Before we are accused of abandoning our old standby for some new trophy show, let me say, that’s not true. We’ll still be watching. We’ll just be watching in private. When a living thing is on its last legs, it’s time to honor it in an intimate setting and not makes it a public spectacle. The public spectacle can wait for when its lying in state.

See you in a few weeks… or maybe not.

The National Air and Space Museum tells us that Pan American ushered in the Jet Age in 1958 with the Boeing 707.

American Airlines set a new speed mark when it opened the first regularly scheduled transcontinental jet service in 1959.

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy spoke to a special joint session of Congress with these fateful words:

“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

And on February 20, 1962, six days after our Sterling Cooperite’s Valentine Day doings, John Glenn became the first American in orbit.

In this one little slice of time we see man’s first concerted efforts to lift his body into the firmament and suspend it there, for the length of a trip crosscountry or around the earth itself.

That’s quite a powerful parallel revolution to the forces afoot on the ground between the sexes and the generations. For some, I think it will help propel the spirit of the Age of the Aquarius—the light, heady feeling that leads to dancing in the park as we’ll see in Hair. The ideas of liberation that seized the imagination of various strata of society were fueled in part by the achievement of the commercialization of flight and the dawning of the space age. So much energy, so much hope and momentum all around.

Don Draper, however, is not flying to the stars. His body is weighing him down, as we see at the doctor’s, and he has come to some arrangement with his wife that tethers him home at night. (Although I didn’t get that plot point clearly until Matt Weiner explained it in the post-game session.) An arrangement that is making him feel leaden.

His feelings get some lift, some charge, when he reads Frank O’Hara. In the last scene we see him looking like a stodgy middle-aged man in his old-guard hat, enshrouded by the domesticity of walking the family dog, mailing a copy of O’Hara’s poems to someone. Midge? Rachel?

We’ll see. And we’ll see if Don takes flight of any sort— either to run away, or opening his spirit to the forces of the decade.

Come watch episode 2 of the new season with the newcritics, Sunday night at 10:00 pm ET. We love/hate the show in the very best way.

For another great perspective on what’s going on with Mad Men, go see our own Lance Mannion and his experiment with The Naked City.

And as a bonus, it just so happens that Frank O’Hara wrote a poem called “Quiet Time” that speaks to the mystery of flight.

When music is far enough away
the eyelid does not often move

and objects are still as lavender
without breath or distant rejoinder.

The cloud is then so subtly dragged
away by the silver flying machine

that the thought of it alone echoes
unbelievably; the sound of the motor falls

like a coin toward the ocean’s floor
and the eye does not flicker

as it does when in the loud sun a coin
rises and nicks the near air. Now,

slowly, the heart breathes to music
while the coins lie in wet yellow sand.

 Say what you want about The Hold Steady–its songs adhere to formula;  the band’s a bunch of 30something,  retro classic rockers–the group’s appeal ain’t nostalgic and the new album Stay Positive is just plain excellent. Full of hooky, guitar driven rock songs with the kind of closely observed lyrics that linger….

Two Men with the Blues, Willie Nelson’s and Wynton Marsalis’ fantastic set of blues, standards and Willie originals recorded live last January at Jazz at Lincoln Center is worth the price of admission. More to come about this and about Joe Nick Patoski’s excellent new Willie Nelson biography, but Willie’s a direct tie back to the fertile Texas soil of the 1930s which gave us Western Swing. Also great listening is a recent, digital only reissue of a 1966 Willie show at Panther Hall in Texas Live Country Music Concert….

 Jenny Scheinmanis the musican I’ve been dreaming of: quirky, ambitious, and as deeply steeped in the vocabulary of American vernacular music as anyone working today…

 Art Yard’s latest Sun Ra concert issue–Media Dream–is a beautiful thing. Like Disco 3000:The Complete Milan Concert before it, the two-disk set pulls material recorded live in the late 1970s with a small band (tenor, trumpet, drums, and Sun Ra) during Ra’s Italian sojurn. The music was culled for a number of hard to find and somewhat disjointed Saturn LPs but these new issues from Art Yard are revelations. Both are major additions to the Sun Ra canon.

But… isn’t a brand what these contestants ultimately want? Aren’t they here to build their own brand? Yes, but shouldn’t a brand come after creative evolution? Shouldn’t the brand be the icing on the creative cake? While I griped last season that there was not enough “personality”, I get the feeling that this season there may be nothing but personality. I’m probably wrong and hope I am. I know there is talent there. Stella, for all of her hard rock look and talk of “leatha”, does seem like she has creative substance behind the packaging. Blayne, however, with his “girlalicious” and other pre-written tag lines, feels contrived to me. I feel like he’s selling me Blayne and not what Blayne can bring to the design world.

For as much as I love snark and love the clashing of crazy personalities, I realize what I really want to see this season is pure, unbridled creativity, creativity with total disregard for the “fame outcome”, and that includes the challenges the producers bring to the table and even the snippets that come out of Tim Gunn’s mouth. I don’t want more PR soundbites merely for the sake of bites. I want a creative meal. I want honest expression. I hope this season of PR does not rest on its laurels and I hope the contestants are truly more concerned with being true to their inner muse than they are with their outer package.

That being said, snark will no doubt continue this evening as we live-blog yet another potential creative explosion. Sandra Bernhard is tonight’s guest judge… did I say snark?? Join Claire and me, below in the comments. Live-blogging starts at 8C/9E.

Mad Men has become, unfortunately, one of those “high quality” TV items where the prestige appeal overwhelms its fairly simple ambitions, and people  are spending time making a lot more of it than it is. That includes the TV Academy, which showered Season 1 with more Emmy nominations than I think was seemly (though they did give long overdue recognition to my silver-haired mancrush John Slattery).

The lavish attention, I think, has a lot to do with the extensive period detail on display in Mad Men, I think. Like a number of popular efforts these days, there’s an obsessiveness to the period details in Mad Men that simply seems like overkill. Sets scream sixties modernism, the male cast wander around with their high and tight hairdos and narrow suits like mini-Ratpackers, while the women - especially the secretarial set - mince around in cocktail sheaths and pumps as if drinks hour is just around the corner. Which of course, it always is.

Such highly stylized production design can easily subsume the actual story, and for many, I think, seeing Mad Men is seeing the design for the trees. What I’ve found is that Mad Men is an interesting, fairly cerebral exercise on the social customs and mores of our recent past… and on that level, it also delivers handsomely. Where I think it falls down is in relating its period musings to our modern day, and thus its airlessness (literally, given the heavy smoking) can seem especially stifling. It’s not what’s on display, but the challenge of figuring what it has to do with our modern life that can make Mad Men… well, maddening.

Lance Mannion suggests that the whole attention to period detail is a trick, that in fact the period detail is meant to simply seem so alien to us that we can see the storylines as more archetypal than not. I tend to agree with Tom that such a notion is a little too far out there - the fascination with the “Camelot years” and the world of Madison Avenue at the time seems too deliberate to be incidental. Though, too, I think Tom is too hard on the show (”plot starved?”): there’s a lot in Mad Men, and a lot of it is too good to ignore.

