PREP TIME

God bless the vegans; they work hard enough at it. I understand why they’re so given to meditation. They spend all of their time chopping vegetables! Plenty of opportunity for reflecting during then.

I am not a vegan. I’m not even a vegetarian, but I am certainly unopposed to a good vegetable melody unaccompanied by an animal broth, and I have fromagavore tendencies, especially around wine. I have adopted a lowered-meat lifestyle, though, because I enjoy the mass mutilation of the garden variety. Mostly I do it for the health benefits. I figure I burn enough calories in the exercise of executing vegetables that I can go back to drinking non-diet soda.

But what is up with these prep time estimates? Twenty-five minutes? Heck, that’s assuming you’ve already BEEN to the store, you’ve rinsed and dried the produce, and there are no dirty dishes soaking in the sink or strewn throughout the kitchen. Wouldn’t it be easier to flip a steak on the grill at this point? Microwave a nice potato with a big pat of butter? A potato is a vegetable, right? With an “e” at the end, right?

And what really of the health benefits of preparing vegetables? What really are the gastrointestinal advantages while you are bleeding to death from lacerations inflicted on your digits? Rather difficult to count the benefits on your hand when your fingers are all cut off. (Difficult to type too.) You see these diced tomatoes? Yeah. Not so much tomatoes as you’d think. Veganism is definitely a sober sport, at least until the food preparation is over. You can’t exactly enjoy a nice glass of vino while you slice up twelve vegetables in sixty different directions.

Why is it that a cow has four stomachs and never gets past the salad course? I sit down to Thanksgiving with my family and I wish I had four stomachs. According to our local newpaper, you have to walk about thirty miles to overcome a typical Turkey Day fare. I wonder how many vegetables you’d have to chop?

JESUS FILMS

My father was a spy. He would never call himself that; he would say he worked in the underground during the war, THE war, WWII, the one that was supposed to end all wars.

He told me how the men met in secret after the pubs closed. They met with scraps of information from all over London, written on bar napkins. One man had heard a number, one man heard an aircraft type, one heard a time and another, a location. The men laid out the napkins on a great table and pieced together clues of the enemy attack.

Perhaps the mystery of God is pieced from similar fragmentation. Each person’s telling of the story of God holds some truth, but nobody has the whole truth. The Tree of Knowledge has many branches. Perhaps we are meant to work together to understand God. This is my best Juess to explain the array of Jesus films.

I made the mistake of getting a jumbo soda when I went to see The Last Temptation of Christ. I had no idea it was going to be a three hour movie. I made it to the crucifixion and I thought, no problem because the movie’s almost over. WRONG! And furthermore, the last hour of Temptation was completely off-book from what I already knew was going to happen. I was ready to pee in my soda cup.

Now I felt The Last Temptation very clearly stated the ultimate sainthood of Judas, the disciple willing to give his soul, not just his body, so that Jesus could fulfill his Messiahship. So I’m not sure what all the fuss was about just last year over Judas, as if that were a new subject. The idea’s been a mote in the public eye for nineteen years. At least.

I don’t think Franco Zeffirelli portrayed the betrayal of Jesus quite that way in his Jesus of Nazareth. I can’t remember. I do recall, however, that movie has absolutely everybody in it. It was like they pulled the fire alarm in Hollywood for the casting call. Olivia Hussey plays the Virgin Mary. She looks fresh from Romeo And Juliette, where we know she ain’t no virgin. Most memorable was John Wayne as the surly Centurion at the cross: “Surely this man…was the son of God,” as only John Wayne could do it.

The Monty Python crew has had their crack at the story with Life of Brian, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the life of Jesus, where a minor character is extolled while the true hero suffers unobserved. Actor, Graham Chapman, steps out onto a balcony, nude, and the crowd shrieks! They were supposed to react; they were Brian’s adoring followers, but main cast and crew didn’t realize it was actually illegal for Chapman to publicly expose himself like that. The production had hired locals for the extras to cut down on union wages. The locals knew the law. They reacted all right!

And of course there’s Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail in which they manage to rhyme “Camelot” with “spamalot,” what more should I say? I only mention it as a comic segue to The Da Vinci Code.

I once tried to write an apocalyptic tale of a nuclear physicist who chases down the Higgs boson, the God particle, using a particle accelerator. Then I read the introduction to Angels And Demons, the precursor to The Da Vinci Code, and found that author, Dan Brown, had done a much better job and actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about. And so I’ve never sought the holy grail.

I went to Paris the summer New Coke came out. Tears for Fears was touring Europe. All you heard was “Shout” from every discothèque. Pei’s pyramid was not built yet at the Louvre. I read about it later, in a French magazine, back when I used to could read French. So I’ve had to wonder if the glass pyramid isn’t something faked, like the moon landing. Nevertheless, it plays a prime role in the architecture of the movie, The Da Vinci Code.

