.jpg "Image from 'Monk'")
Continue reading "'Monk' Enters Final Weeks" »
Continue reading "'Fourth Kind' Unfairly Derided by Critics" »
Continue reading "AMC-TVs 'Prisoner' Poses Philosophical Questions in Action Drama" »
Continue reading "Review: PBS Mystery 'Place of Execution'" »
Continue reading "'The Red Right Hand' Considered and Reconsidered" »
Continue reading "Review: Celebrated Mystery Novelist James Offers Thoughts on Genre" »
Continue reading "'Couples,' 'Paranormal' Show Value of Genre Traditions" »
Continue reading "ABC's 'FlashForward' Builds on Interesting Premise" »
Continue reading "'NCIS: Los Angeles' Off to Strong Start" »
Continue reading "Abrupt End to 'The Beautiful Life'" »
Continue reading "Romero's Latest Zombie Film Has Political Slant, As Usual" »
Stephen Sommers' simplistic summer blockbuster G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened well at the U.S. box office, but the smaller film Julie and Julia will probably be remembered much more fondly.
Continue reading "Top Two New Movie Releases Take Contrasting Approaches" »
Despite being trashed by the critics, Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen led at the U.S box office for the second weekend in a row.
With its strong complement of Christian themes and images, the Transformers sequel edged out the premiere weekend performance of the animated comedy entry Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the third in that series, $42.3 million to $41.7 million.
Indicating that Christian themes, likable characters, and stories depicting people with a positive purpose outweigh critics' cavils, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen continued to draw well from all audience segments and shows signs it will sustain its ability to garner good numbers, according to a studio source.
--S. T. Karnick
Continue reading "The Toxic Philosophy Behind 'Quirky' Film(s)" »
Continue reading "'Terminator Salvation' Delivers Action but Little Real Drama" »
Continue reading "ABC's 'Castle' Is Exemplary TV Series" »
Yes, vampires are still a hot media commodity, but zombies are vying to knock them off the cultural pedestal.
S. T. Karnick considers the terrifying facts.
Continue reading "Zombie Culture and the March of Socialism" »
Escape was the theme once again for U.S. moviegoers last weekend-but don't blame the audiences.
Continue reading "Studios, Filmmakers to Blame for Hollywood Dramas' Lack of Box Office Appeal" »
Last night's episode of the Fox Network medical-mystery series House included a Big Event meant to shock the show's viewers and send the story line in an interesting new direction, as one of the main characters of the series was killed.
This almost instantaneous accumulation and processing of information makes the web something of a superbrain. Yes, figuring out the plot twists of television shows may not be the most productive use of people's time and brainpower, but this somewhat frivolous achievement does indicate the impressive potential of the internet as a mass information processing tool.
This capability makes the internet simultaneously a potential source of astonishing public benefits and the most powerful generator of nonsense ever created.
An interesting side note (plot spoiler follows): Entertainment Weekly revealed this morning that Kal Penn, who played the character who died in last night's episode, will be leaving the show to join the Obama administration as associate director in the White House Office of Public Liaison.
I have no idea what that particular agency is, but I'm quite sure it's a good deal less useful than a good TV mystery series.
—S. T. Karnick
Continue reading "Audiences Flock to 'Monsters vs. Aliens'" »
The latest PBS Masterpiece Classics adaptation of Charles Dickens's classic novel Oliver Twist demonstrates the urgent need for reform of the taxpayer-supported broadcasting service, S. T. Karnick notes.
Continue reading "PBS Dickens Adaptation Politicizes and Vulgarizes Classic Novel" »
Continue reading "'Last Templar' Shows Value of Cultural Freedom" »
Continuing the beneficial meltdown of the mainstream media, including bastions of the erstwhile counterculture (which long ago became the mainstream culture), Village Voice magazine has laid off three editors, including longtime columnist/editor Nat Hentoff.
Hentoff, who wrote about jazz and then civil liberties for the newspaper for the past fifty years, was a staunch leftist and counterculturalist, but he showed some intellectual integrity on the subject of freedom of speech in recent years, exemplified by his book Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
The premise of the book is rather skewed, given that the right has virtually no power in either academia or the culture, especially the elite culture. Nevertheless, the fact that a well-known leftist and ACLU-style civil liberties advocate (meaning those who use the subject as a stalking horse for the left's agenda) would acknowledge the left's illiberalism was an important cultural event.
The decline and perhaps eventual fall of the Village Voice will be equally salubrious.
Update (1/15/09 11:30 a.m.): As Joe notes in the comment section below, another policy position that made Hentoff unusual—and unwanted—among the left was his opposition to legalized abortion. It was indeed a very courageous stand for a man of the left to take.
Hentoff is to be commended for acknowledging that his dedication to protecting people from exploitation by government and big business meant also protecting unborn children from the abortion industry. That industry constitutes an alliance between business and state that exploits women's desperation, especially through decades of destruction of the humane alternative, adoption.
The huge, extremely profitable, and unregulated abortion industry is one of those rare businesses that the left supports, in one of the great, perverse ironies of our time.
Thanks, Joe, for reminding us of this important aspect of Hentoff's life's work.
—S. T. Karnick
The decline of the mainstream media—a very good thing—is the real story behind an interesting L. A. Times article about Ben Lyons, a film critic on the syndicated TV show At the Movies. Critics and movie buffs alike both have nothing but contempt for the 27-year-old Lyons, son of former host and newspaper film critic Jeffrey Lyons.
Jeffrey Lyons was never any great thinker, or even a good one, but Ben Lyons makes him look like Samuel Johnson by comparison. The younger Lyons strikes the viewer as an ignoramus and a jackass, and the producers of At the Movies clearly made a horrendous mistake in hiring him.
Apparently they hoped to get frat boys and other Sports Center fans to watch the show, which only further confirms major stupidity on the producers of At the Movies.
Continue reading "Internet Blamed for Idiocy of 'At the Movies' Host" »
The new remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is getting terrible reviews. But is there something more going on here? S. T. Karnick writes.
Continue reading "'The Day the Earth Stood Still' Opens OK at Box Office Despite Horrible Reviews" »
Continue reading "New Mystery Volume Brings Turbulent '60s to Life" »
Continue reading "TNT's 'Leverage' Shows Promise" »
Continue reading "TNT's Latest 'Librarian' Movie Premieres Tonight" »
The action/sci-fi/conspiracy/you-name-it film Wanted, available on DVD and Blu-Ray starting today, shows that even mere "entertainments" often have more interesting ideas than the explicitly "thoughtful"—meaning politicized and arrogantly didactic—films that deluge U.S. audiences during the holiday season.
Continue reading "'Wanted' Has Much to Offer Beneath Sensationalistic Surface" »
Continue reading "Alleged 'Twilight' Prudishness Might Be a Good Cultural Sign" »
Continue reading "'Quantum of Solace' Opens Big at U.S. Box Office" »
Continue reading "Hollywood Filmmakers Should Be Grateful for Audiences' Taste, Common Sense" »
A new edition of Dracula, the extremely influential 1897 gothic novel written by Bram Stoker, includes a huge amount of background information about the book and its influence on the culture.
The power of the original novel Dracula lay in author Bram Stoker's ability to make Satan real to materialistic late-nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans, as was clearly the author's intention. Dracula still has the power to evoke the same thoughts today, and that accounts for its great and enduring influence in the 111 years since its original publication.
Judging by the description of the contents, the annotations will include much nonsense purveying bizarre, silly theories about the book's underlying meanings, of which a multitude have been written during the past century. However, there are a couple of things that may make it uniquely worth having.
These are, one, an introduction by sci-fi/fantasy author Neil Gaiman, and two, a detailed examination of the original typescript, which is described as having a "shockingly different" ending not previously available to scholars.
Click here for more information about The New Annotated Dracula.
Update: John J. Miller of National Review provides additional details on the volume in this article from the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading "Public Prefers Payne over Politics" »
Continue reading "'Fringe' Updates 'X-Files' with '60s-Style Optimism" »
In a comment on our article titled "'Dark Knight' Evokes Interesting Philosophical, Theological ideas," Mike Tooney presents some highly enlightening thoughts on what the act of creation truly requires, and what it says about human ambitions and abilities.
Continue reading "The Limits of Human Creativity—More on 'The Dark Knight'" »
Pixar's WALL-E led a strong slate at the U.S. box office that resulted in the biggest-grossing weekend of the year.
Continue reading "'WALL-E' Leads Big Weekend for Hollywood" »
Robert Downey Jr., star of the megahit movie Iron Man, has signed on for a new film that crosses genres and may have some interesting and salutary ideas.
Continue reading "Downey to Lead Genre-Bender" »
The acclaimed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was difficult to categorize. That's a compliment, but it also means much important critical work remains to be done.
Continue reading "Thoughts on Arthur C. Clarke" »
The mid-century mystery and science-fiction master Fredric Brown deserves much greater recognition, and his works should be brought back into print.
