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What exactly are we looking at?

69 gone terribly wrong?  A prequel to The Human Centipede?

Nope, just one of the oddest movie posters of all time.

This was the main image used to advertise THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, a now almost-completely-forgotten star vehicle for Robert Redford and Jane Fonda released at Christmas time in 1979.

What was the film about?  Allow me to copy and paste…

Norman “Sonny” Steele is a former rodeo champion now reduced to making public appearances to sell a brand of breakfast cereal.  Prior to a Las Vegas promotional appearance riding the company’s mascot, a $12 million champion thoroughbred, he discovers the horse has been injured and drugged. 

Disillusioned with the present state of his life, Sonny decides to abscond with the horse and travel cross-country in order to release him in a remote canyon where herds of wild horses roam.  Hallie Martin, a television reporter eager to break the story, locates and follows Sonny on his quest.  While en route, the unlikely couple starts a romance as they avoid the pursuing authorities.

You can tell it’s the 1970’s because corporate evil is just a breakfast cereal and intrusive media is a rogue lady reporter with a hunch.

Of course, this image tells us absolutely nada about the actual story.   And that was sort of the point.  The story was irrelevant.  This was a big star vehicle at a time when putting together two big names – REDFORD…FONDA, as the poster shouts, no first names necessary – was the real bottom line.  Movie stars were everything.  Even the title of the movie was irrelevant!  ELECTRIC!  Forget the Horseman part.  Who cares about the horse?  Who wants to see a movie about a junkie horse anyway?  Do you wanna’ see two beautiful people with their faces buried in each other’s crotch?  Damn right you do.  So line up already!

It feels cynical and very quaint at the same time.

But effective: it definitely catches your eye, piques your curiosity…

The shot/position depicted is part of a sequence where Redford and Fonda tussle.  This half-sheet fills in the rest:

I don’t recall what happens next, but I’m pretty sure Redford doesn’t slam her down in a pile-driver hold and leave her for dead.

No, these folks are just letting their sexual tension turn playfully violent.  This happened a lot in the 70’s, kids…  You had to be there.

Part of me misses when iconic actors and the chemistry between them were a huge part of what made movies so special…  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.  In this case, the result was a B+ at best.  Two diverting if not incredibly memorable hours – but if you stumbled onto it on TCM at 2 am, you’d probably make some raisin toast and stick with it till the end.  Because at least the star system meant stories about adult relationships and adult problems, with people actually talking to each other.  Is it me or does that seem refreshing right now?

Sydney Pollack, the director here, once said that no matter the genre every single film he ever made was a love story.  The Way We Were and Out Of Africa are obvious, but even his spy thriller Three Days Of The Condor has a romance between Redford and the woman he takes hostage, Faye Dunaway.  (Kidnapping was also sort of hot in the 70’s – try not to judge)  He was fascinated by the push and pull, the dance, the tussle between men and women.  He saw it as the central story around which all other plot revolves, because that’s the one story everyone can see themselves in.  And movie stars like Redford & Fonda were our love surrogates, our better-looking bigger-than-life avatars.  We slipped them on like a rental tux, found comfort in their glamour, and followed them loyally from movie to movie.

That kind of stardom was starting to fade even in ’79…and doesn’t really exist today.  Spectacle is the star now.  How many superheroes and CGI effects can you cram into one scene?   It’s BIG alright, just less and less recognizable as life.  Look at the hyped pairing of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers –  the spectacle was fine, the chemistry and connection was a no-show.

The reason I thought of all this – and this weird poster – was because I just watched these two in one of their earliest films together, Barefoot In The Park, and followed it with what is likely their final pairing, Our Souls At Night, on Netflix.  It was a shocking bit of time travel.  The first was fast, funny and sexy – for a Neil Simon play; the latter slow, somber and funereal.

Such is the circle of life.  Even for movie stars.

This was the “couple” in 1967…

And in 2017…

Redford says he is retiring soon.  Fonda has a new movie out this week, Book Club, which looks like it might just be a sleeper hit.

Years ago, both walked away from acting at the peak of their career.  Redford created Sundance.  Fonda created…Jazzercize.

Redford probably has the most memorable films overall, but Fonda is having the better “Third Act”.   She seems to have aged with grace and style, adjusted to each new stage of life with realism, humility.  Redford has remained hamstrung by vanity and ego, never really stretched himself as an actor.  He directed many films, but only 1 1/2 of them are great (Ordinary People, Quiz Show).  He won and deserved the Best Director Oscar for the former, but never did win for acting.  Fonda won two acting Oscars, produced but never directed.

When they die, there will be lots of tributes and talk about what they represented – the last of the “real” movie stars.

Young people will shrug.

The Electric Horseman won’t even be mentioned.

And the horse, he’s been dead for decades.  Wha’d I tell ya’?  It was never about the horse.

