advice.

For that, they go to the very people who would most like to destroy them.

 For more details and a complete explanation of the situation, read the full story here.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a comment on my SMiLE post at the Reform Club, blogger Tom Van Dyke points out that Beach Boy Mike Love has sued for greater credit for the band's songs. I, too, had heard about this, and here are my thoughts on the issue.

Mike Love was given co-songwriting credit on numerous songs by the Beach Boys, almost always in collaboration with Brian, who contributed all the musical composition in those efforts. Take a look at the credits on the CDs, and you'll see that this is true. It is certainly possible that Mike Love may have contributed to some songs without receiving credit, though even if that did happen, it would have been the fault of the group's manager, Murry Wilson, who was the (abusive) father of Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson and uncle of Mike Love. No one in the band was able to stand up to Murry until around 1967 or so.

That said, I am extremely skeptical of Love's claim that he deserves even more credit for the group's songs. (I have read several books about the band's history, FYI, and seen the many documentaries about the band as well.) Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the lyrics for SMiLE, received credit for his contributions, as did Gary Usher and Roger Christian, who wrote lyrics for many of the band's songs through 1966, and Tony Asher, who wrote nearly all the lyrics for the Beach Boy's gorgeous Pet Sounds album. If Mike Love contributed to more songs than he received credit for, why were these outside writers properly credited and Love, a full-fledged member of the band, not? That doesn't make sense.

My assessment is that Mike Love is trying to take greater credit than he deserves. Brian has refused to fight him on this, consenting to let Love receive the credit—and money—he is seeking. Brian is an entirely nonconfrontational person, and it is clear to me that he would rather give his cousin the money and undeserved credit rather than fight him for it.

Of course, Mike Love should get whatever credit he has earned for any songs to which he may have contributed, but it is not at all true that he was vital to the band's success. It was drummer Dennis Wilson who was the surfer and contributed the surfing terms for the early songs, and Brian could easily have done without Love's lyrics entirely, using other talented lyric writers instead of his cousin, as he did when his musical concepts finally progressed too far beyond what Love was capable of writing about, specifically with Pet Sounds.

This is important because the Beach Boys are an important part of our cultural history, and credit (and blame) for the band's works should be allocated correctly. Mike Love's lyric writing ability has always been decidedly pedestrian and grossly inferior to that of the other lyric writers Brian worked with. Love was a barely competent singer with an unattractive, nasal voice, little range, and an astonishingly limited ability to convey emotion. In sum, he was extremely fortunate to be able to ride the coattails of his musical genius cousin, Brian.

None of this, of course, is meant to criticize Mike Love as a person. From what I have read about him, he has been a fairly decent person in most ways, although he has had his pecadilloes as have we all. In addition, I would never disparage the Beach Boys' early lyrics or Mike Love's part in the band, but without Brian, the Beach Boys would have been less important than the Hondells and Jan and Dean. Without Mike Love, they would still have been the Beach Boys.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

During the dog days of summer, all real Americans enjoy a bit of a pep-up by listening to the Beach Boys, the nation's great rock and roll band. The Beach Boys have definitely been through their ups and downs, but many of their songs have entered the pop culture pantheon, and have well earned the accolades. Led by primary songwriter, producer, and arranger Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys synthesized rock and roll, early American music, folk, and other influences into a sound all their own, as Wilson's great genius for melody, harmony, and counterpoint made lyrically simple songs such as "California Girls" "God Only Knows," and "Good Vibrations" into works of stunning beauty that were easy to understand and enjoy.

Things went bad for the band in the mid-1960s, as is well known, when Brian began to abuse drugs. Brian had emotional problems that were traceable in part to a poor relationship with his father, and his personal difficulties resulted in utter disaster when he began his drug use. Brian largely withdrew from public life, even spending a long time in bed, where his weight ballooned up to more than 300 pounds.

He still worked intermittently with the band, creating some very good songs during the bad times—compositions such as "Do It Again," "This Whole World," "Add Some Music to Your Day," "Hey Marcella," and "It's OK," and the Beach Boys Love You album showed that on his good days, Brian still could summon up the old magic. But it wasn't until the late 1980s and 1990s that he really began to function again, both personally and musically.