Don Draper and his cohorts embody the last gasp of High WASP-y dominance of the American culture: one of Season One’s most interesting undercurrents was the exclusion of Jews from a certain segment of upperclass working and social life, a reminder just how little progress there was by the eraly sixties (the office’s lilywhite quality is much more immediately apparent).

As Season One progressed, and characters were sketched in more fully, the sense of hidden lives became more apparent: from the deep closet case (Bryan Batt, in a role he was born for), to the secret writer, to the ambitious guy with the massive inferiority complex… and most of all Draper himself, who turned out to be constructed almost completely out of the aftermath of the Korean War, having assumed the identity of a war buddy who was killed.

It’s the sense of constructed identity, the stories we tell ourselves and tell others, and how they differ from reality that make Mad Men, and at best, make Mad Men work amazingly well.  Draper’s understanding of what appeals in advertising, what will attract a customer to make a positive purchasing decision, has everything to do with his sense of America’s archetypes, and those, in turn, are all he wants to be. The apotheosis of this is his wife Betty, literally a model of WASP perfection, a blonde Grace Kelly lookalike who knows instinctively the perfect image of suburban housewife style… but also fleetingly realizes that none of what she has is real.

As with so many of these exercises, the dawning feminism of the period informs more than I think many people see: what really gives Mad Men zip is the narrowness of women’s lives and choices, and the way the women living with such strictures deal creatively with the challenges they face about societal expectations, and the pressures coming from other women. That’s true of Betty (a prime “Feminine Mystique” type), but also Joan, the head Secretary at Sterling Cooper (the ultimate early “Cosmo Girl“), and Peggy, Don’s former secretary who has moved into the role of copywriter (Feminism’s Second Waver).

Compared to them, the men tend to blend into one sexist bore, privileged and pampered and overfed. There are individual variations - Slattery’s smooth iciness as one of the named partners and Joan’s feckless paramour is especially acid - but the men’s dilemmas have an air of similarity that make it hard, eventually, to sympathize with another tale of the WASP businessman who  just never gets fully understood. “Get over it” only begins to cover it.

And therein lies the frustration of Mad Men - in the end, what’s really going on in the series is High WASP Angst, an ancient genre of drama in which painfully unemotional people remain tightly wound and unable to connect. I happen to love the genre, partly because I am one (an easy litmus test: did you love The English Patient?); but I’ll be the first to tell you, it’s usually an exercise in frustration, partly because the acting is mostly in the silences and rarely is the emotional temperature much above “simmer.”  Mad Men’s glossy surfaces and it’s images of glace perfection - especially in Betty - work best when we can realize how artfully constructed they are to deny any admission of feeling, and when we can realize how much pain lurks beneath the smooth surfaces.

Though Season Two leaps ahead by two years, it’s hard to see how much has changed (that, in fact, may be the point of the shift) - most interesting, from the first episode, is Peggy growing into her role as a professional adwoman, Betty’s ongoing struggles with her largely made-up suburban existence, and Draper’s continuing attempts to create himself from whole cloth.

It takes exceptional writing and acting to make this work, and to be fair, Mad Men has a lot of both: Jon Hamm as Don Draper, Slattery, and Bryan Batt are all excellent, and most of the others are very good among the men; and the three main actresses, Elisabeth Moss as Peggy, January Jones as Betty and Christine Hendricks as Joan are all quite wondrous… as was Rosemarie DeWitt as Don’s free-spirited mistress, Midge. As well, the scripts are well constructed and thought out… though they have the feel of Arthur Miller scripts - Death of An Ad Man, done in one hour installments.

The fact that Mad Men feels remote and at times more than a little inaccessible (like Miller, generally) is probably unavoidable. What’s more frustrating is that Mad Men’s lavish recreations of a particular time and place have the distancing effect of saying little about how we live now. Yes, that rampantly sexist, three martini lunch lifestyle gave us much of the modern “isms” which we still struggle to undo… but whether Mad Men glories in its excesses (don’t you miss the days when people dressed a little more stylishly and seemed more inclined to hang out in a cocktail lounge?) or looks askance at them is never entirely clear. Examining the lies we tell ourselves - as individuals and as a society, through our advertising - is interesting… but that’s just who we are. Now what?

Adapted, slightly, from a crosspost at nycweboy

But indulge me for a moment in my 1962 worship. That particular week is fertile territory that I’m sure the writers will explore. On the 14th, Jackie Kennedy gave a television tour of the White House that has become an iconic piece of black and white footage. On the 20th, John Glenn made his historic flight in orbit of the earth. The next day, the first New York Mets reported for training camp - and I reported for duty at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It snowed buckets, as it did that Valentine’s Day (see how obsessed Matthew Weiner really is by checking the weather on tonight’s episode). There were a bunch of ‘62 babies with names you may know: Darryl Strawberry and Jodie Foster, Roger Clemens and Axl Rose, Jim Carrey and Tom Cruise, Jon Stewart and Sheryl Crow, Ralph Fiennes and Jon Bon Jovi.

Lance Mannion suggests that Mad Men is not about the time it’s set in, that “all the attention to period detail is a trick.” But I’m afraid Weiner and his crew - portrayed as accuracy-obsessed in the Times magazine - are trying too say something about the mythical Camelot years in New York, and failing. As Lance suggests, the inclusion of all the “fads of the time are meant to place us in an alien world.” And to this New Yorker, it is alien; that is to say, outside of the costumes, Mad Men doesn’t look like the New York of the 60s. They’re trying a bit more this year: promotional pictures have Don Draper in the real Grand Central Terminal (not Station, as so many Hollywood writers mistakenly describe it - Grand Central Station is the subway stop below the grand and glorious terminal). I found myself on the Times Square shuttle this morning, and it’s all decked out in Mad Men promotional decals: ersatz 1962 Grand Central in the subway in Grand Central - makes the marketing mind spin. Robert Morse’s Bert Cooper would never have greenlighted the campaign.

Over at Basket of Kisses, the best of the obsessive Mad Men blogs, the tea leaves for Season Two have sprawled naked in the bottom of the cup for months. And the proprietors don’t like our house theory of Mad Men, either. “Deb and I are a little sick of hearing how this is a show where nothing happens,” wrote Roberta Lipp. And may be she’s right - stuff does happen. Accounts are won and lost. Affairs stir, fire, and fizzle. Health erodes. The elevators run up and down. Here’s the complete list, a real service for those who need reminding.

Still, as my Mad Men blogging partner M.A. Peel argues, “it’s still the perfect summer fare, and the sixties are the place to be.” That’s why we’re here! We may think it’s a plot-starved train wreck of a drama - but it’s a damned good-looking plot-starved train wreck of a drama, and we enjoy the critical company. “How many times can you watch the show’s star, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), furrow his brow, smoke an herbal cigarette while pretending to smoke a real one, and take a long, pensive pull on a fake alcoholic drink, and convince yourself that this is real drama as opposed to a televised version of an interior decoration magazine?” asks Brendan Bernhard in the Sun [via Jim Wolcott].

Here at newcritics, the answer is clear: all season long.