–RR

UPDATE:  I probably have too few posts and too many updates on those few posts, but a couple days after posting this I discovered Starz Western channel happened to be showing The Electric Horseman.  I watched it and was pleasantly surprised.  Yes, it was as slight as I remembered, but it held up surprisingly well.  In the second half, when the now-dated  satire of the premise gives way to a quiet two-hander between the stars it really begins to sing.  The dialogue by Pollack’s go-to script doctor, David Rayfiel – instantly recognizable to this fan – is clever and romantic without being smarmy.  But best of all, Jane Fonda is really wonderful.  She gives a much more natural and vulnerable performance than I remembered.  Her hesitant first kiss with Redford is a master class in acting all by itself.  And the release of the horse at the end is genuinely stirring – just a great “movie moment”.  Overall, I recommend you check it out if you do happen to stumble onto it late at night while making raisin toast.  It’s a relic of another time, yes, but a warm one.  A feel-good memento from the late great Sydney Pollack.

There were some nice tributes to Milos Forman in the media this week following his death at age 86.

But also some glaring omissions…

Obviously, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest got top billing in every obituary.  And deservedly so.  An instant classic in 1975 (winning all top 5 Oscars that year), it has only grown in reputation ever since.  I don’t think I have ever read a negative review of the film, never heard anyone even say they didn’t like it – how rare is that?  It is an iconic moment in pop culture, occupying that unique space where art and entertainment overlap.  It is Forman’s masterpiece.

Second billing went to Amadeus – which makes sense, of course, as it also won Best Picture in 1984.  Beautifully made, it was never really a favorite of mine – but that may have been my own immaturity at the time it came out.  I am inspired now to rewatch it, see if the themes of jealousy and bitter mediocrity resonate more with me today (ahem).  I do remember how Forman managed to infuse the “classical” piece with his usual shaggy humanity.  Who else would dare cast Tom Hulce of Animal House as Mozart?  Or Jeffrey Jones as an Emperor?  Hell, who else would have even cast Americans??  But I think he loved pricking pomposity that way, cutting through any type of snobbery.  And as a proud immigrant, all his US films are unabashedly American.

The third title mentioned, The People Vs. Larry Flynt from 1996, certainly fits that bill and was a solid enough work, but seems to be included only because it was his most recent box-office success (a modest one) and more identifiable to a younger audience.

It all made for a pretty half-assed summary of his career.

What they so blithely left out were…

TWO of his most accomplished US films, his very best Czechoslovakian film, and a “lost” title that begs for reassessment.

Hair (1979) is quite simply one of the greatest adaptations of a musical ever put on film.  That’s not opinion, it’s a fact.  The only reason it’s not celebrated as such really comes down to bad timing.  Released in ’79, I’m afraid it was both a decade too late and ten years too early.  America was on the brink of the Reagan era, making a hard right-turn toward conservativism, and not (yet) feeling any nostalgia for its Hippie years.  Even though that specific perspective is the reason the movie hasn’t dated at all – a period piece, especially one that winks at the absurdities of said period, never really ages – it also meant memories of protest and political division were still very fresh in the public’s mind.  This made the material much less “safe” than, for example, Grease, which was a colorful ’50’s cartoon with two big stars attached.  At least, that’s the theory.  It’s still not a good excuse if you ask me.  Because I loved it, the critics loved it (see: poster below), and just like Cuckoo’s Nest, I have never met anyone who didn’t at least like it a lot.  But once audiences stayed away, for whatever reason, the critics folded like a cheap tent – withdrew all their praise and dismissed it as a “flop”.  That dreaded label triggered a kind of lazy groupthink from then on and the film never regained its rightful place in film history.

On my grudge list of criminally underrated films, Hair is the one I find the most baffling and depressing.

If you have never seen this glorious film: Rent it, buy it, stream it, find the biggest screen you can, turn out the lights, turn up the volume and ENJOY!

It should be added that along with Forman’s dynamic direction and a perfect cast, Michael Weller’s script is brilliant.  He takes what was a formless mess on stage and shapes it into a potent emotional statement on the Vietnam war.

Weller also wrote the other overlooked film in Forman’s resume from that period, Ragtime (1981).  Based on E.L Doctorow’s bestseller, the movie was considered a bit of a letdown at the time by readers of the book because it didn’t (couldn’t) include many of the novel’s multiple plot threads.  It was judged more on what hadn’t made it into the film.  But now, decades later, what is on screen looks damn good.  It’s a grand tapestry of human folly at the start of “America’s Century” – zeroing in most powerfully on the story of Coalhouse Walker (Howard E. Rollins, Jr), a black ragtime pianist, who suffers a small but vile act of racism that ultimately leads to the loss of his wife and child and transforms him into a revolutionary.  A story that sadly feels relevant again today.

Again, it’s hard to believe such a high-quality film was given such shoddy treatment at the moment of its release.

I can only guess it left Forman feeling a little confused himself.

Maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of this, but I honestly wonder if the capriciousness of the critical reception to these two films and the subsequent slavish praise for Amadeus were at least partly responsible for Forman’s more sparse output in his later years.  Did it make him more reluctant to commit to projects?  Doubt his creative instincts?  See it all as too much of a gamble?  I don’t know the answer.  But I think most film fans would agree with my wish that he had produced more work than he did.