Continue reading "The Case for Fredric Brown" »
Could this be the start of a new trend toward greater optimism and positivity in the culture? HBO, for two decades the home of dark, unhappy, "edgy" TV series, is debuting a new show with a light touch.
Continue reading "HBO Lightens Up With New Detective Series" »
Fox TV comes up with two new drama series featuring troubled geniuses.
Continue reading "Fox Clones 'House' - Rather Successfully" »
Continue reading "The Light in "Dark" Fiction" »
American film critics detest violent movies—unless there's an antisocial message involved. TAC correspondent Mike D'Virgilio looks at critical reactions to violence in movies.
Continue reading "The Violent Hypocrisy of Mainstream Film Critics" »
Continue reading "Monk and God" »
Here's a preview of an article coming soon on another site. I've been working with the editor for a week to get this published, and an updated version will run eventually, but in the meantime here's a version that is timely because the season-ending of Prison Break will run on Fox tonight at 8 EST.Continue reading "A Defense of Pop Fiction" »
This Sunday night at 10 p.m EST, CBS attempts to bolster its writers-strike-depleted primetime lineup by bringing over a program from pay cable, Showtime's Dexter.
For those not familiar with the show, Dexter is a limited series based on the first in a series of novels about a Miami police forensic consultant whose expertise happens to be based in great part on the fact that he is a serial killer.
Continue reading "'Dexter' Comes to CBS" »
Sometimes meaningful cultural moments crop up in the most unexpected places.
One place you'll find them is on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild (Friday nights at 9 EST). In each episode, Bear Grylls, a former British military commando and an expert on survival techniques, shows how to get through the worst wilderness conditions and find one's way back to civilization.
Continue reading "The Subtle Cross" »
Turner Classic Movies is presenting a documentary on filmmaker Val Lewton, produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, tonight at 8 EST with a repeat presentation at midnight.
Lewton (b. Vladimir Ivan Leventon in Yalta, Russia) was a highly talented writer and producer whose atmospheric suspense and horror films of the 1940s for Hollywood's RKO studio are much admired by film critics and scholars and the more tasteful and well-informed of today's filmmakers.
Continue reading "Salute to Val Lewton" »
After the success of several tie-in novels featuring characters from the USA Network detective-comedy series Monk, written by TV mystery veteran Lee Goldberg, two more USA Network series will get the same treatment, according to an item on The Blog of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers.
TV writer William Rabkin has agreed to write three original novels based on Psych, with the first going into print in January 2009, and Tod Goldberg will produce three books based on Burn Notice, with the first installment due out in July 2008, when the series' second season will begin on USA Network.
Continue reading "Tie-In Novels for 'Psych,' 'Burn Notice'" »
TAC Mystery Fiction Correspondent Mary Reed reviews a classic novel by English suspense writer "Sapper," now available for free online through Project Gutenberg Australia.
H. C. McNeile, aka "Sapper," is one of the most popular and most reviled of mystery-suspense writers.
Writing largely between the two World Wars, the former British military man brought an American-style hardboiled approach to British fiction with his popular character Bulldog Drummond, a wealthy, intrepid, honorable former military officer. The Drummond tales combined suspense, espionage, and detection, rather after the fashion of Leslie Charteris's Saint stories. The character also appeared in the movies and on television and radio.
Sapper also wrote straight detective novels, one of which is Ronald Standish, the item currently under review.
Sapper's books sold very well indeed, and readers enjoyed them immensely, but literary critics of later decades, especially since the 1960s, have criticized his books as representing an obsolete, politically damaging, and personally vile point of view—for the narratives frankly demonstrate that different types of people behave differently. This is a reality that contemporary thought (if it can be honored with that designation) would like to deny and ignore, consigning it to the ash heap through force of career destruction of those who dare to speak it.
Hence, reading books such as those by Sapper is a dangerous act and should be undertaken only by the bold. I recommend that you do so immediately.—STK
Continue reading "A Dangerous Mystery Writer" »
My favorite BBC programming has always been its mystery series, and the best of those are not the ones that mimic American programs but those that have the most British feel to them.
Unfortunately, the BBC has almost fully assimilated former Prime Minister Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" notion, turning the government media service into a bastion of vulgar flash and nonsense designed to appeal to sex-addled teenagers of all ages.
Hence it's a happy day any time the BBC accidentally puts out one of its increasingly rare programs of intelligent and sensible entertainment. Life on Mars is just such a one and is not to be missed.
Continue reading "BBC's Excellent "Life on Mars"" »
Most movies, even those that seem rather mindless, actually do have some serious thematic content behind the action, comedy, romance, and other surface elements—as I have observed frequently on this site and elsewhere.
National Treasure: Book of Secrets initially seems very unusual in this respect: it appears to have no interesting thematic content whatsoever.
It's amazingly fluffy and superficial, and works as great, unserious Hollywood entertainment. It is thoroughly successful at that.
Nonetheless, there is some serious thematic content to the film, which we would do well to see.
Continue reading "The Unusual Appeal of "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"" »
New The American Culture correspondent Mike Long has put together a very contrarian and very good list of the best movies of the year for National Review Online, and he has been gracious enough to allow us to reprint it here in its entirety.
Contrary to most critics, Mike claims this was a good year for the movies. I agree. Another thing I strongly endorse about the article is that it does not succumb to political shibboleths of either left or right. That's our approach on The American Culture.
And there's more. In an exclusive for The American Culture, Mike informs us that since he wrote the article, he saw Sweeney Todd and would move it to number 4 on the list. Instead of altering the article, however, we're leaving it as is, so that you will not miss the number 10 movie, which is well worth seeing.
Here's Mike's "2007 at the Movies":
Continue reading "2007 at the Movies" »
In an essay provocatively called "The Slow and Agonizing Death of the Private Detective", crime novel fan and critic William Ahearn argues that private-eye detective fiction is dead:
That's an incendiary way of putting it, and I'm sure that devotees of contemporary private eye fiction will be scandalized by both the content of the claim and Ahearn's dogmatic expression of it.The private detective is as dead as a two-dollar steak and would somebody please get a shovel and bury the stiff.
However, in the main I agree with his statement and endorse its tone.
Continue reading "The Problem with Contemporary Detective Fiction" »
A classic type of literary and folk-tale character is the trickster, an individual who routinely and comically transgresses the boundaries of acceptable social behavior. From Br'er Rabbit to P. G. Wodehouse's Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge and Uncle Fred to Bugs Bunny to The Joker of the "Batman" comics to Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby to the con artists in Hustle, the trickster is a pre-moral or non-moral character whose schemes take ordinary people out of their comfortable existence and force them to react to unfamiliar, morally disorienting situations.
In so doing, this type of character both identifies the regnant social boundaries for us and causes us to think about whether the rules make sense.
This is an important process in a liberal society, as social boundaries should be based on common sense and the consequences that personal choices impose on society and individuals. As conditions change—due in great part to technological advances—we must alter our social mores and rules in order to reflect the different world in which we live.
Continue reading "The Value of the Trickster" »
As expected, the Will Smith-starring intellectual zombie film I Am Legend opened very strong at the U.S. box office last weekend, leading all films by a good measure in its opening weekend.
The film starring the well-liked Smith, whose movies consistently deliver his likeable personality and positive personal and religious values, grossed an impressive $77.2 million during its first weekend in theaters. That's $25 million more than any film in which he has starred has taken in during its opening weekend, and is a very strong performance indeed.
Finishing a surprising second was the CGI animated comedy film Alvin and the Chipmunks, selling a startling $45 million worth of tickets for the Fox studio. Fox was expecting the film to bring in about $20 million. The presence of Jason Lee (My Name Is Earl) as the Chipmunks' boss probably helped extend the film's appeal, though obviously the chipmunks must have been the big draw.
It is now obvious that audiences do not want to see the controversial fantasy film The Golden Compass, as it took in only $8.8 million and finished third. The money total represents a vertiginous 66 percent drop from the film's already disappointing opening weekend total the week before. It is officially a disaster for New Line Cinema.
Continue reading ""Legend," "Chipmunks" Dominate Movie Box Office" »
A very good movie series that has been unjustly overlooked since the cultural cataclysm that began after World War II is MGM's late-1930s/early '40s series of films starring Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare. It's a pity, as the series has much to offer even today.
Ayres, then a very young contract player at what was the top Hollywood studio at the time, portrays the title character with the right blend of earnestness and humor, and Lionel Barrymore is excellent as his crusty but ultimately sympathetic mentor, Dr. Gillespie. Laraine Day is likewise solid as hardworking Nurse Mary Lamont, who becomes Kildare's love interest.
Nearly all the entries in the series were helmed by the undistinguished MGM contract director Harold S. Bucquet, but they are quite competently produced, written, and directed.
Continue reading "The Dr. Kildare Films" »
It's rather startling how much of the culture is exploring moral issues in increasingly traditional terms. As is perhaps most evident in ABC's Dirty Sexy Money, an ever-more common approach among producers of TV fiction series is to take flamboyant story material and apply it to intensely moral ends. An important aspect of this trend, also highly evident in DSM, is the notion that the rich are a good deal more morally suspect than the middle classes.