For of those of you who have seen this movie or just don’t care, please read on. For those of you who haven’t, I’m about to ruin the plot.

The Da Vinci Code is grossly lacking in a lurid sex scene, but most God movies usually are. Immaculate conception and all that, I suppose. If you haven’t figured out by halfway through that Sophie is the chalice of the Lord’s blood, then you really haven’t been paying attention. Audrey Tautou as the holy vessel and the tacky sexual implications are tastefully unstated. Even leading man, Tom Hanks, only gets a hug and gives her a kiss on the forehead at the end, then he’s back on the pursuit of dead non-virgins. Not much of a sex life for him, huh? Anyway, the clues are so well spelled out the movie comes across more like the DUH Vinci Code. And the apple. God didn’t give Adam what Eve did. God didn’t give A-dam what Eve did and she ruined Him for it.

Him who?

God.

She, the archetypal she, calls into question His divinity by underlining His humanity. That’s what the movie’s about.

(As for The Last Supper painting, I always thought Jesus was saying to His disciples, “Look, if you don’t like what’s on the table, you don’t have to eat it, but I’m not serving you anything else.”)

And who could forget/forgive Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and its epic controversy? Sensationalism gutted the heart of truth in this film, kind of like the way this sentence is overwritten. The story of a guy who believes he is the son of God and dies to prove it is powerful enough and doesn’t need an extravagance of Hollywood enhancement. The ware wolf theme with the moon and the devil come off more like a Michael Jackson music video. I half expected Jesus to moonwalk the Via Dolorosa. And I’d hate to see the budget for the stage blood. The blood makes a point, but after the first ten minutes of it you’re drowned in ambivalence toward it. Even the Roman soldiers look bored. The pod racing in Star Wars suddenly becomes more compelling by comparison.

Two elements which I do have to admit worked in Passion were the tear from God and Mary’s long take at the end. The tear from Heaven was a magnificent effect and it made me think back through the film to look for other God’s eye shots—so allegorical to our lives where we miss how much God is watching us. Then there’s Mary’s look at the end with the camera receding into black-out. To have a character look directly into the camera is powerful. It breaks sacred movie-making convention. Burt Reynolds does it in Smokey and the Bandit for comic effect. Bandit shows us that he knows he’s a character in a movie and it’s just a bit of fun, really, like when Buzz Lightyear realizes that he’s a toy. But that’s not what’s going on in Passion.

I don’t know how many seconds the shot lasts, but I had to blink twice while actress, Maia Morgenstern, looks steady on at me. The wind gently buffets her hair around her face to show it’s not a static frame and yet she doesn’t break her stare. Obviously she’s not wearing contact lenses like I was. The Mary character doesn’t even know the whole story yet. She’s unaware of the resurrection, but she knows that this is an important story. The death of Jesus is important and her look purports a mission to tell the story and retell it and keep telling it until you have no more breath to put behind the words you must tell. Through her eyes she seems to say, “You can tell it better. The powerful truth of God is in you and it is for you to use.”

I had a whole bunch more notes on this film and I was going to go on a lot longer than I already have, but when I went to put them together there was a hymnal open in my view, open to the song “I Love to Tell the Story.” I cannot top the sentiment which is apparent in all the above mentioned movies—the enjoyment to tell a story that compels you to your very soul.

EASY LISTENING

I stopped in the local music store not really sure of what I wanted and I started in the slur aisle of country and blues, in which were scattered albums of jazz and folk and I saw a few titles that interested me. But I kept wandering and soon I was in the classical section and world and meditation. I fingered through some of those. I turned around, though, and started actually picking up CD’s by George Winston and Jim Brickman and David Benoit. There were other artists too that I liked, a whole row of them, and I thought, wow, this is really my section, and I looked up to see what category I was in: EASY LISTENING. EASY LISTENING! I’m not even forty yet! When I think of easy listening I think of elevator music and Kenny G and Yani—yeeesh! Sure enough, they were in that row too. Then I began to contemplate the music coming out of the speakers in the store, music based on heavy percussion and seconded by deep bass with cat-strangled lyrics running over the top, music that could knock loose change out of your head. Surely, I thought, if what I like is “easy listening,” then this is hard listening.

I suspect that book categories are just as ridiculous.

BINARY CODE VERSUS TRIANGLES

Levi-Strauss’ theory of Structuralism, binary opposites which define each other, is one of my favorite theories. Completely understandable. I am versus I am not—I’ve already mentioned it in reference to Jesus, right? And yet there are these triangles which seem to hold importance—the holy trilogy, right?