So let’s get back to February, 1962. The Beatles have signed with Brian Epstein three weeks earlier and are playing the Cavern. Bob Feller and Jackie Robinson have just been elected to the Hall of Fame. There are 500 military advisers in Vietnam. Gene Chandler’s Duke of Earl is the big single. And there’s trouble - of some sort - at Sterling Cooper.

If only things were quite so simple.

Brideshead Revisted is an impressive, lavish attempt to retell a familiar story… and yet, ultimately, the questions of its remoteness, and its relentless moralism are what really complicate the assessment of this film’s appeal. If the piece makes you think… does it matter that the thoughts are often quite negative?

Brideshead is probably most impressive, as a story, for its sweep. There are other British school tales, there are other tales of young and wealthy hedonists, and other stories of adults haunted by the demons of their past… but rarely does one story tie all of these threads together. That, I think, is why Evelyn Waugh’s novel of Charles Ryder and his complicated attachment to the Flyte family, a wealthy brood of elite Catholics, continues to have such appeal.

The new film is suffused with the Catholicism of the mother, Lady Marchmain (a brilliant portrayal
by Emma Thompson). Possessive, devout, intolerant, Lady Marchmain makes clear to all her expectations and how and when they will be fulfilled. Her children struggle and suffer to live up to her demands. The younger son, Sebastien, struggles especially, and while away at Oxford, he develops an attachment to a young student, Charles Ryder, played here by Matthew Goode.

The early moments of the infatuation between Sebastian and Charles are perhaps the most familiar to fans of British dramas - this is the well worn territory of Another Country, Maurice, and others. Young men, between the wars, untouched by society’s expectations… it’s been a fertile ground for all sorts of gay fantasias, and here, as played by Goode and Ben Whishaw, all the familiar bells are rung: the ease of upscale British life, the casual intimacy, the exploration of a romance that, so often, leads to disappointment.

Things between Sebastian and Charles are doomed because, mainly, Charles is straight, and in short order falls for Sebastian’s sister, the enigmatic Julia Flyte. But Lady Marchm,ain’s plans intervene, as Julia is promised to become a good Catholic bride, and Charles challenges Lady Marchmain by refusing to budge from a position of determined atheism.

Over time, the heavy mix of duty, a mother’s smothering expectations, and unrequited desires takes its toll: Sebastian devolves into a louche drunkard, held at arm’s length, but never free. Julia winds up in a loveless marriage as a glittering possession, and Charles struggles to find his way in the world, while never losing his fascination for all the aspects of the Flyte’s life: from his infatuation with Julia to his
longing for their lifestyle, especially as its embodied in Brideshead, “the family pile” as such estates are generally called by their residents.

Rarely has a set so overpowered almost all around it - as with the miniseries, Castle Howard, an impressive estate, fills in for Brideshead, admirably. But unlike the miniseries, it haunts the proceedings in a more complete way, syanding in for every notion of class and wealth in British culture, and for the overpowering nature of Lady Marchmain’s demanding religiosity. Something has to - while the film is visually impressive, we are often treated to airless closeups of telling details - a glove, a necklace, a statue, meant to remind us, in shorthand, of all the British upper class values on display.

Such is the presence of Thompson in the part of Lady Marchmain that she dominates the proceedings long after she’s left the stage: this is Oscar caliber stuff, all the more impressive because Thompson wisely stages her cruelties while barely raising her voice. This is steel fist in velvet glove stuff, and it’s very well done.

But my own sense is that for Brideshead to really work best, it needs balance, and here the balance seems entirely uneven.  And while it’s hard to fault Matthew Goode for giving it his all… something is off. While some say he’s a pale stand-in for Jeremy Irons, I’d say his best choice is avoiding obviously following Irons; this is really all his own. Unfortunately, though, what he brought to my mind was a thinking man’s Cary Grant, all ambiguous sex appeal and courtly manners… and it’s interesting to consider that an actor like Grant would be utterly miscast as Ryder. And though Goode offers a lot, ultimately, his Charles is no match for the relentless moralizing and the power of Catholic ritual.

What’s left then is everything following through to foreordained conclusions: that may be as Waugh intended, but it makes for grim stuff. It’s especially cruel to the character of Sebastian, whose homosexuality seems more up front and present here than in the previous version… but dealt with far more harshly (I’m not sure those who griped about potential “soft pedaling” of Sebastian anticipated what’s here). To his credit, Ben Whishaw inhabits Sebastian with a touching gentleness that softens his descent into addiction and madness… but the result is more than a little thankless, and layered with unfortunate modern-day analogies to the AIDS epidemic that the piece simply can’t sustain. As the third leg of the triangle, Hayley Atwell plays with Julia’s uncertainties and ambiguities, but it’s hard to get the sense of what’s driving her and the emotional connections to those around her.

For all that, this Brideshead is blessed with some very strong supporting players: Michael Gambon does a fine turn as Lord Marchmain, the Flytes absent father, and Greta Scaachi makes a breathtaking return to form as his lover, Cara. Among the younger cast, the other two siblings Bridey and Cordelia are ably played by Ed Stoppard and Felicity Jones. Even more memorable is Joseph Beattie’s Anthony Blanche, who provides the necessary in-between notion of a gay life between the extremes of Sebastian’s dissolution and Charles’ flat-put rejection.

Director Julian Jarrold deserves, to me anyway, a lot of credit for wading into such a risky project; this could easily have fallen far more flat, and worked much less. This is a film of ideas, and he explores them thoroughly. Visually, the film is a feast, if gradually a rather dark one, and the score too is immensely satisfying.  This is a morality play with a sumptuous look and feel.

But because of the weight of the moralizing, there’s an inescapable sense that every bit of misbehavior - the affairs, the drinking, even the pride and intolerance - carries the weight of sin. That, I think, is an awfully heavy way to answer the Question of Lust that permeates this piece and provides Brideshead’s real heat (both the film and its manorial embodiment). And that’s the only answer that lies within this grim, daunting house, for all its glorious sights and sounds. And I’m not sure that’s really enough to satisfy.

Cross posted at NYCweboy

When we next see him, it will be Valentine’s Day, 1962.

While we may not learn exactly what he has been doing in the year and a half, we know that Jon Hamm, his alter ego, has been busy garnering awards, along with Matt Weiner and the whole crew: three Golden Globe, a Peabody, and 16 Emmy nods, including outstanding actor, supporting actor, writing, directing, and series.

Clearly it’s a show filling a hunger of the tv-watching audience of 2008. What are we finding there?

Well, it’s one heck of a kaleidoscope of recent history. The past forty years have seen powerful societal revolutions. MM gives us a chance to see these revolutions–which some witnessed first hand, and others, including the brainchild Weiner, inherited–all recollected in tranquility (and saturated color). Yes, the series is the poetry of our summer.

For instance, TV viewers born in each decade from 1960 on know there was a feminist revolution, but for nonboomers, we never saw exactly what it was trying to correct. MM dramatizes what women faced in the workplace when they entered it after the war. That’s not to say that women don’t still face sexism, but most of us don’t encounter it to this degree: “It’s like watching a dog play the piano”; Mr. Rumsen on the thought of Peggy Olson writing copy.