When he had his initial breakdown, Brian (it's hard to call this genial man "Wilson") was hard at work on what he intended as his true masterwork, SMiLE. With lyrics by the undeniably talented hippie wordsmith/songwriter Van Dyke Parks, the album was to be, in Brian's words, "a teenage symphony to God." After Brian's breakdown, however, work on the album stopped, even though it had been nearly finished, and the group released the rather disorganized and puzzling replacement Smiley Smile and moved on.

Tantalizing pieces from the original SMiLE lineup, however, appeared occasionally on the band's subsequent albums, making the unreleased album a great legend of lost popular art: an album of songs such as "Heroes and Villains," "Good Vibrations," "Cabin-Essence," "Vegetables," "Our Prayer," and "Cool, Cool Water" would have to be an astonishing thing, the group's fans supposed.

But it was almost forty years before we got to hear it—in 2004 in a version credited to Brian Wilson and performed by him and his current-day touring band. And it really was great, as I stated in my review of the recording for Tech Central Station. 

Still, I couldn't help but wonder what the album would have sounded like as performed by the Beach Boys in their prime, with Brian's youthful voice—his voice has coarsened over the years because of tobacco use, drug abuse, etc.—and with the vocal performances by the orignal band. The group, after all, had sung together since childhood, and was composed of three brothers, one cousin, and a longtime friend, and as a result their voices blended together beautifully. Given the tremendous vocal harmonies and counterpoints Brian had created for SMiLE, and the fact that some of the songs were originally written to be sung by Brian's now-deceased brothers Carl and Dennis, it was interesting to conjecture how the album would have sounded with their contributions.

We can't hear an entire performance of SMiLE by the Beach Boys, but ITunes has created the next best thing: a playlist of the Beach Boys' performances of SMiLE that have been released on the band's albums over the years. Several songs were released as tracks on the original vinyl albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and quite a few more were released on the various remasters and reissues during the past few years, and also on the superb Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys boxed set. (The latter, by the way, is a must-have recording.)

You can download the songs from ITunes and turn them into a compilation for your MP3 player and burn it to CD if you wish. 

The ITunes page offers a two versions of the compilation. For my own CD of it I used tracks from both suggested versions and added a couple of songs not mentioned in the ITunes lineup, to approximate most closely the lineup on the 2004 version. For example, to add "Gee," which appears on Brian Wilson's SMiLE but not in the ITunes compilation, I made a file of the corresponding 1:21 segment in "Heroes and Villians (Sections)" from the Good Vibrations boxed set and inserted it after "Our Prayer." You probably won't want to be so obsessive about it, but it's an option for any perfectionists out there. The full version of SMiLE is more than 50 minutes long, and the one I put together from the ITunes suggestions is about a half-hour long, but it's a superb album and gives a strong sense of what SMiLE would have been like as performed by the Beach Boys.

As bonus tracks, I added the best non-SMiLE tracks from Smiley Smile  ("Gettin' Hungry," "With Me Tonight," "Little Pad," and "Whistle In") plus a few of Brian's other finest songs from the late 1960s ("Good Vibrations—Early Take," "Add Some Music to Your Day," "Cool Cool Water," and "This Whole World"). The result is truly a great Beach Boys album, and it is sure to bring a smile to the listener's face—just as Brian had always hoped.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Closer, on TNT Monday nights at 9 EDT, is an unacknowledged Americanization of the long-running British police procedural TV program Prime Suspect—and is something of an improvement on the excessively saturnine original. In The Closer, now in its second season, Kyra Sedgwick plays a police detective and homicide team supervisor who solves crimes while stumbling charmingly through a rather bumpy personal life. She's a Southerner living in Los Angeles, and her charmingly manipulative ways make for an interesting character. It's a good show, made appealing by Sedgwick's excellent performance. She's quite likeable as the protagonist, and her various problems are handled by both herself and the program's writers with a fairly light touch. There is an appealing but not excessive amount of humor in the show.

The season premiere episode, which first ran a couple of weeks ago, was particularly satisfying. Unlike most entries in the first season of the program, it had a solid puzzle with several suspects, and the viewer had enough info to solve the crime by the time Brenda was ready to reveal the killer. Most of the appeal of The Closer lies in the non-mystery elements, but having a good mystery made this episode really sing.