Hence it should hardly surprise us that not one but two new shows on the CW this year are based on the premise that life among the wealthy in Manhattan is so bad that even self-imposed exile is better.
Interestingly, the point of both shows is that the moral weakness and decadence of the New York wealthy is what makes life there really rather miserable.
Continue reading "New TV Dramas Are Taking Moral Issues Seriously" »
This past weekend's movie box office tallies provided more evidence that U.S. audiences are tired of gloom and doom from the popular culture. Producer-writer-director-actor Tyler Perry's comedy Why Did I Get Married? led with $21.5 million in sales, displacing another comedy, The Game Plan, which came in a distant second by bringing in $11.5 million.
The George Clooney left-wing legal drama Michael Clayton and the Mark Wahlberg-Joaquin Phoenix crime drama We Own the Night tied for third with $11 million apiece in the preliminary reports.
The Farelly brothers film The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller in a comedy depending on personal discomfort for its effects, fell to fifth in its second week, taking in $7.3 million, a very poor number in light of Stiller's proven box-office appeal—his last movie, the charming and amusing Night at the Museum, brought in well over $100 million in its first ten days.
Continue reading "Perry Buries Competition at Weekend Movie Box Office" »
Tonight at 8:00 EDT Turner Network Television is showing a very underrated movie from 1957, Curse of the Demon (also released as Night of the Demon), directed by Jacques Tourneur. It's based on a very fine horror story by M. R. James, "Casting the Runes."
James's metier was in creating horror stories that depended on strong characterization, a solid story with sensible motivation, great skill at conveying atmosphere and suspense, and some real intellectual power. He stayed away from sensational effects, and his stories were much more effective for it.
Continue reading "A Very Good Film Dealing with Devil Worship" »
Like Pushing Daisies (analyzed earlier on this site), the new CBS drama series Moonlight explores fairly heady ideas about what makes us human, specifically the relationship between flesh and spirit. Unlike the cheerful Daisies, Moonlight, created by movie producer Joel Silver, is another of the many dark dramas so common on TV today.
Mick St. John (Alex O'Loughlin) is a moralistic vampire who doesn't prey on "innocents" but instead kills only evil people whom he thinks deserve to die (so he says). Mick despises vampires who kill humans indiscriminately, and he helps people by working as a private investigator, using his heightened senses to solve the crimes.
The possibility of redemption is a strong impulse throughout the pilot episode, as Mick is torn between his will to live and his desire to live right.
That's a good and interesting theme to consider. Unfortunately, the scriptwriting, performances, and visual presentation are at a low level of sophistication, sticking to the modern comic-book/graphic-novel approach and never striking much contact with the real world. That makes it difficult for the viewer to experience the show as much more than an intellectual exercise—and comic books are hardly the best way to exercise the intellect.
Critic John J. Miller has published a very informative interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Rusty Burke on National Review Online, which merits attention.
The excerpts below provide a good sense of why the underappreciated writer of the Conan the Barbarian stories deserves more consideration. Howard wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, and modern-day readers are rediscovering his non-Conan writings and realizing that he was above all a master storyteller.
Particularly praiseworthy is Burke's emphasis on the importance of story in narrative fiction, which reflects criticisms made in the prior century by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other such luminaries:
Continue reading "Master Storyteller" »
Mystery critic Jon Breen, writing in The Weekly Standard, has offered the best capsule description of Dan Brown's megaselling novel The Da Vinci Code I've ever read. Noting that it is inaccurate to describe the book as a new kind of "thriller," Breen disposes of it as follows:
Dan Brown's novel works best as an old-fashioned clued detective puzzle, albeit an unusually badly written one.
Perfect.
The mixing of genres can be interesting when it works, but when it doesn't, it's usually a disaster.
The producers of the forthcoming CBS TV primetime series, Viva Laughlin, based on the BBC series Viva Blackpool, will see if they can avoid the shoals. The series will feature mystery-suspense plots augmented with musical-theater sequences, the network has revealed. USA Today explains:
Continue reading "Another Try at Genre-Bending" »
If you need any demonstration of the amazing cultural power of tweeners (young people exiting childhood and entering the early years of adolescence), the popularity of the Disney TV movie High School Musical should provide it. It was watched by millions on television, has sold well in DVD, and has spawned a cottage industry of associated paraphernalia including concert tours and CDs.
Last Friday night the sequel, High School Musical 2, kept the tweeners and their undoubtedly reluctant parents enthralled, setting a record for non-network TV viewership:
Continue reading ""High School Musical 2" Grabs Record Audience" »
J. K. Rowling, author of the mega-bestselling Harry Potter books, is writing a detective novel, according to the Sunday Times of London. AP reports:
The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling's, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction.
"My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.
A mystery series selling in the hundreds of millions, as the Harry Potter series did, would certainly be good for the genre's overall popularity—but is exceedingly unlikely. However, Rowling's ability to bring imagination and some interesting ideas to genre fiction has been fully proven, and her effort could indeed be refreshing for a form of fiction that has become rather dreary in recent years.
Coincidentally timed to align with today's premiere of Live Free or Die Hard, the magazine Entertainment Weekly released its list of the greatest action movies of all time. Number one in the genre was Die Hard.
It's a fairly good and reasonable list, albeit tilted toward more recent films as these things usually are. I doubt, for example, that Spider-Man 2 and Kill Bill—Vol. 1 will make the list in future decades, even though they may be justified in making this one.
Some titles I'm glad to see included are Drunken Master II: Legend of Drunken Master (feat. Jackie Chan; I think Drunken Master is better, however), The Adventures of Robin Hood (though it's absolutely ridiculous that it's not number 1 or 2), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hard-Boiled (John Woo's highly influential film starring Chow Yun-Fat is an action film with heart and mind as well as the necessary amount of muscle) and Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (although I like his Hidden Fortress a good deal more).
Continue reading "Greatest Action Movies of All Time" »
Our friend Mike Tooney called our attention to the following passage in William K. Everson's book The Detective in Film in which the author discusses the four 1930s Nancy Drew films produced by Warner Brothers and starring Bonita Granville as the title character. It's a good capsule description of the series:Continue reading "The 1930s Nancy Drew Films" »
A new wave of movies aimed at young girls is coming, starting this Friday with the theatrical release of Nancy Drew. The director of that film, Andrew Fleming, points out that the recent preteen and teen culture presented models of behavior very different from that of the children at which they have been aimed and which most of their parents would endorse.
The LA Times reports the good news that this is about to change somewhat:
Continue reading "Movies for Good Girls" »
Do producers and TV networks have an obligation to their viewers?
Producers and networks are increasingly using long-term plotlines in order to keep viewers returning week after week. In shows such as 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, and the like, a long-term, overarching plot line keeps moving the narrative forward as each episode resolves lesser elements of the story.
It's a great way to keep viewers interested in a show, and when done well, it gives a program the narrative drive of a Victorian novel by Wilkie Collins or Anthony Trollope.
But what happens when such a show gets canceled? Should viewers who have invested multiple hours in a program just be left hanging?
Continue reading "What TV Networks Owe Loyal Viewers" »
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a televison evangelist and moral activist, died today at the age of 73.
Falwell was, of course, one of the great bugaboos of the Left for the past three decades, and he earned that distinction largely by having non-atheist and non-latitudinarian principles and sticking to them.
Falwell had failed to install the theocracy that leftists had long insisted he was intent on creating in the United States.
Although I disagree with some of his theological positions and many of his political statements, I acknowledge that Jerry Falwell tried to work correctly within the American system to effect positive change.
He founded an institution, Liberty University, that may well hae a greater and more lasting influence on American society than any of his political activities did.
Continue reading "The Politics of Jerry Falwell" »
.jpg "A typically gloomy image from Batman Begins movie")
[I ran across a DVD of the movie Batman Begins recently and was reminded of how representative it is of much of today's movie culture. So, for your enlightement and delectation, the following is reprinted from my review for Crux.]
What Batman Begins says most powerfully is how bad the earlier films in the series were—and how crippled by stylistic cliches today's Hollywood action films have become.
The best way to experience Batman is still to read the original DC comic books from years ago and watch the TV cartoon series. This one ain't bad, but they're the real thing.
Continue reading "Batman Begins . . . Again" »
Turner Classic Movies is featuring mystery films this month, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with an emphasis on various detective series. All showings will be entirely without commercial interruptions, as is TCM's custom.
Those who have had their fill of sensationalistic, ultraviolent, ugly, modern theatrical crime thrillers would do well to take a look at these films, which are mostly lower in production values but much stronger on logic, common sense, insights into human behavior, and what makes for good character.
Tomorrow night the series begins with two of the best films featuring hardboiled detectives. The 1941 film The Maltese Falcon (8 p.m. EST) was written and directed by John Huston and features Humphrey Bogart in the definitive private eye movie performance as Sam Spade. TCM follows that at 10 p.m. with an even better film, Howard Hawks's superb adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946), by Raymond Chandler.