Drugs are entering daily life—the beats are getting high, and it’s the beginning of the “us vs. them” with the police. Don’t trust anyone over 30 is on the horizon. Music is energizing the postwar crowd. When the Twist comes on at PJ’s in the party for Peggy, a primal scream of delight goes up that we can all relate to.

The overarching revolution that’s coming is not old versus young—it’s old order versus the new waves of energy of those who think young, challenging that order. And Matt Weiner is giving us a front row seat to the sea changes, layered with personal details of characters amid the revolutionary swells.

I am not a complete disciple of the Mad Men. I thought the storytelling itself was weak and disconnected; there were lots of strong, interesting moments that did not build together well in larger arcs.

James Wolcott’s early post also voiced the minority vote: that the series isn’t as good as people think it is, and we wish it were.

But it’s still the perfect summer fare, and the sixties are the place to be. Which may be why New York is experiencing a full revival of Hair at Shakespeare in the Park.

This Sunday night, July 27, at 10:00 p.m., Mad Men second season premieres. Tom Watson, editor extraordinaire and I will be your hosts for live blogging of the episodes. Tom leads off this Sunday. So turn on the lava lamp and join the fun. Can key parties be far off?

Heath Ledger was good. Of course he was. He was a 29 year old wild man! An uninhibited, great actor. Makes sense he’d play that part for all it was worth! I wish he would’ve done more with the sound of his voice, though. He kept it up behind his nose, at the same high pitch throughout the movie. I wish he would’ve slowly let it drop down about an octave and then back up again every now and then.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was miscast. She’s more believable as creative quirky than sexy glamorous. She couldn’t even fill out her dress, let alone that role.

Meeeoowww.

Maybe I could play Catwoman?

I did not believe that The Batman and Harvey Dent would both be in love with her. Who should have been cast then? Maybe Charlize Theron? It would’ve worked with Harvey Dent, but that girl would eat The Batman alive.

She’s too much woman for Christian Bale! Who was good. But, I’m biased. I’ve liked everything about Christian Bale since American Psycho. Everything except his voice as The Batman.

I would’ve known it was him in two seconds!

And now that I think about it, I didn’t really care much for Rescue Dawn. But, that mess wasn’t Christian’s fault.

Aaron Eckhart was great. Great! And no one’s talking about him. Except me. And Laurie Mann over at Susie Bright’s. And she’s also right about his fantastic makeup/CGI at the end of the film.

How did his one eyeball move around so convincingly?! Aaron Eckhart’s fake left eyeball was more believable than Maggie Gyllenhaal’s whole real body!

Why must Morgan Freeman always be so wise?

Why was Gary Oldman cast as Tom Skerritt?

Why did the woman in front of us bring two five year old boys to see such a film??!! Totally inappropriate. She should be ashamed. Bad, bad mother!

Meeeoowww.

And finally, the movie was too long.

Other than that, I liked it. Especially Aaron Eckhart.

Count me in as one who totally believes in Harvey Dent.

Brief recap of episode one: Girl from my hometown wins! Go Kelli, go! (Clearly I am already biased, although there are two Columbus residents on the show, Terri lives there too.) Austin Scarlett, from Season One, was the guest host. They had the classic “use unconvential materials” challenge, which Austin won, so long ago. Jerry was booted, though there were several boring outfits (I thought the trash bag designer should have gone). It seemed that everyone used tablecloths. My early conclusion: we’ve got a bunch of duds this season. Dilutions of past “wacky” characters.

An aside about Kelli. She owns a store in Columbus and my mother and PR-crazy aunt went in last Thursday and met her. They think she’s lovely, though mother thinks it’s a shame about all her tats (Richard Cohen would probably agree). She wouldn’t tell them who won, much to my aunt’s sorrow.

Tonight our guest host is Natalie Portman. Facebook tells me the contestants will have to create “eco-friendly” designs. So no fur, I assume. Way to jump on the green train, Bravo. Join us at 9/8 pm in the comments!

Yes, Heath Ledger’s Joker really is all that. And the two-and-a-half hours of terror he inflicts on the denizens of Gotham is sickeningly brutal (if Gotham is our New York proxy - played here by Chicago - it’s like the Son of Sam and September 11 all rolled into one), making The Dark Knight the feel-bad hit of the summer.

Nolan - who wrote the screenplay with his brother and veteran screen-writer David Goyer (who adapted Blade for the screen) - resisted the temptation to tell a Joker origin. Sticklers might quibble over the Joker’s motiveless malignity. But like last year’s great screen villain, Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, the Joker has always had a force-of-nature/agent-of-fate quality. It’s the classical Greek dimension of the Batman/Joker relationship that drives literary fanboys mad, and the movie exploits it to the hilt (”You complete me,” the Joker tells Batman in the movie’s best joke, during what feels like the movie’s only brightly lit scene, a brutal interrogation in a Gotham City police station).

From the start - Batman #1 in the spring of 1940 - the Joker was a cipher. He didn’t get an origin in the comics for 11 years. And that origin didn’t get it’s definitive retelling until 1988 (Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, a breakthrough “Prestige-format” one-shot that remains the greatest single comic book ever published). With Ledger’s death, this screen Joker will remain a cypher. I can’t imagine another Joker story in the movies for years. But the Joker’s origin was always something of a McGuffin. For the drama to work its enough for the Joker to be Batman’s mirror - white where the Batman’s black, smiling while the Batman broods, obsessed with chaos while the Batman is compulsively devoted to order.

If the Aeschylean drama of Batman v. the Joker were all there were to The Dark Knight it would already be one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. But Nolan’s decision to weave in an origin story for classic Batman villain Two-Face gives the movie a human dimension that kicks it up a notch. Where Batman and the Joker fight a war of Platonic ideals, Two-Face - a half-disfigured crusading District Attorney turned villain obsessed with duality and random flukes of chance - presents the war between good and evil, chance and design, chaos and order in a single scarred body and psyche. Ledger’s Joker gets all the press, but Aaron Eckhart’s ambitious, vengeful portrayal of Harvey Dent/Two-Face movies the movie along. (Maggie Gyllenhaal is also an enormous upgrade over Katie Holmes although Batman never needed a love-interest.)

The Dark Knight may well be the pinnacle of this moment in the pop culture sun for comic books and the fanboys who love them–the moment when Batman, not a dumbed down or campy Batman, but our beloved Batman and his psychopathic mutual dual twin opposite - win an Oscar or seven. It’s been a seeping, generational change that has drawn superheros to the surface of the literary and entertainment worlds. Its still a transformation that irks some (”Pop nostalgia clings like a kudzu weed to everyone who ever grew up feeling alien-freaky—i.e., all of us who somehow knew we were born to die uncool.” John Leonard scolded the ever-so-cool Jonathan Lethem in The New York Review of Books for his obsession with comic books and pop music). But The Dark Knight’s received almost unanimous raves. It still may not be the movie that converts my mother-in-law (though the moral darkness and fabulous acting will help), but it is almost certainly the best Batman movie that will ever be made, up there with the best Batman stories of Steve Englehart and Frank Miller. And that’s saying plenty.

Just in case you missed Part I.