With a talent like his, you get greedy.

The Czech film I referred to is Loves Of A Blonde (1965), a sly comedy about a girl who pursues a young man after their one-night stand together.  Like a lot of films made under communist rule, by ignoring politics and just concentrating on relationships, it makes love feel subversive.  Though shot in austere black-and-white, it radiates Forman’s trademark wit and warmth.

And the film most in need of reassessment?

His version of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, Valmont (1989), which, in another case of awful timing, came out the year after the enormous success of Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons.  Most critics drew unfavorable comparisons and wrote it off as softer and less edgy than the melodramatic Glenn Close/John Malkovich pairing.  But another way of looking at it would be that Forman’s rendering was more human and blackly comic, more genuinely sexy and more compassionate.  It has a glowing early performance by Annette Bening (as well as Meg Tilly and Fairuza Balk, quite the trio of babes), and a more convincing lothario in Colin Firth.  Like Amadeus, it’s been a while since I’ve watched it, but I own the DVD and plan to soon.  My memory is it’s only real shortcoming was a somewhat abrupt and anti-climactic ending.

The bottom line is even the most flawed Milos Forman film is worth your time.  I keep using the word “human” – that was his gift: collecting all these recognizable human moments and telling stories that honor our sloppy, imperfect lives.

It irked me then that, even in death, some of his best work was being dismissed by people who have probably never even seen it.

But to err is human…

Thank god film is forever and always there to be rediscovered.

So long, Milos.  Thanks for all of it.

 

After a spectacular start with Brian DePalma’s original entry, a terrible sequel by John Woo, a slightly-warmer JJ Abrams revival, and two absolutely crackerjack installments by Brad Bird and Christopher McQuarrie —

The trailer for the new Mission Impossible film is out…

My first reaction is – Wow.   And Wow.

The MI films are now officially eating James Bond’s lunch when it comes to high-quality action and great locations.  The Tom Cruise stuntwork is jaw-dropping as usual, with the helicopter sequence looking especially amazing.  It makes the pre-title sequence for Skyfall, where Bond fights a man in a spinning chopper above a crowd of people, look rather lame and unimaginative by comparison…which it was.  And while the trailer boasts a few scenic barren vistas ala Spectre, there also appears to be a tense motorcycle chase sequence through the heart of Paris.  When is the last time you saw 007 in real action in a major world capital?

As always, it pains me to make these comparisons.

I’m a lifelong Bond fan and I would really like to believe that the Bond films are still the best in the spy genre.  It’s just not true anymore.  Not even close.  Daniel Craig and the endlessly inept producers Barbara Broccoli & Michael G. Wilson have not only sapped the franchise of any real escapist joy, they have also gotten lazy with the action and cheaped-out on glamorous locations.

The last two MI’s, Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation, have shamed their Bond counterparts in every possible way – as thrilling roller coaster rides in exotic locales with eye-dazzling production design.  All the money is on the screen, as Cubby Broccoli used to say.  The opera sequence alone from RN is the cleverest and most Bondian thing I’ve seen in any action film in the last 20 years…

Is that a beauty or what?

And with Rebecca Ferguson in a sexy dress with a high-powered rifle.

That’s a spy movie.

Meanwhile, the Bonds have degraded into ponderous, pretentious, overlong melodramas mainly about Craig’s paycheck.

Granted, this was just a trailer – we don’t know if the finished film will make good on its promise.  But writer-director Chris McQuarrie delivered in spades on the last film and Cruise’s injury midway through the shoot actually gave him extra time to whip the story into shape, so my hopes are high.

Fallout does appear to have a darker, rougher edge to it – with much less of the sophistication and gadgetry of the last two entries;  and the inclusion of Hunt’s forgotten wife and the villain’s personal threat to Ethan does make it feel like a Craig-like mission of revenge.  (Or, even Dalton-like…as the sequence of Sean Harris’s prison transport being rammed into the water, ostensibly to be freed by his cohorts, feels lifted directly from Licence To Kill)  But the truth is I’ve never really been opposed to injections of grit into the spy mythology, even some cold hard reality.  I just want my hero to rise to the occasion and be a hero.  Cruise has never been afraid to make his hero sweat, or get bested and beaten, but he still delivers true popcorn derring-do when the time comes.

When I first read the script for Casino Royale by Paul Haggis, I loved that he shook up the formula, gave it a fresh start.  That’s what all franchises must do every once in a while.  Each film has to deliver certain beats while still moving forward, having its own distinct personality.  But Craig’s blank stare created a grim cipher out of Bond, left a big hole in the center of the reboot.  There was an absence of personality.  And the series has been stuck in a retro rut ever since, all brute posturing and static tableaus, instead of moving forward.  Quantum Of Solace, even with its botched editing, is the only one of Craig’s films I actually enjoy rewatching because it feels and moves like a modern-day action movie.  And yet it includes some of the darkest 007 material I’ve ever seen.

It’s all in the execution.