Those two are must-sees. At midnight, iron-fisted Mike Hammer comes on the scene in Robert Aldrich's excellent 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, followed by a poles-apart detective, Hercule Poirot, played by Albert Finney in a star-studded 1974 production featuring Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Lauren Bacall. After that, at 4:15 a.m., the DVRs will still be running, to record The Scarlet Clue, a minor but amusing Charlie Chan film from 1945—it features the woefully underappreciated comic brilliance of Mantan Moreland as Chan's driver, Birmingham Brown. Watch this one if only to see how much a great comic actor can do with seemingly ordinary material.
Wednesday night TCM turns to the greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, as played by the actor who best inhabited the role, Basil Rathbone.
Even though nearly all of the Universal films starring Rathbone with Nigel Bruce as an amusing Watson are set during contemporary times, the World War II years, the films capture the spirit of the orignal stories, combining equal parts deduction and adventure.
The four films showing towmorrow night are good ones: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, The Woman in Green, Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night, and Sherlock Holmes in Dressed to Kill.
The Holmes films are followed, beginning at 1:00 a.m. EST, by four films starring Warren William as the Lone Wolf, Lewis Vance's reformed jewel thief who has turned to a life of fighting crime. I haven't seen any of the Lone Wolf films and am looking forward to doing so.
Coming later in the month: films featuring Dick Tracy, Nancy Drew, the Saint, the Falcon, Boston Blackie, and other police detectives, private eyes, and amateur sleuths.
Both flaws come about because Lee is trying to do more than just make a solid crime drama. That's an honorable intention, of course, but in most cases efforts to "transcent the genre" result in neither a good genre work nor a good non-genre work. That is what happens with Inside Man. It is neither fish nor fowl.
First, the good. The film features Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer, all of whom are talented and charismatic performers, and each of whom gives a quite competent effort in the film. They make the movie worth watching.
A central plot element of the film is much less appealing and skillfully executed, unfortunately. The owner of the bank that is being robbed in the film turns out to have gotten his start in Switzerland during World War II by collaborating with the Nazis to turn stolen art works into Swiss cash. He has built his empire on dirty money earned on items stolen from Jews murdered by the Nazis. Awful.
That's certainly bad, but it doesn't make sense in this film. I disapprove of Nazism in the strongest terms. Of course. But that was more than sixty years ago, which makes Plummer's character at least in his mid-eighties (and he doesn't look it, by any means). A much more sensible approach would have been to have Plummer's character have gained his money by, say, collaborating with the Soviet Union in 1956 to betray Hungary, or in 1968 to betray Czechoslovakia.
Oh, but that wouldn't work, would it? Communists always had Good Intentions, even if their methods were sometimes not perfectly nice, so they can't be behind a Real Villain. No, that status is reserved for Nazis, white South Africans (now being murdered willy-nilly with no outcry at all from the West, by the way), mythical white separatists in America, and other, well, blond people.
So of course any dirty money had to come from Nazis, however absurdly anachronistic that is in a contemporary film.
In addition, the fact that this bank just happens to have been founded by dirty money is asinine. The implication that riches based on dirty money are rampant in our society is an utterly absurd and false notion. People in America get rich by offering people what they want to buy, not by robbing Jews. To suggest otherwise is ignorant, stupid, and evil.
This is a particularly silly notion to be offered by Spike Lee, a man who has made a good deal of his own personal financial fortune by selling overpriced athletic shoes to poor, teenage boys, many of whom thought the shoes so important that they committed crimes in order to get them.
Turning to aesthetics, the big artistic and dramatic flaw in the film is the inclusion of the character played by Jodie Foster. This character is a "fixer" who goes around solving problems for rich and powerful people. This is a character that deserves a film of its own, but she is entirely unnecessary to the story of this film and is shoehorned in without adding anything of value.
Taking out her story line would have reduced the bloated two hour and nine minute running time by a good twenty minutes, much increasing its dramatic impact.
Of course, Lee does a little something here and there with the character, using her to provide temptations to corrupt the central character, a hostage negotiator played by Denzel Washington (superbly, as is his usual way). But these temptations could have been done through other characters, and Foster's story line just bogs the narrative down.
Lee is a good director of actors, and the performers he has obtained for the film are very good, as mentioned, so at least the thing is watchable. But it could have been much more had he tried to do considerably less.
A commenter going by the cybernom of Pascal Fervor has made some interesting and provocative comments on my appreciation of the great film writer and director Billy Wilder. Fervor's comments specifically refer to the thematic content of Wilder's great mystery-comedy-drama Witness for the Prosecution. In my brief survey of Widler's career I mentioned this film as a classic but said nothing specific about it.
Mr. Fervor's comments afford an opportunity to talk further about this excellent motion picture which was produced in 1957 film and starred Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester. Set in London and dealing with a murder trial, Witness for the Prosecution is a strong comedy-drama with numerous plot twists and interesting characters.
First, I would suggest that everyone get a hold of a copy of this film, either the individual release or in the superb Wilder box set. Wilder is one of the greatest American filmmakers, and his movies are both entertaining and insightful. He has been characterized as cynical by most reviewers and critics, but as I demonstrate in my appreciation of Wilder and his work, his body of work is much more sophisticated than that simplistic characterization suggests, and much more laudable than the common opinion holds.
Now, on to Witness, specifically. Pascal Fervor asked about my opinion of "the social commentary that may be inferred from" the film. As Mr. Fervor points out, however, it is difficult to discuss this matter without possibly giving away some plot points that would lessen the fun for those who have not yet seen the movie and choose to do so after reading the discussion. However, I think that we can dance around it a bit while still making our meaning clear.
Fervor astutely characterizes the film as an "amazingly successful demonstration of human gullibility," and ties this insight to my reevaluation of Wilder's reputation. He offers his insight into Witness as further evidence for my point that Wilder was no cynic (As I wrote in my appreciation of Wilder, "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.' ”):
[W]orking with your own evaluation of Wilder, I think you implied there is good reason for us not be so convinced of his lauded and perhaps cultivated appearence of cynicism. Indeed, there is reason to suspect from his whole body of works that he just so happened to provide a measure of protection to his viewers from cynics by unmasking them and revealing a bit of their tactics.
Our gullibility -- and maybe our guilty pleasure to be willingly gulled by masters -- I think is the overarching theme and social commentary [in Wilder's body of work, if I'm reading Fervor correctly here]. I think he employed a disarming measure here [in Witness] too. I don't believe I've seen another film that has quite as many subtle puns as does this movie. Include in this two and maybe three (Wilfred) character names. Double entendres R us.
I hope I've added to your appreciation for this classic. And that I haven't written too much.
Mr. Fervor has indeed added to my appreciation of this film—though I would hardly have thought that possible, given my already great fondness for the movie—and no, he has not written too much, by any means.
Mr. Fervor's comments are spot-on. He is correct to point out that Wilder's exposure of our vast human vulnerability to jiggery-pokery (to use John Dickson Carr's evocative term) in this film fits perfectly with this filmmaker's process in other movies. Like the scars on a particular character's face, the motives and intentions of the various characters in the film are hidden from one another, and the misunderstandings multiply.
In this way, one could indeed see Witness for the Prosecution as expressing a certain cynicism, as the distance between people's surface impressions and the reality behind them can be great indeed in the narrative. Yet this need not be cynical at all, and isn't in this case. After all, the observation that human beings are always being bad and pretending to be good is simply an expression of the Christian idea of Original Sin. In addition, Wilder shows the great good in several characters, including the lead character of the narrative, barrister Sir Wilfred Robarts, who rather flippantly risks his health and life in order to serve his client with a clear head. There is nothing cynical about that at all. On the contrary, it's quite inspiring.
Although it may at first seem something of an odd duck among Wilder's output, Witness for the Prosecution is indeed of a piece with his other work, thematically, and it's interesting in how oblique a way this film expresses those themes. Looking at the theme of deception, one can see why Wilder was attracted to the source material--an Agatha Christie short story and play--and also why he had such great affection for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.
Witness for the Prosecution is rather unusual among Christie's works in that it doesn't include several suspects from whom to choose, as her novels and short stories tend to do. On the contrary, it is designed for the theater, and with immense skill and ingenuity. Nonetheless, as Mr. Fervor's comments show in regard to Wilder's adaptation, Christie's narrative serves the same ends and provides the same pleasures as her other tales. In mystery fiction, we delight in being fooled by the author's trickery, and more greatly in that justice is ultimately done as the detective character does eventually figure out whodunnit.
We delight in being fooled, I think, because we human beings simply enjoy reasoning. Mystery fiction (of the classical, puzzle kind) invites us to exercise our God-given capacity for reason, and challenges us to the utmost in that regard. And because we don't solve the mystery, we more greatly appreciate the exercise.
After all, once the mystery is solved, the story is over, and our pleasure in ratiocination is finished in the present case. Hence, we actually enjoy being fooled, because it prolongs the highly pleasurable reasoning process until the last possible moment.