She had that agile, clear, distinctive voice, dripping with depth and expression. Her commanding downbeat to “Seeeeeee” those pyramids, still gives me chills. It’s powerful and sexy, and later “fly” is sung with such abandon. But what really captivated me about the song were the words—all that exotic travel. It never crossed my mind that the woman singing the song was the one staying home, and it was the man “flying the ocean in a silver plane.” That had to be learned later.

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember darling
All the while
You belong to me

It was also the way she sang “darling”—it was the epitome of grown-up love to me. I didn’t know that by the time I would be old enough to say darling, it would be all but gone from the modern lover’s lexicon, thrown to the rubbish heap of the affected.

See the market place in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember
When a dream appears
You belong to me

And I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember till
You’re home again
You belong to me

Many have covered the song, from Bob Dylan to Rose McGowen, I’m sure drawn to it by Stafford herself. But she owns it, now and forever.

Few thoughts to mull over while we wait to get started. First, here’s part of a post I wrote way back in April when I started reading Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution and got the idea for this caper:

Did you know that at two separate points during the early stages of its development, Francois Truffaut was set to direct Bonnie and Clyde?

Did you know that he helped novice screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton reshape, revise, and rewrite their script, even though he didn’t speak English and they didn’t speak French?

Did you know Newman and Benton, who were working at Esquire magazine when they came up with the idea of a movie based on the life and death of Bonnie and Clyde, wrote it to be first American French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague film, whatever that would have meant? (SFMike thinks it would have meant disaster.)

Did you that after the first time Truffaut begged off he managed to get Jean-Luc Goddard interested in taking over. That deal fell apart over an argument over the weather in New Jersey in wintertime.

Did you know that the second time Truffaut was attached—or seriously thinking of becoming attached to the project—Warren Beatty set up an accidental meeting between himself and Truffaut at a Paris cafe in order to cajole Truffaut into letting him play Clyde Barrow? Truffaut took a dislike to Beatty and vowed that if he wound up directing the movie there was no way en terre that he’d cast Beatty?

Did you know Truffaut would have liked to have cast Jane Fonda as Bonnie? Maybe.

Did you know that Truffaut finally gave Bonnie and Clyde the skip because he wanted Fahrenheit 451 to be the first film he made in English?

Did you know that right up until the nearly the last minute the script included a menage a trois between Bonnie, Clyde, and the character that was eventually played by Michael J. Pollard? The character was a bit different before the scene was dropped and Clyde was rewritten as impotent rather than as bisexually confused.

Did you know that for years afterwards Beatty liked to tell a story about how after he took over as producer he went down on his knees to beg Jack Warner to finance the film? Warner didn’t want Warner Brothers to have anything to do with Bonnie and Clyde. Not because he thought it was too cutting edge, too French, or too New Wave. Warner thought it was too old-fashioned. No different from all the gangster films Warner Brothers produced back when Cagney and Bogart were the resident tough guys.

Did you know Beatty came very close to casting Natalie Wood as Bonnie?

Next, here are five things the Siren loves about Bonnie and Clyde:

1. The superb control of tone. Take the scene with a kidnapped Gene Wilder, which starts out mocking the squares in a way that’s very 60s without killing the period ambience. And then, when Wilder tells them his profession, Penn cuts to Dunaway’s face, and the scene is suddenly the very darkest kind of foreshadowing. Split-second abrupt, and smooth as Talisker.

2. The tender, whispery-quiet family reunion scene that functions as the funeral we never see.

3. The beauty of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. All the Siren can say to that is, damn.

4. The supremely witty script from David Newman, Robert Benton and the uncredited Robert Towne. Some say that screenplays are about structure, not dialogue. This one has both, the light-and-dark interplay between the episodes kept moving along perfectly, while the dialogue is always spare but telling.

5. The music. Boy, does this bring out the Siren’s inner Alabama. In a good way, of course.

Now, over to Jim Wolcott who gives us this lyrical quote from Manny Farber describing the opening of the movie and Faye Dunaway’s ethereal presence in it:

The movie starts with the aroma of a French Agnes Varda bedroom scene: Miss Dunaway lying belly down on a bed, in heat, restless, with no action in town, West Texas. “Hey, there, that’s my momma’s car you’re stealing!” She flies down the stairs, the camera staring up her billowing skirts. The movie picks up now that it’s out in the open air, an authentic small town street with covered sidewalks: pseudo-folk conversation, spiffed-up Warren Beatty doing that coy shuffle when his face loses itself inside a boyishly fake half-grin.

The fluke of Dunaway is that her body moves uncannily in harmony with the film’s movement. While Beatty-[Michael J.] Pollard-[Gene] Hackman are muscular, earthbound, scurrying and plodding in skit-like business that is both entertaining and synthetic, she is almost air.

And finally back to me but really to Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, for a sense of the political and cultural impact Bonnie and Clyde had when it came out in 1967—just the link though because it’s a long, long quote, Bonnie and Clyde in Nixonland.

Some background trivia, some film criticism, Faye Dunaway, and counterculture politics—that ought to be more than enough to get us started. Fire away. Anybody gets caught lurking’s going to have to answer to the business end of my tommy gun, got that? So unbutton your yaps at spill.

Quick, name the movie.

At this stage of her career, Jolie gives great movie star; that’s not necessarily the same thing as acting (which, I think, explains why her earnest attempts at such tend to fall flat, these days). And the apotheosis of her movie star presence may be Wanted, the movie where mostly, she just stands there, being badass Angie.

Based on a “graphic novel” (that’s “high end comic book” to us older folk), Wanted is one of those “dumb as a box of hammers” movies that can still thrill, mostly by keeping all of the hammers in motion.

Wanted is ostensibly the story of a group of assassins with an ancient history who recruit a shy neophyte mousy geek when his father is apparently killed. The neophyte, names Wesley Gibson (it’s always a Wesley) becomes a great fighter… and then learns his true identity.

And mayhem ensues, naturally. Wanted is directed by Tim Bekmambetov, a Russian director who made a stir with the films Nightwatch, and Daywatch, which also feature spectacular action sequences and a dark mythology (it’s something about vampires and an ancient battle between light and dark… which makes them the movies that the Underworld series should have been). Bekmambetov seems to now be the go-to guy for preposterous plotting (the ancient order of assassins in Wanted developed, I kid you not, from an ancient clan of… weavers. Looms - again, I kid you not - figure prominently in the plot).

Say what you will, Bekmambetov certainly knows how to play with his toys - Wanted contains dozens of bravura action sequences, that pump up the adrenaline level (that, apparently, is the mark of the assassin in this story - an ability to pun one’s heart super fast and cause an adrenaline surge at will). Not only that, but Bekmambetov also does an impressive job of creating a sense of dread about the whole thing - rarely have assassin flicks made random killing seem so present, and so grim.

Still, there’s a preposterousness to all of this that makes Wanted mostly kind of silly and overwrought. James McAvoy has become the latest pretty heartthrob to put himself at the center of these giant affairs, and he’s yet to show a real ability to carry the big pictures. That’s the case in Wanted, where his transformation from mousy geek to gun-toting badass never rings true (it was also the case in Atonement where his performance wasn’t big enough for the storyline). To be fair, it’s hard to see how almost any actor - especially these days when Hollywood is casting everything too young - could carry the absurdities of this script.