If McQuarrie goes a little more rough-and-tumble this time, gives the gadgets a rest, and finds some new emotional depth, so be it.  Just as long as you give us a great piece of entertainment.  Keep it moving.  Make it exciting.

From the looks of it, that’s exactly what the audience is going to get.

Plus, Rebecca Ferguson.

I can’t wait.

Robert DeNiro kissing and comforting Ellen Degeneres at The White House, where they were both receiving the Presidential Medal Of Freedom from President Obama.

Just because it’s unexpected and wonderful and makes me feel good…

Shout Factory – or, rather, Scream Factory, their gore-centric wing – has made a lot of “Horror Geeks Of A Certain Age” very happy with the release of vintage 70’s thrillers on Collector’s Edition Blu-rays.

They include two certified masterpieces – Carrie (1976), The Thing (1982) – as well as more obscure cult classics that could have easily been lost to time and never given the full BD treatment, including The House That Screamed (1970), Willard (1971), and Black Christmas (1974).

There are plenty of bloody goodies in their impressive catalog – go check it out – but the above five titles are personal favorites of mine and I’m very grateful to finally have them remastered and in High Definition.

Scream Factory always offers a full roster of Special Features and obviously takes great care in presenting these old films with the love they deserve. That love is especially rare in a time of diminishing returns for collectors of physical media – and given the nitpicky nature of that fan base, often a thankless task.  We film geeks need to support their good work.

That’s why it sucks I have to add to the nitpicking and offer a small caveat on two of these otherwise excellent editions…

I guess it was inevitable that the classics, Carrie and The Thing, would be much more scrutinized and our expectations impossibly high.  And the films do look as crisp and detailed in HD as you could hope – adding information, particularly to the darker scenes.  But, unfortunately, at the same time, the color timing feels slightly off: with Carrie skewing green, The Thing bluer than blue.

The latter may seem appropriate for a film that takes place in the frozen tundra, but the subtle effect is a slightly drained, monochromatic color palate that dilutes some of the more beautiful visuals.

Or to put it more simply: Where did all the purple go?

This has sparked a fierce debate among the fanboys online, and since Arrow has announced an October release of its own Region B edition of the film, from a 4k scan of the original negative, the debate is sure to rage on.

The visuals in Carrie are even more beautiful.  It’s a dizzying feast for the eyes, DePalma at his very best.  The color “changes” here actually bothered me more, even though the majority of fanboys seem to be thrilled with this release.

It’s true that previous versions leaned pink and skin tones felt flushed, but that sort of fit with the theme of the movie.  If any film ever begged for a red “push” it’s this loving ode to blood.  Watching the new SF edition, I appreciated the clarity – especially given the diffused 70’s cinematography – but something felt wrong.  It was colder somehow, uglier, more disjointed visually.  Was I imagining things?  To test it, I did something I’ve never done before: I put on the older Blu-ray right after and watched the whole movie again.  It confirmed what I thought. While “softer”, the older version felt more fluid and pleasing to the eye.  At least up until the climax at the prom where the SF edition wins out.

Now I am old enough to remember seeing – and instantly loving – both these films upon their theatrical release in ’76 and ’82.  That doesn’t make me an expert, obviously – but it may mean my eyes have a wider frame of reference than those who have only seen it on video.  Whatever the case, wrong or right, I can’t ignore what they are telling me.

I still STRONGLY RECOMMEND both SF editions – they offer a wealth of cool extras, and your mileage will definitely vary.

Just do like I do and slip other discs/editions into paper sleeves and add them to the SF case so you’re covered and can make your own comparisons.

(The larger problem here may be how movie geeks in search of THE DEFINITIVE VERSION of their favorite movies need to ultimately come to terms with it being a futile search with no end )

As for the remaining three titles: The House That Screamed, Willard, and Black Christmas, Scream Factory gets an unqualified A+ all the way around.  The films look fantastic and, like I say, I truly doubted I’d ever see them get proper digital treatment, so it feels like a small miracle of the movie gods.

I remember when I was one of a nerdy few who obsessed over Bob Clark’s creepy holiday classic, Black Christmas.  In the last decade or so the internet has changed all that, with the film’s reputation growing exponentially every year.  It is now widely (finally) recognized for what it is: a seminal benchmark in the slasher genre and superbly-crafted filmmaking.  That is why it was so baffling when the quality of each new video release over the years seemed to only get worse and worse.

Scream Factory offers a disclaimer right off the top about “limited source materials”, but no need, they have done a gorgeous restoration.

This truly is the best it will ever look.

After a minor hiccup with the mono soundtrack, SF went to the great trouble of promptly replacing fans’ discs, and it’s that original soundtrack that I definitely recommend you use.  Sound is a crucial aspect of this film…

As far as being influential and stylistically ahead of its time, the same could be said about The House That Screamed from four years earlier…

This Spanish film originally titled La Residencia was directed by Narciso Ibanez Serrador.  Shot in voluptuous widescreen, with gothic atmosphere, swooning music and a bevy of teenage girls, it is a clear precursor to both Black Christmas and Carrie. One death scene in particular, where a girl sneaks into a greenhouse for a late night tryst and is stabbed to death, has the disturbing soft-core slo-mo lyricism that would later be Brian DePalma’s trademark.  The whole film bristles with sexual repression, and the killer hides rather brilliantly in plain sight throughout. It may turn out to be exactly who you think it is…but the final reveal, when we find out what all this killing has been in service of, is a wonderful shock ending.