This is a rather different point from Mr. Fervor's, although I think that the two are complementary. On a practical, psychological level, mystery fiction gives pleasure by exercising the mind. On a thematic, moral level, mystery fiction challenges us by showing how easily we can be fooled, how easily manipulated by cynical evildoers.
In both these ways, mystery fiction does much more than provide light entertainment—though it can do that as well. It has been popular over the ages because it works on a deep psychological level while affording easily accessible, surface enjoyment. All genre fiction has its benefits, and in Wilder's film of Witness for the Prosecution, these rewards are at their apex.
This is the last day in which I can decently mark the centennial of the birth of the truly great detection fiction writer John Dickson Carr. Carr flourished as a writer during the 1930s and '40s and wrote numerous classic detective novels and short stories, continuing to write until the 1970s. With Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Queen, and Sayers, Carr is one of the greatest of all mystery writers.
Carr was the master of the "impossible crime" story and its best-known subset, the locked-room mystery. Carr's narratives are fiendishly deceptive and puzzling, yet he leaves the crucial clues right out there for the reader to see. Yet we never do, and the detective's revelation of the killer nearly always comes as a big surprise.
Carr's stories tend to include a bit of overly cute romance between some young couple unique to each book or story, and he has a habit of piling on melodramatic language at times (primarily in the dialogue) and setting obviously artificial rhetorical cliffhangers at the end of some chapters, but these are minor inconveniences that detract only a little from the overall excellence of most of his books and stories.
His achievement rests mainly on two series. One, written under his own name, featured Dr. Gideon Fell, a delightfully larger than life English detective modeled on G. K. Chesterton and Dr. Samuel Johnson. Fell's exploits began with the splendid 1933 novel Hag's Nook, and extended through 23 novels and several short stories, most of which are of very high quality indeed. Highlights are The Mad Hatter Mystery, The Blind Barber, and The Hollow Man (aka The Three Coffins).
The Hollow Man is truly one of the great classics of the genre, and includes Dr. Fell's famous "locked room lecture," in which he tells the reader how to solve locked-room puzzles, in a novel in which the central issue is a murder in a locked room. Of course, even after reading the lecture, no sane reader can actually solve the puzzle anyway.
Although Carr was an American, born in western Pennsylvania, his detectives were predominantly English, and his second great series, written under the pen name Carter Dickson, features Sir Henry Merrivale as detective. These are rather more humorous on the whole than the Fell mysteries, and are indeed often farcical, usually in a highly entertaining and likeable way. (Thanks are due to the late Wyatt James, an enthusiastic and astute reader of Carr, for my capsule description of Merrivale.)
Merrivale, a bald, stout, Churchillian English baronet descended from Cavaliers, is one of the great characters of mystery fiction. Smoking vile cigars and dressed like a villain in a cheap melodrama, Merrivale sweeps grandly through each story, arguing forcefully with his friends and staying about fifty-five steps ahead of both narrator and reader. And the mysteries are often as brain-roastingly puzzling as those in the Fell stories.
Among my favorite Merrivales are The Plague Court Murders, The White Priory Murders, and the delightfully zany The Curse of the Bronze Lamp. One of Carr's very best novels and one of my personal favorites is a Merrivale: The Judas Key. It is one of the most Carrian of all of Carr's novels, and it is one of the greatest mystery novels of all time, in my view.
Carr's first detective character was Dr. Henri Benconlin of the Paris police. The Bencolin novels are highly atmospheric, often almost gothic in tone, and very tense and spooky at their best. The Corpse in the Waxworks is quite impressive. Another Carr detective who was featured in a series of short stories was Colonel March; his exploits are collected in the book The Department of Queer Complaints and in the excellent 1991 collection Merrivale, March, and Murder, edited by Carr biographer Douglas Greene.
Greene's biography of Carr, The Man Who Explained Miracles, is one of the greatest biographies of a mystery fiction writer ever produced. Perhaps the best, in fact.
Carr also wrote several excellent mysteries set in historical times; most of these appeared during the 1950s and '60. Among my favorites in this group are The Bride of Newgate, The Devil in Velvet, Fire, Burn!, Most Secret, and The Demoniacs. These are all great fun, often with a good deal of swashbuckling action not found in Carr's other writings.
In addition to all this, Carr wrote several novels and a like number of short stories featuring non-series detectives. Among these are a couple of my favorite Carr novels: The Nine Wrong Answers and Patrick Butler for the Defense. Also among these is my favorite of all of Carr's novels: The Burning Court. The latter is one of the top five mystery novels of all time, in my opinion.
Carr also wrote numerous scripts for radio, and the excellent mystery publisher Crippen and Landru has published a volume of these, Speak of the Devil.
It's a real pity that Carr's writings have fallen into relatively obscurity in the three decades since his death. He is truly one of the very greatest mystery writers, and his writings still give great pleasure to those blessed enough to know about them.
One thing that may have contributed to this undeserved obscurity is the unfortunate fact that few of Carr's writings have been translated to television or film. In the 1960s the BBC produced a fondly remembered series starring Boris Karloff as Col. March, which alas I haven't seen and would dearly like to get a hold of. Other than that, there haven't been many adaptations of Carr for the visual media. Some enterprising British or American producer would do well to mine Carr's rich vein of great mysteries and bring these tales to a new audience while taking advantage of some really superb, atmospheric story material. Carr's narratives are ripe for the picking, and it's about time someone who appreciates great mystery fiction brought him to a new generation of readers.
You could certainly do much worse than to make a resolution to read some Carr this year. Start here and here.
Strongly recommended
John J. Miller of National Review has put together a nice overview of Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Barbarian" tales, for the Wall Street Journal. Miller notes that Conan has been a highly popular character in the original pulp tales and subsequent comic books, movies, and simply as a widely known fictional character. Miller's article is well worth reading as an introduction to this important literary phenomenon.
With Conan, Howard created a protagonist whose name is almost as familiar as Tarzan's. In his influential essay on Howard, Don Herron credits the Texan with begetting the "hard-boiled" epic hero, and doing for fantasy what Dashiell Hammett did for detective fiction. Suddenly, the world--even a make-believe one such as Conan's Hyboria--was rendered seamier and more violent, and Howard described it in spare rather than lush prose.
Conan has a knack for locating damsels in distress, but he is no knight in shining armor who piously obeys a code of chivalry. Instead, he is a black-haired berserker from a wild and wintry land called Cimmeria. He has little patience for social conventions he doesn't understand. "The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men's lives were meaningless to him," wrote Howard in "Beyond the Black River." Conan occasionally thinks his way out of a problem, but more often he reaches for a weapon and slashes his way out. "There's nothing in the universe cold steel won't cut," he boasts.
To this I would add the following brief observation:
The bleak, existential approach that Miller correctly attributes to the stories and which Herron traces to Hammett is a byproduct of the post-World War I culture in which writers looked at traditional values of honor and concluded that they were no longer viable in the cruel world that had been revealed by that horrendous war.
They were wrong, of course, in that the new world needed those values more than ever before, but that was the thinking, and the Conan tales reflected the violence of the trench wars superbly. They ironically brought the modern world to a mass audience through a series of adventures set in an ancient world. That is the kind of achievement pulp fiction can accomplish.
I've mentioned on several occasions the turn toward "darker" programming on network TV this year, and one of the pioneers and models for that approach, the Fox series 24, will become even darker this season. An article in USA Today notes that protagonist Jack Bauer will reach a new low to begin the season:
Central character Jack Bauer isn't dead, but he's feeling that way going into Season Six (premieres Jan. 14, 8 p.m. ET/PT), said Kiefer Sutherland, who won an Emmy in August for his portrayal of the stoic counterterrorism hero. Bauer, whose kidnapping by Chinese agents closed last season, returns in the premiere, set 20 months later, as a haggard, beaten man.
"Jack's at his darkest place. He's dead inside. Even in Season Two, when he was terribly mournful at the loss of his wife, he was feeling pain but he was alive. (Now), there's an indifference which is almost primal. It's absolutely a new place to start with the character," Sutherland said on the red carpet.
As I've noted earlier on this site, "darker" new series primetime programming has had a bad run this year, as viewers have not responded favorably in general to the new shows that tried this tack.
The reason 24 has had such success is that even though the stories are full of interlocking conspiracies and betrayals, at the center of the show we have unabashedly good characters, led by Jack Bauer, a real modern-day hero. That's what makes this show so special, and as long as Jack doesn't turn "complex," meaning morally compromised (which he never has been, despite the awful things he has regularly been forced to do), the series will retain its central warmth and decency that ultimately dissipate the darkness.
TV producers and other genre writers would do very well to remember this simple fact.
I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?"
It's a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual's chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it's silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes.
I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it's true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the same thing as saying that there are no qualitative differences between such works and authors. And if there are such differences, then it is most certainly useful and salutary to discuss the matter.
Francis points out the following as possible standards, but then dismisses them:
-- Widespread critical acclaim?
-- Volume of sales?