I like to think of time as non-linear because that’s how it feels to me—sometimes passing very quickly and in other circumstances slowly. I tried to read J. Barbour’s book, The End of Time, about how time doesn’t really exist, but I got lost in the charts and graphs, especially once he introduced the third dimension; however, I enjoyed his imagery of a bag full of triangles being emptied, blue and green triangles and they gave off a mist. Yeah, I could walk through that tasting the flavors of the quarks, but then when he plotted these things on a graph I just didn’t follow. He got me outside of Newton’s theater of time and space, but then I didn’t know where I was.

What I’m trying to say is that I love this concept of binary opposites, but maybe it only goes so far. I think life must be based on something more complex, at least with a third dimension. Perhaps triangles are a good basis, which can build more complex shapes from there according to the laws of trigonometry. If binary opposition is so useful and fundamental, where does the third point come in? Does it form the sinister right angle? Is it the axis of evil? But what of these triangles and their six different types? Are they models to shape our lives? Have they already shaped our lives? Interesting that when you mold their angles to extremes they come out in binary opposites—acute or obtuse. Wow, it would be really intriguing to write a six character play based off the types of triangles wouldn’t it? To hang personality types on triangles. I guess the Zodiac has already done that, but doubled so each has an opposite. Again, interesting.

Are there versus to be written here, or have I fallen into an asymptote?

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

The Work:

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

The Artist(s):

Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur

Description:

Critic: In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), no one is above the Party's scrutiny. Playwright Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) and his actress/girlfriend Christa (Matina Gedeck) are successful East German artists who ultimately come under surveillance by the Stasi (the secret police) precisely because they are too good, too loyal, to be on the level. The “case”, such as it is, falls to Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a steely eyed Stasi agent who takes a grim, almost religious pride, in his work. As Wiesler proceeds with his investigation, he becomes the only man who can save the playwright and the actress from torture and prison.

Purpose:

Critic: Oh, the joy! A foreign film! Granted, we had to go all the way to Houston, but we finally managed to see one of the best films of the year. The theater was fabulous and fabulously empty.

Consumer: Watch it there, fan boy. You’re forgetting to review the movie.

Critic: What’s to review? It was wonderful.

Consumer: Okay, since he’s no use right now, I’ll try to explain the purpose of the film. It’s a spy thriller, I guess, because the secret police are trying to put this guy in prison, and he’s basically innocent.

Critic: Yes, but it’s also a meditation on what happens in a state where ideas become more important than the humanity which they’re supposed to serve. The result is a total loss of orientation. An, as Kundera might put it, “Unbearable Lightness of Being.” In this world, human values take a backseat to a kind of state-induced paranoia. Nobody can really trust anyone else and as a result, most of the characters in the movie have given way to despair and apathy. It seems only the playwright and his girlfriend have managed to hold onto some level of basic human goodness, and the movie ultimately organizes itself around this small bit of hope. So it’s a story, ultimately, about hope.

Consumer: (rolls eyes) He’s back.

What Works:

Consumer: The subtitles weren’t so annoying after a while. The popcorn was good. I think that’s all I can say. Wait, the playwright, Georg Dreymann, he was good at smoking. There were lots of scenes where he lit up a smoke and made it look cool.

Critic: The pace, the writing, the quick, well-constructed scenes all building to an inevitable climax, it all worked. There is one interrogation scene in particular, toward the end of the movie, when you are completely riveted but you no longer know what the outcome should be. You’ve come to sympathize with the antagonist, the protagonist, and just about every other character in the movie, so during this confrontation you have a delicious feeling of vertigo. In this way the movie literally takes you someplace you could not go on your own.
I like a movie that doesn’t try too hard, that doesn’t go for the cheap thrill. There are very few jump cuts or other directorial tricks. The story is the most important thing and here the story is pitch-perfect. Did I mention that the acting was wonderful?
You see this kind of movie and you think, “Why don’t they make more like it? Looks easy enough to do.” Ah, but to give the impression of ease is very difficult.

What Doesn’t Work:

Consumer: It was a long movie. Period. It was too long. I had to go back for more popcorn. And all the people in the movie were kind of ugly. Only the fat people got naked, which was disappointing. There was the fat hooker and the fat guy who pulled down his underwear. Who needs to see that? Even the female lead, Christa, she was kind of played-out looking. No real hotness here. And the buildings were all old and gray. And the clothes were bad.

Critic: I’d say the conclusion didn’t succeed. It was overly long and worked to tie up every last thread of the plot. There were several spots in the third act that would have made good stopping points, but the movie rolled on to its final conclusion. In that way, the theme of the movie became more important than the story. Always a mistake.

The Verdict:

Critic: Are you kidding? If you get the chance, don’t hesitate. It's not a great movie but it's very good.