SF offers two different versions – the longer Spanish release and the edited US print.  It’s the rare instance where the shorter one is better.

If you’re a horror buff who has somehow missed this drive-in gem, trust me, buy it blind – you can thank me later.

Finally, Willard…   

On the commentary, lead Bruce Davison says he doesn’t even think it technically qualifies as a horror film – and he may be right, it’s closer to a black comedy.  Just a simple parable of a young man falling in with some bad rats.  Call it Southern California Gothic.  Whatever it is, it stands up amazingly well after all these years, looks great for a such a low-budget film.  And it still works.

A surprise sensation when it came out, it triggered a long line of “Animals Attack” movies, a popular sub-genre of the 1970’s.

Ben (1973), the weaker sequel, remembered mostly for its saccharine Michael Jackson theme song, is offered as well for completists.

Whatever the quibbles of people like me, I do hope Scream Factory continues to bring back well-made schlock from the past…

My own personal Wish List would include House On Haunted Hill (1959), The Masque Of Red Death (1964), Bluebeard (1969), Bug (1974), Rec (2006)/Rec 2 (2007) and Inside (2008).

Here’s to Screaming.

It never gets old.

–RR

UPDATE:  I, of course, ended up buying the Arrow releases of The Thing and Carrie.  The Arrow Thing is definitely more reliable in its color timing than the SF version, as expected, but the overall HD quality may not be quite as sharp.  The fanboys are still arguing over which one they prefer.  I’m just glad to own both editions and will work out which is my favorite somewhere down the line…  Or never?  Who knows?  The Arrow Carrie, on the other hand, at least to my eyes, is clearly superior to the SF disc.  The color is dead-perfect from first frame to last.  I know because I stopped thinking about it and fell in love all over again with every shot.  Maybe the “definitive” remaster is not a futile search after all…  If you own a multi-region player, that is…

 

Dear Saul –

Can we get on with it already??!

I just watched S3E4 and once again was left with a bad case of blue balls.

Like pretty much everyone in the known world, I was a huge fan of Breaking Bad.  The measured storytelling, the cinematic visuals, the mix of black comedy, brutal violence and banal domesticity – it all built to what was, without a doubt, the most electrifying final season in TV history.

The prequel, Better Call Saul, was always going to be a more subtle beast.  From the start the pace wasn’t just measured, it was positively glacial.  Just like its lawyer anti-hero, taking a series of baby steps into more criminal behavior. Which was fine because the character detail and subplots were so smart.  There was great fun in anticipating how Saul/Jimmy’s and Mike Ermantraut’s very different worlds would come into collision – or perfect harmony, depending on how you look at it.  Just like with Walter White, we’re rooting for both men to go “bad”…to break out of the constraints of normal society and embrace their true identities of slimy crook’s counsel and cold-blooded hitman.

Season 1 worked like a Swiss clock.

Season 2 was almost as fun but started to test my patience near the end.

Season 3, so far, has me squirming in frustration.

Must everything happen so slowly??  Can somebody please get killed?  Could it be Chuck so I never have to hear his annoying whine ever again?

I like stories that take their time, but this season feels more like it’s padding out an undernourished plot than carefully setting up for eventual payoffs.  It’s so thin, I have no idea if Jimmy and Kim are still in a romantic relationship or if they have put that on hold for the sake of their business.  This week he seemed to be sniffing her longingly as they worked side by side, but shouldn’t I know where they are as a couple?  The same goes for the scenes between Mike and his widowed daughter-in-law…which, in this episode, consisted of her asking him if he was okay.  Even the return of Gus Fring feels stiff.  Why aren’t the writers using this opportunity to fill in this villain with some nuance or backstory? Instead, we get a long scene with a Mexican drug lord pitting his minions against each other that feels derivative of countless movies from the 1980’s.

Now Jimmy and Kim finally seem to have a trick up their sleeve for putting Chuck in his place at last…though, yep, you guessed it, we will have to wait another week to find out what the plan is, let alone its outcome.

And the scenes from next week do not signal any speeding-up of the narrative. Jimmy’s hearing to keep his law license felt as if it was going to be the lever that gives him his new identity as Saul, but now I’m not so sure.  And since it has taken four episodes to get Mike and Gus to where I expected them to be in S3E1, I’m not expecting anything very dramatic there either.

At first I told myself all of this will play much better when one binges the show in the future, watching 2 or 3 episodes at a time…but none of this feels rewatchable to me.  The show needs to entertain us from minute to minute, making the journey as pleasurable as the destination, and it’s not doing that.

It has become airless, claustrophobic…and – I hate this word – just BORING.

I’ll still be watching the rest of the season, of course.  I doubt I will ever truly give up on it.  But something precious has been lost for good now.  I’m not sure how much I care anymore, and that’s a shame.