-- The length of time his works have been read?
-- His avoidance of modifiers?
-- The effulgence of his imagery?
-- Some other criterion?
The answer, as you will have already guessed, is (f), some other criterion. Or, more accurately, some other criteria.
To wit:
Most assuredly there is a certain something at the heart of all great literary works that cannot quite be identified, much less quantified. Rather like the human soul, we perceive it but cannot isolate it. However, just as the human soul is held in a body that makes identifiable and even quantifiable actions, this heart of a novel is contained in (and indeed suffuses) a book that has identifiable characteristics. These characteristics can even be usefully quantified in some cases, though I believe actual numerical quantification to be unnecessary for a valid literary analysis.
Specifically, it is possible to put individual tastes aside and discuss literature and the other arts in a rational and salubrious way.
We can observe, for example, that some books have deeper, more true, and more convincing characterizations than others. We can see that some have plots that are more interesting and diverting than others. Some have stories that are more plausible, convincing, and usefully reminiscent of reality than others. Some have descriptive passages that make the fictional world come alive more convincingly than others. Some have prose that is so beautiful and artful that it gives us distinct pleasure to contemplate. Some have moral implications that bring our human condition into greater focus and give us real insights into our position in the cosmos. And so on.
Yes, we cannot always quantify such things, but we certainly can make comparisons and discuss what is most worthy of our time and energy. And the point of my post was that a good many of the writings of Philip K. Dick are much more worthy of our time and attention than those of most mainstream American literary artisans of the twentieth century.
So let us indeed feel free to discuss the quality of authors' works, singly and in toto. We should always recognize that there is much room for disagreement, awareness of ambiguity, and differing assessments of how various works measure up to the ideal characteristics of literature, and that individuals can hold different rankings of importance among the various aspects of literary excellence, but that it is nonetheless both possible and necessary to discuss these works objectively and with a sincere search for truth at the heart of the matter.
It's official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports:
Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas's interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist's plate: "I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select."
I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded.
A good many of Philip K. Dick's books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great contribution was to convey interesting, provocative, and important ideas in a pulp context, but that is like making a really fast production automobile. It's fast, but it can't run with the custom jobbies.
Dick stands out as an author because the "custom cars" of his time were so shabby.
PKD's prose was usually serviceable at best, although better than, say, Theodore Drieser's glop. But whereas Dreiser's characterizations could be immensely powerful and the conflicts highly real and dramatic, Dick's characters are usually unable to sustain much interest, and the stories depend almost entirely on their ideas and interesting plot angles. Some of those concepts and ideas are so good that his writings have gained a strong foothold in the culture through film adaptations. For that reason, he's certainly one of the more important American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
Philip K. Dick was indeed a great pulp writer, if there can be such a thing, and a very good writer within his limits. I'll call hiim a very good writer overall when at his best. And his elevation to Library of America status points out once again that genre literature, despite its limitations, was where it was at in American literature during the past century.
Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can't say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality.
I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We've all done things we wish we hadn't, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we've all experienced things that we wish hadn't happened. Thinking about what things would be like if we had done things differently is a natural human endeavor, every bit as natural as mortality itself. And this is a particularly strong element in time travel narratives, such as the recent BBC-TV mystery series Life on Mars, and is in fact the central issue in time-repetition stories such as Groundhog Day and Daybreak.
That's what is really behind Deja Vu. Denzel Washington plays a BATF agent investigating a terrorist bombing, who discovers that he might just be able to go into the past—at a good deal of risk to his personal well-being—and prevent the attack, thereby saving several-hundred lives and possibly the lives of his ATF partner and of a beautiful, young, single woman who was murdered as part of the "collateral damage."
Of course, he does what people typically do in such movies, but this being a Denzel Washington film, there is a good deal of Christian imagery and thematic material, including a couple of prominent acts of self-sacrifice and a resurrection from death. There is a brief exchange about morality early in the film, but what is always at the forefront of the story is the desire to change our conditions, to make things right and avert trouble for other people.
As in Back to the Future, The Time Machine, and other such narratives, Deja Vu is most intensely concerned with the here and now, the present conditions of our lives. That's what makes it so absorbing and interesting, and well worth seeing.
Except for a couple of big successes—NBC's Heroes and ABC's Ugly Betty—this year's new primetime network TV serialized dramas are tanking. As the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes reports:
The outlook for the many of this fall's new serialized dramas is not good. ABC's "Six Degrees" isn't working; ditto its "The Nine." And Fox's "Vanished" appears to be on its way soon to join "Smith," "Runaway" and "Kidnapped" in the Great Freshman Serialized Drama Hereafter
That's a pretty strong trend. De Moraes quotes a source suggesting that the new shows have failed because of a lack originality and clarity of concept, but de Moraes seems genuinely puzzled about the situation. The poor performance of the programs has surprised critics, who generally liked them:
So, this was going to be the Year of the Serialized Drama. What gives with you people? Why aren't you watching?
You've caused considerable hand-wringing among the Reporters Who Cover Television, because they hate to see a good trend story go south and, besides, they generally liked the new crop of serialized shows on the fall lineup. There was some mention among the reporters of viewers not having enough time to commit to another series requiring such a commitment. But if you mention how many people are making time to watch "1 vs. 100" this fall, that shuts them up.
I would contend that originality is not the problem. Sure, Heroes, Ugly Betty, and Jericho, the shows that have done well, are fairly original as far as primetime network TV goes, but I think what's more important in each of these cases is that there are likeable characters central to the show. They are not perfect people, by a good measure in most cases, but their motives are understandable and somewhat normal, even if the situations in which they find themselves can be quite strange and harrowing.
In this way the successful new serials are like their successful predecessors such as Lost and Desperate Housewives, in which there are at least a few characters whose presence is somewhat enjoyable. In the failed new primetime serials, on the other hand, the characters are largely strange and/or unlikeable. The senator in Vanished, for example, and the wealthy father in Kidnapped, by contrast, clearly have evil secrets in their history that have led to their anguishing predicament. The same appears to be true of several central characters in Six Degrees and The Nine, and Smith was about a gang of violent thieves.
The accused criminal in Runaway, played by Donnie Wahlberg, is quite clearly innocent of the murder for which he has been blamed, and he appears to be a reasonably decent individual, but the in-fighting among the family as they try to make a new life in a small town while on the run from the police makes them ultimately unappealing and the show relentlessly depressing.
Tim Daly and Kim Raver of ABC's The Nine have had success in other series (such as Wings and 24) but they're overwhelmed by a large cast of unlikeable characters in their current program, and their own characters are not particularly appealing either.
At the center of Heroes, by contrast, are immensely likeable characters such as Japanese office worker Hiro, high-school cheerleader Claire, and beat cop Matt. Even though all the characters have their faults—Hiro for example, initially gives in too easily to the tempation to use his powers for personal gain—they are people we can identify with and care about. Similarly, the title character of Ugly Betty is immensely likeable, and Skeet Ulrich's character in Jericho is someone to whom audiences can relate, a fellow who is trying to put his life back together after making some bad choices in the past.
The unsuccessful new serial drams fail to have a goodly number of personable characters such as these. Add to this lack of likeable characters a series of harrowing, decidedly unpleasant situations, and you have a recipe for depression. The failing new shows lack the humor and humanity that has brought great success to shows such as Desperate Housewives and Lost, respectively.
As I noted in my analysis of the travails of the NBC-TV program Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, people have to have a very good reason to invite a program into their home week after week. A strong story line is a very good thing, but without characters about whom the viewers can truly care, they won't care about what happens to them, which makes the story meaningless. That's why these programs are floundering—and that's why they should.
Postcript:
One more thing on reactions to the new TV programs. As noted above, critics generally liked the new programs that are failing this year. Here's an example from Lisa de Moraes's own newspaper: Tom Shales of the Washington Post panned Heroes and praised Runaway—the very opposite of the reaction that audiences quite properly and sensibly had toward these shows. Once again, the elite critics show themselves as absurdly out of step with the greater wisdom of normal people.
In commenting on our discussion of Christian cinema (see posts immediately below), some visitors brought up a couple of interesting points. One is that any kind of Christian movie ought to be acceptable to both critics and audiences, and the other is that the economic realities of making Christian films today require a more encouraging stance than Barbara Nicolosi and I seem to have taken regarding Facing the Giants.
Clearly both these observations are well-intentioned, but I think that adopting these recommendations would greatly harm any nascent Christian cinema, rather than helping it.
Let's examine them individually.
First, the premise that any kind of Christian cinema ought to be good enough for Christians, with the implied corollary that any Christian film is at least better then what Hollywood puts out, ignores an imporatant reality: what is on the surface of a film does not always reflect what it all actually means. Many Hollywood films and TV programs, despite their often shabby surfaces, carry meanings that Christians should find quite appealing. If you have any doubts about this, click on the "Movies" and "Television" categories on this page and take a look at some analyses of Hollywood products showing how easily they are misinterpreted if we concentrate solely on surface imagery.