Well, except for Jolie. As Fox, the roughest, toughest assassin of the crew, she is, of course, flawless. Blessed with virtually no dialogue (and what she does say is incredibly weakly written), and mostly required to manage guns and knives with her usual flair, Jolie has presence for days, enough to give McAvoy some for their scenes together… and so, without her, things tend to go slack. Moreover, the weight of her star presence throws off the balance of nearly everything - not only are star actors like Morgan Freeman (really, what’s happened to him these days?) and Terence Stamp wasted in their “grizzled mentor” roles, their star qualities are overwhelmed by the leather clad vixen who really carries the pic.

One wonders, naturally, how long Jolie can sustain this kind of stardom; the roles are really starting to blend, the performances seem to be getting rote… and really, how many tattoos before one starts to run out of available space? There was a moment - back when she alternated Gia with thrillers like Hackers - that her badass presence made for some serious, subversive sexiness, as well as some memorable, impressive work. Wanted, as these things do, makes it all a cartoon, a CGI-doll with spike heels, wild hair, and bad attitude. As such cartoons go, Wanted lifts itself above the pack with Bekmambatov’s dark visions and thrill ride sequences. Whether that actually constitutes a recommendation depends, I guess, on how you like hammers. And Sweet Angie’s Badass Song.

After an attack by “malware” hackers last week, newcritics looked more like Bonnie & Clyde’s bullet-sliced sedan than the functioning cultural colossus that it is has been over the past year and half. Well, the site’s back up, folks, and it seems like most of the data is intact. Finger crossed, of course. A huge note of thanks to a (thus far) silent newcritics supporter, Wordpress expert Larry Aronson - a great man indeed who helped us with the scarred and riddled chassis, and got this thing running again (with an assist from Howard Greenstein). Let’s all thank Larry. And speaking of a hail of bullets, this thing’s running just in time for Lance’s cimematic shin-dig tomorrow night. Fingers crossed, of course.

It was to be the last fine performance of a long line of fine performances.

Think of the great male stars of Tracy’s era and Tracy’s name doesn’t usually pop into the head first. Bogart, Gable, Cooper, Cagney, Wayne, Stewart, Fonda, Grant. But in the day Tracy was bigger than all of them. His star shone brighter, longer than any of theirs, except Grant’s and Wayne’s. And it was because he was the best. Everybody thought so. Everybody was right. The best natural movie actor ever.

And he made it look easy.

Karen Karbo writes in book about Tracy’s greatest leading lady, How to Hepburn:

It’s a challenge to think of an actor working today with whom to compare Spencer Tracy. The best I can come up with is Russell Crowe on a calm day crossed with the Robert De Niro of Godfather II. Tracy’s great gift was that he never looked like he was acting. Watch even the worst of the seventy-four movies he appeared in, and whatever is going wrong on screen or in the script, it never has anything to do with Tracy. Compare Tracy’s performance as John Macreedy, the one-armed war veteran who shows up at a desert backwater that hasn’t seen a visitor in four years in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) with that of Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker, where Lancaster starred opposite Hepburn as the flamboyant, madly gesticulating con man Starbuck. Lancaster can’t deliver a single line without crouching, leaping, or swinging around a post, as if he’d just been cut from the chorus of Oklahoma! Indeed all the male leads throw themselves around (off and on their horses, up and down the porch steps, in and out the front door) as if their acting coach were Dane Cook on speed. The Rainmaker is as dated as an old dance card. Tracy’s Oscar-nominated performance in Black Rock, on the other hand, looks as if it were turned in last week. His low-key gravitas, not to say normal behavior (notice the way he keeps his arms down?) is timeless.

And he was all done.

That he’d gotten so far, lasted this long was amazing, really. Tracy the quiet, solid, amiable if gruff, normal man on screen had been on self-destruct off screen since he was a teenager. He was still alive, still a star, still able to work the little that he could manage, because for close to twenty-five years Katharine Hepburn had kept him that way, alive and working.

Karbo writes:

Hepburn fashioned her life around Tracy’s movie roles and drinking binges. They lived in separate houses…but she managed both households, seeing to Tracy’s cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, entertaining, and, as Tracy’s health worsened, nursing.

Her other full-time project was keeping him away from the bottle. When Tracy and Hepburn weren’t working, she became a camp counselor, and he her lone, doted-upon camper. She kept him busy with art projects, books, stimulating conversation, gallons of coffee, and daily swims. When he was working and she wasn’t, she would drive him to the studio, wait on the set, then drive him home and cook him dinner. The flow of concern went in one direction, and one direction only, from Hepburn to Tracy; it was understood that he had his own problems, and they were paramount to hers.

When he went on benders she went looking in all his favorite bars to find him and drag him out before he started breaking things and hurting people.

In return he bullied her, he ignored her, he cheated on her. “He called her Olive Oyl. He called her Bag of Bones. He was known to tell her to just shut the hell up.” He made her carry his luggage! When she wasn’t around to take care of him he sulked. When she was around he wasn’t much more cheerful.

Or apparently grateful.

Someone asked him once why his name always came first in the credits, why didn’t he let the lady go ahead of him. “It’s a movie, not a lifeboat,” he said.

If their life together was a lifeboat, there was one passenger, Tracy. Hepburn was the crew.

Hepburn is the legendary exemplar of the independent woman. Strong, self-reliant, alone but never lonely. She could take men or leave them, and she did both as she needed. Karbo’s book is about how to make a role-model of Hepburn, about how to borrow some of Hepburn’s strength and independence and eccentric flair for giving strength and meaning to one’s own life. How to Hepburn is about how not to become someone else’s notion of you.

It’s about how not to let yourself be used the way Tracy used Hepburn.

So had did it happen to her? How did she put up with him for twenty-five years?

Hepburn’s own answer was simple. She loved the bum.

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get,” she said, “only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything.”

As Karbo writes, “Even Hallmark would steer clear of that one.”

But she did love him. No denying it. And he loved her. You could see it, right from their first movie together, Woman of the Year.

Karbo again:

…between Woman of the Year and Adam’s Rib the world was treated to some impressive sizzle. Part of their colossal appeal was that audiences knew something had to be going on, while, of course, at the time knowing that nothing could be going on, because Tracy was a Married Man with a Deaf Son, and also a devout Roman Catholic.

Still, what to make of those simmering gazes? Those effortless riffs of teasing banter? The hot scene in Woman of the Year where Hepburn’s Tess Harding pauses on the stair to coyly arrange her stocking, while slinging some smart-alecky remark at Tracy’s Sam Craig, panting with hat in hand, two risers down? Ooh-la-la!

This could not be a simple demonstration of fine acting.

That chemistry is still there, that love is still obvious, if not as sizzling, in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It could be argued that it’s what makes the movie. So let’s argue it. Tonight’s open thread is now open…

This thought initially occurred to me when I was writing a praise-ful review of the movie Starter for 10 on my own blog, but it comes back to haunt me as I think about writing a review of WALL-E. Critics are falling over themselves to lavish praise on Pixar’s latest film (much as they have with… well, pretty much every Pixar flick); and the danger, I think, is that such praise overstates what’s really happening in a light, charming summer film.