–RR

Interesting New Yorker article by Emily Nussbaum here on the final episode of Girls.

I don’t agree with her on everything, but she’s dead-on about the noise around the series being exhausting.  It will be nice to never read any more bloviating social commentary on what was always just an extended, edgier female-Woody Allen movie.  Dunham would hate that classification because she assumes Allen is guilty of the baseless charges made by a bitter ex-girlfriend, but I mean it as the greatest compliment.  Like Allen, she is a major comedic talent of our time. Her “Hannah” may not be the voice of a generation, but she is – was – a hilarious voice of selfish, quirky, wonderfully human angst.

Nussbaum is right: the finale was raggedy and anti-climactic, but also in perfect keeping with the digressive style that distinguished the whole series.  No pat answers, no promises of sudden maturity, just the trial of motherhood testing Hannah’s fragile mental health.  I loved the montage of her trying to reason with her fussy baby.  Talking to him like he’s just another disappointing male in her life.  This maternal thing is going to be a very slow turning, bit by bit, nipple by rejected nipple.  She’s still a child herself.

But ironically, like so many social critics of the show, Nussbaum wants to inject politics and see the fight between Hannah and her mother as a sop to said critics. I don’t think so.  It was just good brutal writing.  Dunham was not about to let her character off the hook just because the series was ending.  Same as she resisted the urge to reunite the girl foursome for some maudlin group hug, or to make Marnie less of a neurotic mess (her British stewardess sexual fantasy was so oddly specific and politically incorrect – the show at it’s best).  She has the faith in her audience to expect them to forgive Hannah her outbursts, or to understand at least.  Her last look straight into the camera was relieved, but also as nakedly vulnerable as any of the series’ infamous sex scenes.

What critics on both the left and right continue to get completely wrong is that Dunham is too smart to fall for either traditional tropes or strict feminist dogma. She knows her messy contradictions are to be savored.

The season as a whole was bumpy, but with some classic moments.  Which, again, describes the entire series.  The third season was a pretty dismal failure, but the writing rebounded beautifully in the last few seasons.  A highlight for me was Hannah’s untethered detour into bucolic college life in Iowa, where she felt like an alien pervert in her writing workshop and her bike was immediately stolen New York-style.  The surfing camp episode this season was a close second. It was in these fish-out-of-water moments that Dunham’s self-awareness really shined for me.  The laughs were choking and bittersweet.

As unlikely as it seems, given my age and sex demographic, her work, like all great work, inspired me to be more honest in my own writing…

And ultimately, I admire the way she refused to wrap the show up with a bow, stuck to her short-story aesthetic all the way to the end.

It will be fascinating to see where Dunham’s career goes from here.  Ater making such a grand autobiographical statement before the age of 30, how will she apply her genius to other formats and stories?  It may be that by middle-age she will have taken over Judd Apatow’s position as comedy guru and puppet master for younger “voices”.  Maybe she will turn to drama instead.

In any case, she has already achieved something writers often attempt but rarely succeed at – turning flaws of body and heart into pop culture gold.

Recently, I was very sad to hear that Caroline Aherne had died.

It’s a celebrity loss I feel more acutely than the death of pop legends like Bowie and Prince because my relationship to her work felt so much more personal.

If you’ve never heard of her, and it’s too bad that most Americans haven’t, she was a brilliant comedic actress and writer who created an absolutely genius British sitcom called The Royle Family (1998) which lasted three seasons and spawned several one-hour specials.  And yes, that’s Royle, not Royal.  It’s the ironic last name of a working-class family in Manchester, England, and the episodes take place almost exclusively in their cramped living room, where they mostly sit and watch TV.

And that’s it…that’s the show.

That’s why it was genius.

Forget Seinfeld, this was the real show about nothing!

No plots, no big events, just everyday life in all its humdrum glory.  If art holds up a mirror, this was a mirror under a microscope; revolutionary in its minimalism. And yet, it very pointedly seemed to ask: Isn’t this type of listless gathering and idle family chatter the real meat of our lives?  And isn’t there something kind of wonderful about that?

I stumbled onto the show on BBC America one day in 2001 and was instantly sucked in by the simplicity of it.  It was the perfect antidote to the forced mayhem of most American sitcoms.  Of course, I had trouble at first with the characters’ thick Manchester accents (thank god for subtitles) and I had to learn a whole new vocabulary of British slang, but that only made the discovery more exciting.

And, as a writer, I knew all too well such simplicity was an illusion.

“Effortless” naturalism does not come easy, it requires tremendous skill.  Aherne possessed a perfectly-tuned ear for the way people really talk – especially when they are lying to themselves; and she and co-creator, Craig Cash, managed to hide a cutting, scalpel-sharp wit behind every seemingly inane line of dialogue and pregnant pause, finding the poetry in the crude and inarticulate.

They rightfully won multiple BAFTA awards for their work on the show, and I ended up buying the published scripts so I could pore over every word, study their precision and learn from the best.