The other side of this issue is the fact that an openly Christian movie can carry underlying messages and assumptions that are at best dubious, as in the Left Behind series (especially to non-Evangelicals), or are outright false, as appears to be the case with Facing the Giants.
Hence, it is clear that the ideas behind Christian films should be approached with the exact same attitude toward which we look at the ideas behind mainstream cinema. Let's call it enlightened skepticism.
As to the second point, that Christian cinema requires encouragement, I submit that this is precisely what Barbara Nicolosi and I are both trying to accomplish. As I noted in my Weekly Standard review of Ms. Nicolosi's latest book, one of the contributors rto that volume correctly notes that
Christians are "of the lineage of Michelangelo, Raphael, Shakespeare, Lewis, Tolkien, and Caravaggio," and that "there was a time when Christians were the undisputed masters of art and literature." As many Christians have withdrawn into a "safe" religious subculture, "Mainstream culture has moved on without us, and the world of entertainment has coarsened in our absence."
If we are to encourage people to create art that is both fully Christian and of high aesthetic quality, we must be willing to criticize their products fairly and honestly. Otherwise, they will have no incentive to try to excel, and we will end up with dreck—and garbage with a Christian patina is still worthless.
We do artists no favors when we pretend that good intentions are more important than results. Yes, good intentions are laudable, and we may well acknowledge people's intentions. But it cannot stop there. Bad art is bad, and we should tell the truth about it. Nowhere does Scripture tell us to bear false witness about our neighbors, even if we wish to do so to spare their feelings. A lie is a lie.
Pretending that substandard work is in fact good is a sure way to destroy an artist. Think about it this way: if you were coaching a child at basketball, and their shot mechanics were wrong but they were trying hard, would you really say that they're doing it right? Even if they were badly missing all their shots? To do so would be a contemptible thing.
The same is true with artists of whatever stripe, and it is particularly important when trying to nurture new artists and forms. To pretend that they are doing just fine when they're missing all their shots simply ensures that they'll never make the big leagues. Instead of artists on the order of Michelangelo, Raphael, Shakespeare, Lewis, Tolkien, and Caravaggio, we will get complacent, pointless junk. And that would be worse than having no Christian cinema at all.
There is room in society for both high art and pop culture, and both have an important place and can be highly salutary in their effects. Yet both must meet quality standards if they are to have a good effect on people. And it is up to critics and audiences to encourage artists to try to reach the very highest standards in whatever form their work takes.
Our job as critics and consumers is to tell the truth, with our pens and pocketbooks. If we do that, the artists will find their way, and real creativity will flower. If not, the torrent of lies will kill them all.
Screenwriter and script analyst Barbara Nicolosi is extremely disappointed by the Christian-produced film Facing the Giants. I have not yet gotten around to seeing the film, but I suspect that Ms. Nicolosi is quite right. She points out that Facing the Giants is the cinematic equivalent of Contemporary Christian Music, bland nonsense meant to make Christians feel good and thereby bring in a steady stream of money from a highly defined market segment, what is known in the entertainment business as a cash cow.
In addition, Nicolosi argues, Facing the Giants is animated by a devotion to what is known as the Prosperity Gospel, a decidedly perverse notion prevalent among some Evangelicals, which holds that God wants believers to be happy and prosperous in this world (which is surely true to some extent), and that he will give believers such earthly success to the degree that they believe in Him and accept his promises. That is an absurd, unbiblical doctrine that is derived from Puritanism but puts an optimistic, positive spin on it. It is an idea, as Nicolosi notes, that utterly denies numerous direct statements in Scripture, especially the words of Jesus Christ himself.
In sum, the Prosperity Gospel is a very bad thing indeed, and according to Nicolosi the story of Facing the Giants manifests it entirely. Given that even the film's defenders are not making any claims of aesthetic value for it, this suggests that the film is unworthy of admiration.
Now, not everything has to be great art, of course, but if a "message" film has a bad message and little to no artistry, it cannot be said to have much going for it.
As noted on this site earlier and as cited by Ms. Nicolosi in her article, the Fox studio has embarked on an effort to create low-budget theatrical films for the Christian market. The important question at hand is whether the model will be indie films that challenge current atheistic cultural perspectives or a bland and manipulative Christian Contemporary Cinema that uses religious tropes to snag an ignorant and complacent audience.
Right now we have no idea what the answer will be. As I noted earlier, however, Fox will undoubtedly follow the audiences' lead, giving us more of the type of film to which we respond with the most support, financial and critical.
The responsibility, then, is most certainly ours.
Addendum (November 2007):
I saw Facing the Giants on TV recently, and I found it to be somewhat bland and the performances rather weak, but I did find it quite watchable and felt that the sincerity fairly well forced one to get involved in the story. And the film does have a couple of very good scenes. Some non-Christians may find it enjoyable and learn something from it, but the quality of the film is not strong enough to make it likely to entice a large number of viewers.
In sum, I doubt that this film will make many converts to Christianity, but I don't see it as spreading a Prosperity Gospel as Barbara Nicolosi argues. It's perfectly apparent that the football coach at the center of the story wants to do well as a coach because he believes that teaching young men to work hard and strive to achieve their best is why God put him on this earth. That is definitely a conventional Christian point of view, and I don't think that the Prosperity Gospel message of treating God as a spiritual ATM is the film's intended effect nor a likely message for most people to draw from it.
Hence, I suspect that the film will ultimately do more good than harm, though probably not all that much of either.
One of the best television programs ever was actually three or four programs in one. The NBC Mystery Movie ran from 1971 to 1977, on Wednesday nights its first season and then on Sunday nights for the rest of its run. Three series rotated week by week. Additional series were added on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 1972 and 1974.
Presenting a new TV mystery movie each week in a 90-minute slot (which was later expanded to two hours), the program was an immediate success, reaching number 14 in the ratings during its first season and fifth in its second. One of the programs, Columbo, received eight Emmy nominations in its first year alone, and won four of them that year. The, first, most popular, and best remembered programs from this series were Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife. These programs and some others from the series have been shown in syndication and on cable networks ever since.
Selected seasons of all three of these programs are now available on DVD—you can find them by clicking on their names here—but other shows from the series also did well in the ratings and are still remembered fondly. The popular program Quincy, M.E, starring Jack Klugman as a causy, caustic, whistle-blowing medical examiner, began its run as part of the NBC Mystery Movie series. Also fondly remembered are The Snoop Sisters, which starred Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick, and Hec Ramsey, which starred Richard Boone as a crimefighter at the turn of the last century. The latter programs lasted only one and two years, respectively, and are seldom if ever run on television, which is a pity.
But the best of the lot, and one of my personal favorite TV shows ever, was Banacek. The program starred George Peppard as Thomas Banacek, a suave but tough freelance investigator in Boston. The conceit was that Banacek would find things that had been stolen, which the victims' insurance companies were unable to recover, and he would restore them at double the percentage that the insurance company charged. Hence, he made a huge amount of money and lived very well.
Banacek was created by Richard Levinson and William Link, an exellent writing team who also created Columbo; Murder, She Wrote; and the superb but sadly short-lived Ellery Queen.
The thing that made Banacek really interesting, however, was that each week's crime was an "impossible" one. A large, bejeweled coach would disappear from a locked cargo hold of a ship in transit, a horse and rider would vanish from a racetrack during a practice run, an experimental car would be stolen from a train while in transit and watched by multiple witnesses, a football player would disappear after being tackled on the field before tens of thousands of fans in the stadium and millions of TV viewers, and other such puzzlers would occur in each episode.
Thomas Banacek was the epitome of "cool" at the time. He would investigate these impossible crimes while doling out sarcastic comments, old Polish proverbs, and punches and karate chops (ah, those were the days!) to deserving meanies; sipping expensive brandy in his luxurious (but interestingly old-fashioned in its decor) apartment; tooling around in his chauffer-driven limousine and taking calls on his enormous "portable" phone; and romancing a never-ending series of scantily clad cuties played by the likes of Linda Evans. Unfortunately, his style in accomplishing the latter was an early 1970s pseudo-Dean Martin approach which is now highly outdated and a bit silly. But it's easy to overlook it as a mere sign of the times, in light of all that is good about the series.
During the run of the series, we find out that Thomas (never Tom!) Banacek grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and chose to apply his talents to good ends, unlike many of those with whom he grew up. People occasionally mock him for his Polish background or deliberately mispronounce his name. The former get a stinging rebuke or worse, and the latter receive a polite but pointed correction.
Though he does delight in twitting the insurance investigators who consider him a greedy dilettante, Banacek has risen above his original station in life in developing excellent manners overall, and he expresses open disapproval of those who fail to show proper politeness themselves. That's something I, for one, would like to see more of both in television and in real life today.
Banacek would take an occasional physical beating himself when hopelessly outnumbered, but he always came out on top in the end. Aided by his loyal but dimwitted driver, Jay Drury, and his friend, mentor, and crack researcher Felix Mulholland, a bookstore owner, Banacek solved the crimes with great insight, perseverance, and panache, besting the plodding, corporate-drone insurance investigators who were perpetually trying to beat him to the solution. Of the latter, a tart-tongued young insurance investigator named Carlie Kirkland, played superbly by Christine Belford as Myrna Loy would have done it, provided an excellent foil and a feisty romantic interest.