In the two subsequent episodes this season, there have been multiple suspects, although in last week's episode a vital clue was withheld until Brenda revealed the identity of the murderer. That's not what true mystery aficionados call fair play, but the mystery was nonetheless good, and the character relationships and the various agendas driving the murder suspects were interesting.

It's very pleasing to see another American crime show take up a more puzzle-oriented, cheerful approach to crime fiction, in this time of gloomy CSI imitators. There's no reason a police procedural or hardboiled story can't have a good puzzle, as the stories and novels of Cornell Woolrich and Fredric Brown make very clear in the hardboiled realm and which the British series Midsomer Murders and Dalziel and Pascoe in both books and TV make abundantly clear. (Both of the latter are produced in Great Britain.) I like to see TV moving away from what I called, in my National Review Online roundup of the last TV season, shows about Saving the World, One Creepy-Looking Corpse at a Time.

The formulaic probing into the insides of dead bodies in these programs has made the TV cop show a very tired genre, and it will begin to fade away soon if the networks don't bring new life to it with an approach more sanguine and less sanguinary. The Closer joins Monk, Psych, and the late, lamented, lost A&E Nero Wolfe series in doing just that on satellite channels; we'll know things are getting better when the networks begin to follow suit.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

The new USA Network mystery-comedy series Psych, which runs Friday nights at 10 EDT, is still . . . pretty good. The premiere episode wasn't nearly as good as the premiere of Monk a few years back—though that is a very high standard to reach. Psych is fairly amusing, and in fact LOL funny at times. The characters, however, are still not very interesting, and the mystery in the premiere episode was very weak, especially for a first shot at establishing a program's credentials. The puzzle centered on a kidmapping, but there wasn't much mystery to it, and the solution was a real cliche of the form—entirely predictable. Not a good way to begin a mystery series.

Other than James Roday's lead character, Shawn, the characters are all obvious refugees from other mystery programs: the skeptical/worried sidekick, the tediously suspicious cops, the gruff police captain (female in this case, but predictably hard-edged), the snotty suspects, etc. Shawn's relationship with his ex-cop father (played well by Corbin Bernsen, though the actor is given very little to work with) is fairly interesting, but it doesn't bring much more depth to the characters. Many things about the script seem rather undeveloped, alas.

In the premiere episode, the writers did take great pains to establish exactly how the protagonist came to have such great powers of observation, and they have made sure to remind us in the two subsequent forays. That, however, may actually be something of a mistake. Usually, we don't really care why the detective is so insightful; it is enough that he or she is a genius and that we get to go along for the ride. With Monk, of course, a good deal of the fun is in watching him flounder through life while blasting through puzzling mysteries, and we appreciate the ironic truth that the very thing that makes him a great detective makes him a very unhappy person. This gives the program an inherent tension and drama, to go along with the comedy it creates.

Psych attempts to recreate this aspect of Monk, but there is a big difference: whereas one feels great sympathy for Adrian Monk because of his mental problems, Shawn's continual optimism and snarkiness in Psych tend to defeat any sympathy we may wish to feel for him due to his strained relationship with his father. We know that Shawn must crave a better relationship with his father, which could make for some good drama, and comedy as well, but Roday is rather too successful at hiding it under his character's Mr. Fun persona. Shawn's blithe surface appears too often to be what he is really about—and such superficiality in a character defeats audience identification and sympathy. In addition, the father-son relationship is improving as the series progresses, which further dilutes any call for sympathy.

The series also lays on Shawn's conflicts with the police too heavily. There is a continually antagonistic relationship with one of the cops assigned to the cases Shawn investigates (yawn), a burgeoning cooperation with the mean cop's nice female partner, and the police captain's continual pretence that she doesn't like Shawn's investigative work when in fact she really does. The latter relationship is perhaps most annoying of all because it is just so bloody cute.

When Psych concentrates on the mystery story in each episode, the program becomes more interesting, but the show really spends too much time trying to emulate Monk's quirkiness. In episodes two and three (out of three so far), more of the show is devoted to the mystery plot than in the premiere, which is a very welcome development indeed. However, the distractions still remain. That's a pity because the concept—a detective who is so insightful that he has to pretend to be a psychic in order to keep police from thinking he has actually committed the crimes he is trying to solve—is perfectly brilliant and doesn't need any additional quirkiness. The program's creators should trust the concept and cut back the nonsense to the barest minimum.