The famous Television-POV opening credits for “The Royle Family” with Oasis song. (To play, press the long link code below.  Recorded from, where else, my own TV.  Please forgive the shaky-cam framing)

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Meet the Royles:

The patriarch Jim, like most fathers, enjoys ranting at the world from the comfort of his easy chair.  His wife Barbara, is ever the peacemaker, smoothing out his temper with her eternal optimism.  Denise (played by Aherne), is their spoiled princess daughter who makes an art form out of laziness.  Younger brother Anthony, the put-upon baby of the family, is frequently abused as slave labor. And then there’s Dave (played by Cash), Denise’s fiance/husband, a gormless bloke completely unburdened by higher thought.

The characters are silly, peevish, vulnerable and fiercely loyal all at once.

The show makes fun of them, yes – but lovingly, never meanly.

The first two seasons (or “series”, as the Brits say) are sheer perfection.  The first leads up to Denise and Dave’s wedding, the second to the birth of their son.  As hilarious as they are, they each finish with a powerful emotional wallop.

The third season is fine, but has no such story arc and feels less focused.  Then there are several one-hour Christmas specials of varying quality – the very best being The Queen Of Sheba, which deals beautifully with the passing of the family’s Nana.

A talented sketch performer, Aherne was also beloved for her parody of an elderly talk show host called “Mrs. Merton”

I have to admit I became obsessed with Aherne – my admiration for her work mixed with a schoolboy crush.  Like Lucille Ball or Gilda Radner, she was hugely appealing.

Hunting for more info online, I found out she was a brassy Manchester girl in real life as well – prone to drinking too much and loving the wrong people. Unfortunately, her every vodka shot and stumble became fodder for the tabloids. In one incident, well in her cups at an awards show, she got impatient with a winner’s long-winded speech and yelled “Get on with it!” at the top of her lungs.  I thought that was hilarious.  It just made me love her more.  But, unfortunately, it was also a sign of a big substance problem.

Her addiction issues were fueled by a tragic life.  She survived two bouts of cancer, one that cost her an eye as a child.  She lost one boyfriend to cancer and another to suicide.  She herself attempted suicide with an overdose of pills and champagne after frequent battles with depression and was committed to a mental hospital.  All of this was chronicled in gleeful detail by the British press. Eventually, she felt the need to “escape” to Australia just for the privacy and space to recuperate.

Not to be melodramatic – which she would hate – but it seems she spent the majority of her very successful career just fighting to survive.

Then by all accounts, in the last decade or so, a happy calming.  Things quieted down and she was finally at peace with herself.  She moved back to Manchester to be close to her family.  Returned with the occasional Royle holiday episode, which was always much anticipated and a big ratings winner.  Made a good living with voice-over work.  No longer in the white-hot spotlight, no longer the wild phenom or “future of British comedy”, but having beaten her demons and enjoying a simpler life.

Until, in a sick joke of fate, she was attacked by cancer for yet a third time.  This time it was lung cancer.  This time she lost the battle.

She died all alone, in her home, having only the day before reassured her brother over the phone she was “feeling fine”.  Almost certainly a lie.

She was 52.  Robbed of a good 30 more years of hard-won happiness.  As we were robbed of her comic brilliance, her crooked grin, and one helluva’ memoir.

I never knew the woman.  But I wish I had…

Her work was nothing less than a joyous celebration of humanity.

Sometimes it’s just easier not being a genius.

–RR

Recently, I got a request from one of my readers…

Okay, okay, my only reader.  Or the only one to actually leave comments so far.

So I think she deserves a good response, even if it is way after the fact.

Regarding my column about the Oscar controversy this year, Lynn asked: “When are you going to tell us what you thought when it was all over?”.

Well, the answer is pretty much what you might expect.

The reason I didn’t think it was even worth adding an update to my column was because the show played out almost exactly as I predicted.  Only worse.

I thought the show was a debacle.  Maybe the most painfully uncomfortable and hard-to-sit-through in all the 45 or so years I have been an Oscar watcher.  And that includes the times where Rob Lowe sang “Proud Mary” with Snow White and David Letterman did stupid pet tricks, so that’s really saying something. Chris Rock got off maybe three good jokes at the start, but the rest of it was terrible. The bottom line on handling any controversy is: Can you make it funny? Can you ease the tension, move on from it and bring the audience back together? Rock did not accomplish any of the above.  Rather, he beat the topic to a bloody pulp and succeeded in casting a pall over the entire evening.  I didn’t laugh, I just cringed. Then, as he wouldn’t drop it, I got angry.  Ultimately, the ceremony is a celebration of people’s work and that totally got lost in the mix.

As I said before, Rock is a talented man, but in his comedy act, especially in the last ten years, he often belabors a subject until it becomes repetitive and grating, and in my opinion, this was the Perfect Storm for his worst traits as a performer. I thought he was a bad fit in his last Oscar gig, so it was not a surprise.  When he repeated the same gag of asking black moviegoers in nearby Compton what they knew about this year’s Oscar nominees – knowing full well the answers he would get – the result was not just unfunny, patronizing, pointless, it was downright depressing.  His only message seems to be that the gulf between races (or classes, or both) is insurmountable – which I think is mostly a belief rooted in his own advanced years.  Even if it is still true, how is he helping?