WALL-E is a visually rich, almost dialogue free film that does, yes, amaze. But suggesting, as some do, that the film is a searing indictment of corporate greed and waste, or a stunning eco-parable about our stewardship of the planet… is probably a stretch. At its heart - and it really does have one - WALL-E is all about love and the connections between all of us, man or machine.

And really, isn’t that enough?

Nothing, I think, demonstrates the power of WALL-E’s storytelling as much as its first 15 minutes, when a lot of expository detail - explaining how Earth came to be a vast wasteland, where all the people went, and the sole existence of our protagonist - is revealed in tight, short snippets of business. We are shown the vast retail edifices of a company called Buy N Large and quick snippets of holographic video regarding a “space cruise”, all through the smudgy lenses of WALL-E, a trash collecting and compacting robot who appears to be the last working one of his kind.

Here lies the real genius of the film: WALL-E is surely one of the great robot characters to ever appear on film. With only a limited range of movements, WALL-E is able to convey his feelings about his existence, and he generates a great deal of audience empathy. WALL-E doesn’t just make compact little trash cubes, he’s a collector and a packrat; each day he loads the little Igloo cooler he carries with items of trash he finds interesting: an old bra, ceramic trolls, christmas lights… and probably most significantly, an old videotape of Hello, Dolly! that he watches over and over (we are treated to “Put On Your Sunday Best” among other numbers… but no Streisand - which is probably a relief).

WALL-E’s world is forever changed with the arrival of EVA, an investigative droid scanning the planet for… something. It is, of course, love at first sight for WALL-E, even when EVA turns out to have a “shoot first, determine friendliness second” approach to meeting strangers - I mean, what’s cooler than a hot chick who’s armed to the teeth (and next, let’s review Angelina Jolie in Wanted, yes)? There’s a lovely moment when, in their bleep-y way, these two machines introduce themselves and begin a romance.

But all of this is merely prologue: it turns out WALL-E is in possession of the one thing EVA is actually searching for - signs of sustainable life on the planet (in his travels, WALL-E finds the bud of a small plant). EVA collects her sample and promptly signals the mother ship, and WALL-E, smitten, of course follows her… halfway across the galaxy.

Toy Story may have exhorted us “to infinity, and beyond” but WALL-E actually goes there: it’s actually a lavish space cruise ship, populated by the descendants of the people who fled the Earth when it became too garbage filled and life threatening. Fat, lazy, and bored, the people float around on sedan chairs with computer screens, barely aware of any of their surroundings. And their lives, too, will be up-ended by the arrival of EVA and the plant.

Like previous Pixar films, WALL-E succeeds surprisingly well at telling a story whose archetypes are entirely familiar and known. You know where this is all going (hint: back to Earth), but it’s the getting there that the film makes so charming. Man vs. Machine, Machine vs. Machine… the conflicts here are as old as the hills (or at least as old as 2001: A Space Odyssey), yet there’s nothing tired about the way WALL-E goes through the paces. Content to gnaw on the hand that feeds it (as opposed to outright biting), WALL-E gently pokes fun at our Wal-Mart culture, our lives in front of the glowing screens… but the points it makes about waste, and laziness and our need to get up and get going… are really very muted. While many are bound to see a “strong, bracing” social message here, I think that’s a bit much - WALL-E has no answers for our consumerist ways, and seems content to leave its most bracing message at “stop and smell the flowers” or at least “dive into the pool.”

(I’ll even leave aside the practical questions raised by the cruise ship, such as how these lazy people reproduce - which is clearly not about sex - or what happens to the dead; the cruise ship seems to have two sets of people: small children, and middle aged adults. It’s like some sort of weird Logan’s Run.)

Don’t get me wrong: I too was blown away by the level of animation, and the brilliant storytelling; I can’t imagine almost anyone failing to be moved by WALL-E and EVA’s courtship. As others say, the most charming love story of the year up to now is probably these two robots. And the visual elements, notably the sunburnt, faded colors of an abandoned Earth are surely some new feat of realism in computer graphic animation (the kind that wins Oscars). I just don’t want to oversell it, because it’s easier to make more of WALL-E than it is… and it’s the gentle, smaller elements that, to me, really make it shine. I’d hate to have people go in expecting too much, and then - like the lazy giants on the cruise Spaceship - not appreciating the gifts of wonder and discovery. That’s what WALL-E (and WALL-E) has. We should all be so lucky.

It all started innocently enough over at my place when I put up this charming clip.

One of the two or three regular readers of my blog, who chooses, perhaps out of laziness, to go by the moniker Anonymous, left this comment:

Great 60’s Male Vocalists in No Particular Order:
John Lennon Elvis Presley
Paul Jones Paul McCartney
Roy Orbison Van Morrison
John Fogerty Bob Dylan
David Ruffin James Brown
Arthur Alexander Sam Cooke
Jackie Wilson Brian and Carl Wilson
Robin Gibb Gene Pitney
Solomon Burke Brook Benton
Aaron Neville Wilson Pickett

I quickly responded with:

Anon, dig it, love them all. I’m so glad you mentioned Robin Gibb, because I love the early BeeGees. So many great singers and this is only the dudes. Just off the top of my head I’m tossing in Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, Eric Burdon, Mitch Ryder, Dyke of Dyke and the Blazers, Tommy James, Colin Blunstone of the Zombies, Steve Marriott of the Small Faces and Humble Pie, Gary Brooker of Procol Harum, and, yes, a couple of obscure r&b shouters named Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart. Oh, and just squeezing into the 60s with that first Stooges album, Iggy Pop. And I think we’re still leaving out fifty or sixty.

Anon soon came back with:

Jackie Wilson is worth mentioning twice, he was so amazing. Also:
Marvin Gaye / Roy Hamilton / Dee Clark / Rudy Lewis, Johnny Moore,and Charlie Thomas of the Drifters (various lead singers) / Alex Chilton / Roger McGuinn / Joe Cocker / Eddie Cochran / The Everlys / Tommy Hunt / Jimmy Hughes / Jerry Butler / Major Lance / Gene Chandler / Robert Plant / Leonard Cohen / Lee Dorsey / Fats Domino / Little Richard / Mark Lindsay /
Ray Charles / Steve Winwood / Tom Jones / Lou Reed / Jesse Colin Young

Ball in my court:

Wait, did we mention Smokey Robinson, or Curtis Mayfield, or Clarence Carter? Ray Davies or Scott Walker?

And we haven’t even gotten into the blues, or country.

So now we know why I’m still living in the 60s…

Oh, yeah, and Jackie Wilson three times!

Anonymous, fa fa fa, your turn:

Percy Sledge, Sam and Dave, both Rightous Brothers, Dion, Eddie Kendricks, Tim Buckley, Harry Nilsson, Paul Rodgers...this is making me really depressed.

Back to me:

Aw, damn, and we forgot Felix and Eddy from the Rascals!

Hey, but don’t worry, there’s lots of great singers out there today, like, uh, um, oh, I know, like this dude.

Ah well. And we still left out about seventy-five. Sorry, Jim Morrison, I still love you.

And as for the girl singers from the 60s?