Banacek is truly an exemplary character in many ways, excepting only his corny, pseudo-suave romantic life, and it is a pity that this excellent program cannot be seen today.
It would be a fine thing if programs such as Banacek, The Snoop Sisters, and Hec Ramsey could be brought out on DVD.
The good news is that we can help make that happen.
If you go to amazon.com and search for Banacek on DVD, the page informs you that the program is not yet available but you can vote to have it put on DVD and amazon.com will inform the copyright owners of the demand for the program. The process is very simple—a single button click will suffice for most people—and given the number of absolutely horrendous TV programs already available on video, it would send a good message to the rights owners, MCA Universal, that there is an audience out there for good programs such as Banacek.
So, don't delay: do yourself and all of us a favor, click here, and vote for Banacek.
The one thing most certain to destroy a work of genre fiction is for the author to try to "transcend the genre."
You've heard of this many times, I'm sure, from the opposing point of view, as critics praise some author for transcending the genre in which they're working and thereby producing "a real novel."
That is hogwash.
The result of such endeavors is typically a poor example of both genre fiction and mainstream fiction. I won't name names here, but much of what has received the most critical praise in the mystery field qualifies strongly for this dubious distinction.
Read a few of the most recent Edgar Award winners if you want to be fully versed in the infamous results of authors thinking themselves superior to their audiences.
On this point Helen Szamuely has written a good book review for the website of the Social Affairs Unit in Great Britain. Noting the drab results produced by many writers trying to write "real novels" in the mystery genre, Szamuely writes:
I blame the critics, starting with Julian Symons and his seminal Bloody Murder. As the author of a number of extremely interesting detective novels himself Symons ought to have known better. But he and his many successors have been advocating the theory that the best detective story writers ought to go beyond the genre and write "real" novels. Symons, for example, who always prefers thrillers to detective stories, despite his own achievements, repeatedly shakes his head over someone like Ngaio Marsh failing to transcend the genre.
Transcending the genre is all very well but a good detective story is considerably more difficult to write than a sloppily constructed and written "real" novel. In fact, all that happens is that we get a romance with a little detection thrown in instead of a detective story, not a work of literature.
Szamuely is absolutely right to point to Symons and his Bloody Murder as a great offender in this matter. Symons and the American critic Otto Penzler have probably most powerfully and influentially represented the idea that the best kind of mystery novel is not a mystery at all and really not much of a novel, either .
Their intentions were and are good, I am sure, but their ideas are simply wrong.
Symons, Penzler, and their vast host of slavish followers praise what they call crime stories, which are narratives in which a crime is (perhaps) committed and the minds of the various characters are analyzed from a psychological point of view.
Hence, they are often not really narratives at all and hence not really novels at all.
The opposing point of view is that a novel is first and foremost a story, and that a mystery novel is first and foremost a story with a criminal mystery at the center.
This point should seem obvious to those uninitiated in the occult practices of modern literary criticism. It is obvious because it is true. As George Orwell noted, there are some things that are so silly that only an intellectual could believe them.
The notion that a novel without a real story at the center is the best kind of novel is precisely the kind of idiotic notion only an intellectual could believe.
For more on what a real mystery novel is like, read this.
Looking for something to read over the three-day weekend? I have some writers for you to investigate.
Jon Jermey, a mystery aficionado and moderator of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction Mailing list on Yahoo, has composed a set of humorous rules for the writing of Golden Age detection fiction, the sort of tale that was made immensely popular by authors such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson), Erle Stanley Gardner, H. C. Bailey, Rex Stout, and so many others during the 1920s and '30s.
The Golden Age, traditional, puzzle mystery style thrived in Britain and America between the two world wars, but was driven out by publishers and critics after World War II when it was arbitrarily decided that a pretense of realism should be paramount in the genre. I say a pretense because the styles that superseded the puzzle form, the hardboiled and police procedural approaches, were just as much romances (in the literary sense) as the puzzle form was. In addition, the importation of ambitious literary devices (as in the non-series novels of Ruth Rendell) to create Serious Crime Fiction did nothing to change the fact that the books were romances at heart. Crime and Punishment, The Bothers Karamazov, and Bleak House are serious, important novels; Road Rage is not.
The Golden Age writers wrote to entertain and enlighten, and they embraced the fact that what they were writing was intended to be fun to read, recognizing that genre fiction could be well worth reading if done well. The works they wrote within their chosen form were every bit as real and true to life as the hardboiled genre (so beloved of left-wing critics) and the police procedural form (which so often descends into a mundane preoccupation with physical evidence that can be read more than one way but which is presented as entirely dispositive).
In recent years, the Golden Age style has found its way to television in series such as Monk, Murder, She Wrote, Midsomer Murders, Nero Wolfe, Psych, and other puzzle-based programs that center their attention on human devices and desires, as opposed to currently popular but fanciful notions about the unambiguity of physical evidence and the desire and ability of the police to pursue all conceivable leads.
With all that in mind, here are Jon's rules regarding the type of crime fiction we both enjoy most:
Ten rules for writing Golden Age Detective Fiction
1. The victim shall be someone who, despite being universally loathed, has no difficulty in surrounding themselves with friends, relatives, employees and colleagues.
2. The murderer shall kill the victim using a method that a) is clearly murder and b) is available only to a small circle of individuals. Genuinely untraceable murder methods (such as anonymously hiring a hit-man) shall be avoided at all costs.
3. To compensate for their poor choice of murder method, the murderer will evise an elaborate plan to cast suspicion away from themselves and on to one or more other people. Despite being based on detailed and untested assumptions about human behaviour, this plan shall succeed perfectly.
4. The investigator shall be a bright and wealthy person with an international reputation who is thrilled by the prospect of spending a great deal of their own time and money prying into the sordid affairs of perfect strangers.
5. The aforesaid perfect strangers will not question or resent this intrusion but – after some initial grumbling – will bare their souls to the investigator and reveal compromising secrets that they have never before told anyone.
6. These witnesses and suspects will be perfectly willing to spend their time and money on investigating the death of a person they loathed, including acting in a dramatic reconstruction of the circumstances of the crime, and coming back together at considerable inconvenience for the dénouement.
7. The witnesses and suspects will be able to remember and recount with perfect clarity everything they said and did days, weeks, months or years ago. Any deviation from the truth on the part of a witness shall be a deliberate attempt to deceive and not forgetfulness or simple ignorance.
8. The death of a second or third victim shall not be taken by anyone as a reflection on the competence of the investigator, but rather as an encouraging sign that he or she is getting close to a solution.
9. Low-level police operatives will be well-meaning but slow. Mid-level police operatives will be active but hostile. High-level police operatives will recognise the sterling qualities of the investigator and allow them full access to any evidence gathered by officials.
10. When confronted with their guilt the accused shall not point out the paucity of the evidence against them or the threadbare nature of the detective’s reasoning, but shall instead engage in some dramatic act which makes their capture or demise a certainty.
Yes, all of this is precisely why we enjoy them.
Golden Age detection fiction is an acquired taste—so aquire it! (Use the author links above.)
The box office performance of a "high concept" film such as Snakes on a Plane is typically based not on the cleverness of the concept but on whether there is actually a good movie in it. Die Hard and Speed, for example, had characters we could care about, and the films put them in situations where they had interesting choices to make. Those that don't have these things usually fall off at the box office even if they get a good opening weekend.
Interestingly, the least entertaining and involving parts of Snakes on a Plane are the two big action scenes in which the serpents attack the passengers on the plane. The snakes operate in a riidiculously implausible manner, even if we accept the filmmakers' premise that pheromones released on the plane would make the creatures more aggressive. These snakes are much more than "more aggressive"; they're positively malevolent and volitional. That's not at all believable—and it's not the slightest bit necessary, for the film is interesting enough without sci-fi snakes.
The first 40 minutes of the picture are devoted to scenes setting the stage for the big action sequences. The central conceit is that a young man who witnessed a murder by a powerful gangster in Hawaii consents to testify against the killer and is duly to be flown to Los Angeles to appear in court. That leads to the scheme to release hundreds of snakes on the plane and cause it to crash. OK, better plans have been devised in this world, but we'll let it go, shall we?
After all, what really makes a high-concept thriller successful is how the characters react to the situation, and especially the need for them to show courage, honor, and other good character traits. Snakes on a Plane has plenty of that, with some characters acting honorably, others meanly, and others developing better character through the course of the story. What is most pleasing is that the characters actually manage to surprise us just a little bit once in a while. The film has a solid performance by Samuel L. Jackson at its center, and it has the right amount of humor, meaning not too much. Snakes on a Plane also has enough action-film cliches to choke an anaconda, but the filmmakers' willingness to let us see human character in action makes it worth seeing.