It reminds me of George Carlin in his last years as a comedian when his act stopped being funny and became a hectoring lecture on the sham that is Capitalism.  Whatever truth he was speaking to power was drowned out by the vitriol, and eventually, felt almost – almost – as ugly to me as Dennis Miller’s reactionary right-wing routine.

A great comedian finds a way to seduce you into, if not agreeing, then at least understanding and laughing along with their point-of-view.  If they can’t do that with genuine wit, browbeating the audience is not the same thing, and no longer really comedy.  In the end, the mood was so sour even Rock’s anodyne gag about selling his daughter’s Girl Scout cookies left a bad taste.

So, imagine my surprise the next day when I read the reviews and found everyone raving about how daring and hilarious Rock was.  What?  Even a lot of my friends felt Rock had shaken up the proceedings in a healthy way, made them more lively at least.  I must have seen a different show.  Or perhaps I take it all too seriously.  In any case, I don’t think Rock will be asked back next year.  I think the Academy has endured enough self-flagellation for a while.  Hopefully, the 2017 nominations will, in fact, show real diversity – if the industry does its part by releasing good movies of color – and the ceremony can return to just being the world’s highest honor for excellence in film.

The postscript (and post-modern) punchline, of course, is that Rock actually ended up being accused of racism himself for his admittedly lame joke with the three Asian child “accountants”.  You couldn’t make it up, the irony is sublime.   Hollywood has turned into an eco-friendly production of “The Crucible”.

The Academy apologized, naturally.

Chris Rock didn’t.

I can’t help but applaud him for that.

——————–

As for the winners…

I think they were all very deserving.

I would have loved to see Saoirse Ronan win for Brooklyn – hers was by far the most moving performance of the year in my humble opinion.  It was a stunner. But Brie Larson did a fine job in Room and was a lock, probably the surest thing of the night.  It’s interesting to me that the Best Actress category’s median age seems to be getting younger and younger every year.  Maybe actresses of a certain age need to come up with a protest hashtag – #Oscarssonubile!  No, no.   I think it’s more a result of truly substantive roles for and work by the younger generation and is a good sign for the future of film.

Call it the Jennifer Lawrence Effect.

It was great to see Leonardo DiCaprio win – not only because I thought his work in The Revenant was excellent, but yes, also because it was overdue after years and years of excellent work.

Stallone’s loss in Best Supporting Actor was a surprise, but maybe it shouldn’t have been.  My guess is his forgetting to thank director Ryan Coogler and his co-star Michael B. Jordan at the Golden Globes did not sit well with the voters.  It seemed to show a real hubris and lack of perspective.  Like Burt Reynolds and Michael Keaton before him, his ego may have ended up sabotaging the fairy-tale ending of his big comeback.  It managed to trip up Eddie Murphy as well.  Once that feel-good award starts to feel too expected and the recipient just a little bitter or smug, it can all curdle pretty fast.

Besides, the optics of giving an award to The White Guy in Creed, no matter how much of a veteran, would have been legitimately awkward.  Especially since the success of that film rests squarely on the shoulders of Coogler, who is maybe the great breakout filmmaker of the year.

And Mark Rylance, a well-respected theatre actor, but up until recently an obscure name in the US, was a feel-good winner himself.  It’s always nice when a real working character actor wins.  And now he is lined up for Spielberg’s next THREE FILMS, so we will be seeing much much more of him.

The boy from Room macking on Sofia Vergara.  Good eye, kid.

I didn’t see Alicia Vikander in The Danish Girl, but her work in Ex Machina blew me away.  Yet another young actress with skills way beyond her years.

I loved all the technical wins for Mad Max: Fury Road, the greatest popcorn film of the year…the big wins for direction and cinematography on The Revenant (both men winning for the second year in a row!  Proud Mexican nationals, by the way, Diversity!)…and that Spotlight won Best Original Screenplay, then nipped in at the finish line and pulled a Best Picture win.  They were right choices all the way around.  It showed Academy voters really can delineate the strengths of each film and spread the honors around accordingly.  It was a very satisfying eclectic mix.

My only nitpicking complaints would be The Big Short for Best Adapted Screenplay (instead of Brooklyn) – a film I felt was vastly overrated; and the mystifying Best Song nod for the anemic Spectre theme.  Although I’m glad it beat Lady Gaga’s entry, which despite the laudable subject matter, was just awful. The REAL racism scandal was the omission of the song “See You Again” from Furious 7 from even the list of nominees.  The song category is an annual embarrassment.  Ms. Academy President, you might want to retire that geriatric bunch of has-beens before doing anything else!

But, overall, a great selection of winners…

Like I say, it’s just sad the night wasn’t really about them.

——————–

Okay…there you go, Lynn – my take, for what it’s worth.

And thanks for reading me – I really appreciate it.

On to the next comment…  Uhm, someone?  Anybody?