Don’t get me started.

Ah, hell, just dig this.

Here’s a few notes from the Self-Styled Siren:

…while it’s the worst of the nominees for 1967’s Best Picture Oscar, it still provides Mark Harris with the best parts of Pictures at a Revolution. The Siren was glued to the book in general but Doctor Dolittle, like all disasters, makes brilliantly good copy–from the tons of shit produced by the animals, to the choice of the rainiest village in England for a location, to Rex Harrison’s lord-of-the-manor racism and ability to be a towering prick to all who encountered him, to Harrison’s wife Rachel Roberts and her alcoholic benders that even appalled Richard Burton. There aren’t many movie books that can make the Siren shriek out loud on the subway but Harris’s did, and it was a Doctor Dolittle part that done it. This legendary turkey does need to be seen at least once. Like it (does anyone love it?) or hate it, Doctor Dolittle embodies a type of moviemaking that’s as dead as the dodo. I’m willing to bet you will at least appreciate the scale and scope of the movie, in those wonderful days before CGI came along to annoy the bejesus out of us. And if you are a Netflix subscriber, it’s available for instant viewing.

I don’t know why there’s so much blank space below. Comments here.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, a vicious email appeared in my inbox that blamed the victims for not evacuating and was purportedly written by George Carlin containing (in part) the following:

A mandatory evacuation means just that…Get the hell out.
Don’t blame the Government after they tell you to go. If they hadn’t said anything, I can see the argument. They said get out… if you didn’t, it’s your fault, not theirs. (We don’t want to hear it, even if you don’t have a car, you
can get out.)

The government isn’t responsible for giving you anything. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave, but you gotta work for what you want. McDonalds and Wal-Mart are always hiring, get a job and stop spooning off the people who are actually working for a living. President Kennedy said it best…”Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Snopes had not yet debunked it, but I knew those words couldn’t have been written by him. A quick Google search turned the transcript from his recent appearance on Bill Maher’s cable program. Here then is how George Carlin really felt about the government’s mishandling of the aftermath of the hurricane:

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that rich, white men don’t care about poor, black people, period. So they’re not high on their list.”

“And generally speaking again – it’s all generalized – the left-of-center people are more concerned with humans and human beings and human concerns; to the care of humans, not the care and worry about property rights. That’s generally been true. And Bush is pushing this country farther down the hill, faster than anyone has before.”

Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, but know this: George Carlin was a liberal until the bitter end. I’ll leave you with a clip from Keith Olberamann’s Countdown from October 2007.

It’s almost old-fashioned that way.

But In The Heat Of The Night is very much a statement in response to its time. It is a product of the Civil Rights Movement and it delivers some very definite, and defiant, messages about race and prejudice and the brotherhood of man. It is not a protest film, though.

It’s a triumphalist film.

The filmmakers aren’t joining hands to sing We Shall Overcome. Their song is We Have Already Overcome…Get Used To It.

In The Heat of the Night is about how the Old Segregationist South was being swept away to make way for a New South very much like the New North and the New West. The New South would be a place where pragmatism replaced prejudice, where money made the rules, and where competence and intelligence made the money.

The new elite wouldn’t be white or black. It would just be people who were very good at their jobs.

This was a very optimistic view, considering that within a year of the film’s completion the country would see the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Presidential campaign of George Wallace, and the first applications of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which would eventually bring about thirty years of Republican dominance in national politics based on the GOP’s incorporation of the old Dixiecratic South within its base.

It was an optimistic view but it was a realistic one and in large areas of the South it has turned out to have been what has happened.

Before the movie even gets underway the power in the town of Sparta, Mississippi has shifted, out of the hands of the old Southern aristocracy and segregationists who had run the place for generations and into the hands of the murder victim, the Northern industrialist who came to town to open a new factory there. Even dead he still wields power, through his widow and through his money which she now controls.

When we first meet Philadelphia Detective Virgil Tibbs - in one of the best introductory shots in movie history, ranking up there with Humphrey Bogart’s first appearance in Casablanca - he is an outsider and seemingly in a very vulnerable situation. All the power in the scene would seem to belong to the police officer arresting him and we should expect things to get worse for him when he’s brought into the station.

But no character played by Sidney Poitier can ever be without authority and it doesn’t take long before by the sheer force of his glare he has most of the white characters backing away from him, if not backing down. Nobody knows how to deal with him, because Tibbs represents something they have no experience with - a black man with political clout. The North has invaded, and it doesn’t take long for the North in the person of Virgil Tibbs to establish its authority based on competence.

Shortly after that, Tibbs is invested with even more authority. The murdered industrialist’s widow recognizes him immediately as the one man in town who knows how to get the job she wants done done and she puts him in charge of solving her husband’s murder.

Once he becomes the agent of the new powers that be, Tibbs is the ultimate Insider.

The outsiders are now the representatives of the old South, the plantation owner up on the hill, the good old boys who chase Tibbs into the abandoned warehouse, the stupid counterman at the diner who refuses to serve him, and, especially, Chief Gillespie.

And Gillespie, it turns out, can’t afford any more added outsiderness.

It’s a beautiful job of expositionary economy: we’re never told it explicitly but Gillespie is not just new to the job of Chief, he’s new in town. He’s been brought in from outside to reshape the department, make it more professional, and so far he’s not had much success. His cops are in passive revolt against his authority. Nothing he wants done, gets done the first or even the second time he gives an order. His broken air conditioner, which he finally sets about fixing himself, is the symbol of his weakness.

Gillespie is a racist and he doesn’t want to believe that a black man can be a better cop than he is. But his real problem with Tibbs is more practical and would be a problem even if Tibbs was white—just by being there, Tibbs, the big city detective, is an argument against Gillespie’s competence. Gillespie’s already afraid for his job when we first meet him at the crime scene, and he doesn’t even know about Tibbs yet. He’s nervous and full of self-doubt to begin with. If Tibbs solves the case then what does the town need Gillespie for? It would be worse for him, if a black man proves to be better at his job than he is, worse for his position among other racist whites, worse for his pride, but the effect will be the same—he will lose so much face as chief that he’ll never gain control of the department. It won’t be long before he’s out of the job.

On one level In The Heat of the Night is about how a bigoted white man learns to accept a black man as his equal, even as his superior. But on another level, the level that I think resonates most today, it’s about how a proud man learns how to accept his own limitations and who learns how to make-do given those limitations.

This particular murder mystery is an interesting side-trip in the life story of Virgil Tibbs. But it is the adventure of Bill Gillespie’s life. This is make or break for him. If he fails in Sparta he has nothing left ahead for him. He’s through, as through as the Old South.

That’s why, as great as Poitier is as Tibbs, this is Rod Steiger’s film and why he deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

So that might be the best place to start our discussion, with Steiger’s performance.

What do you think? In his first scene, does he overdo it with gum-chewing?

A few more points to consider, courtesy of our fearless leader Tom Watson who ranks In The Heat Of The Night as his favorite of the five films in this series. Tom’s points:

- I like the noir pacing, design and camera work - in my memory it’s B&W - so much fear of violence
- I love the accents - Poitier doesn’t talk “black” which is such a key to the movie’s tensi