Making things even more difficult for Psych is its seemingly advantageous position following Monk. The latter program has been nearly as good in recent weeks as we might have expected it to be. The concept for the season premiere—an actor playing Adrian Monk in a movie follows the obsessive detective as he attempts to solve a mystery—is the kind of thing that can be disastrously cute, and the producers managed to avoid that and present a solid mystery with the show's usual level of engaging comedy and serious moments that we have come to expect from this impressively intelligent and consistent show. The two subsequent episodes have been good as well. What the producers of Psych should learn from all this is: The best thing about a mystery is . . . the mystery.

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my view, Monk is one of the best programs on television: it's funny, always has strong plots and interesting characters, and upholds values I consider quite laudable. When Monk deals with traditional Judeo-Christian religion, it does so respectfully, another thing I like about the program, and it does so subtly, without being the slightest bit preachy, which makes the treatment palatable for those who don't share that faith.

This is an aspect of the show that has been little remarked upon, and I think that suggests the treatment is very effective, in that it doesn't offend people while still making its points. That is an important lesson for writers and filmmakers to learn, I think.

I own the Monk pilot movie and first three seasons on DVD, and I do watch them during those long, sad months when the show is on hiatus. (There are only about a dozen new episodes per year, running for about six consecutive weeks at the beginning of the year and then in July and August.)

 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although the USA Network program Psych has its faults at present, it at least has a good chance to right the ship and become a successful show to pair with Monk on Friday nights. The network's previous attempt to follow Monk with an eccentric detective—a remake of the English series Touching Evil—failed, and in my view it happened mainly because the program's tone was inconsistent and largely too different from that of Monk.

Like its BBC predecessor, Touching Evil dealt with extremely grim subject matter, but the producers tried to spice it up a bit by making the lead character a bit kooky and increasing the prominence of a bizarre subsidiary character whom they made more zany than in the British original. Although Jeffrey Donovan did an excellent job of portraying the lead character, Detective Dave Creegan, and Pruitt Taylor Vince was very interesting as Cyril, the attempt to make an extremely grim show more pleasant didn't work. It's as if they had tried to make Adrian Monk the central character in Criminal Minds. Audiences didn't take to it.

Psych looks like a better fit both in its central concept and as a companion program for Monk. Improvement of some of the characterizations appears to be called for, but if that should happen—something one would think rather urgent on a channel that advertises its offerings as "Characters Welcome"—it has a decent chance of making it.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Having cleared the decks of a few things, I finally got around to seeing Superman Returns. It's reasonably entertaining and worth seeing. What I found most interesting about it was how much Christ imagery and other references to Christ there were in the film. Certainly, the presence of Christ references in the Superman saga is nothing new, although that was an aspect of the story that was not emphasized in Superman: The Movie, Superman II, and the two dreadful sequels that everyone would prefer to forget. In Superman Returns, the Christ imagery returns as well and is greatly emphasized.

I won't bore you with countless examples, as anyone watching the film with any attention at all will ascertain many such, but I will observe that the central question of the film, "Does the world really need Superman?" is presented as a newspaper story, in a way quite deliberately reminiscent of the famous Time magazine "God Is Dead" cover story of the 1960s. Lois Lane, the jaded author of the Pulitzer-winning story titled "Does the world really need Superman?", talks to the hero about that very question, giving the answer she gave in the story, and interestingly phrasing it as, "The world doesn't need a savior."

In answer, Superman slowly ascends with her into the heavens and looks down on the world below, listening to the arguments, worries, and anguished cries of the multitudes of people below. (This moment gains further power from its resemblance to the scene in Bruce Almighty when Bruce hears millions of people's prayers simultaneously.) Superman looks at Lois and says, "You wrote that the world doesn't need a saviour, but every day I hear people crying for one."

Of course, the film is no allegory, and Superman is no precise Christ figure. He apparently has had an affair with Lois in the past and fathered a son with her, and he requires help from humans in order to avert his own death in the film. However, such differences are what make the Superman mythos more interesting and rich in its implications.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)