Consumer: Are you kidding? Those subtitles are the worst. I don’t go to the movies to read. If I wanted to read I’d open a book.

Critic: A comic book.

V for Vendetta

The Work:
V for Vendetta

The Artist(s):
Directed by the James McTeigue. Written by the Wachowski brothers. Starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Steven Rea, Steven Fry, John Hurt.

Description:
Critic: In a dystopic near future, Brittania groans under the yoke of a totalitarian regime whose leaders rose to power amid threats of terrorism and biological warfare. Evey (Natalie Portman) is a young everywoman who is saved from her attackers by mysterious stranger named “V” (Hugo Weaving). Evey is pulled deeper and deeper into a world of violence and revenge as she tries to evade government agents who believe that she is in league with the mysterious V.

Consumer: I think it’s easier to say that Natalie Portman is in trouble, and leave it at that.

Critic: If that’s what the movie meant to you…

Purpose:

Consumer: Well, yeah. This is a movie that gets Natalie Portman in trouble and then you wonder how she’s going to get out. There’s lots of explosions and killing, good guys die and bad guys die, they lay out a bunch of roses on the corpses and more things blow up.

Critic: It’s part social commentary, part political manifesto, part love story, part action movie, part philosophical exploration. It’s a lot of parts that are supposed to add up, I suppose, to a new kind of epic genre. My guess is the Wachowski brothers will always be chasing the magical convergence of these elements as we saw them in the original Matrix.

What Works:

Critic: I don’t know, frankly. There are brief moments that work, here and there. I found myself sporadically caught up in a scene or a sequence of scenes, but it wasn’t sustained…

Consumer: Can I interrupt? Can’t we talk about Natalie Portman? In twenty years, that’s all anyone will care about anyway. If you’re a heterosexual male or a homosexual female (nothing wrong with that) rent it for Natalie Portman. Don’t bother worrying about the rest of the stuff. She doesn’t show much skin, but she suffers awesomely and gets her head shaved. Unfortunately the head-shaving doesn’t inspire her to kick ass like Sigourney Weaver in Alien or Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, but...

Critic: (sniffs) Natalie Portman is quite fetching. There, are you happy? However I have to say that I don’t think Ms. Portman is half as good here as she was in The Professional.

Consumer: Yeah, she was awesome in The Professional, but she was only like twelve years old, so I’ve always felt kind of pervy talking about that movie.

Critic: Sounds like a personal problem.

What Doesn't Work:
Critic: It’s a pretentious, bloated, rip-off of a movie, a bad pastiche of 1984, Count of Monte Cristo, The Matrix, Darkman, need I go on? The Wachowski brothers’ imagery is often cheaply derivative (see the silly government sets with the chancellor raving on a big screen TV) and their ham-handed dialog is cheaper. V is makes preposterous, pseudo-philosophical statements about the loss of fear while Evey squints and nods as if she’s struggling, like the rest of us, to make sense of this mess. There’s a confusing subplot about medical experimentation that looks as if it was cribbed literally, image for image, from the Dachau museum. Watching this movie, you often feel like someone is changing channels on a television while superimposing Evey and V, puppetlike, on the screen. I half expected to find a subplot about getting rich in real estate or to see a shot of Christie Brinkley working out with the Total Home Gym.

Consumer: It’s true, I have to admit it. But Natalie Portman is hot. Come on.

Critic: Okay, I’ll admit she is rather comely, but something troubles me about her acting range, or lack thereof. Apparently her main talent is the ability to look worried. She works exclusively in that vein. She can take it from mildly perturbed to hysterical, sob-wracked anxiety, but the worried face is always at the foundation of her performances. If you look back, you can see she’s been doing this in all her films. I would submit that she's the Talia Shire of her generation.

Verdict:
Consumer: Your analysis has tired me out. I say see it for Natalie Portman, the knives, and the explosions. And stop thinking so much.

Critic: Yes, Consumer, that’s precisely what Hollywood wants you to do, stop thinking so much! Ironically, it’s flawed thinking that undoes this movie. The creators had a vision, but they lacked the mental stamina to forge all these pieces into a cohesive whole. The result? A mess. But, I will grant you, an entertaining mess. When it fails, it does so in such a spectacular fashion – for instance, Evey’s groan-inducing final speech – that you can’t help but watch. I’m going to say: Rent it, not to watch a success, but to watch a spectacular failure.

Consumer: I said the same thing in a lot fewer words.

The Squid and the Whale

The Work:
The Squid and the Whale

The Artist(s):
Directed by Noah Baumbach. Starring Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Owen Kline, Jesse Eisenberg, William Baldwin.

Description:
Critic: I’ll take this one.

Consumer: Fine, fine.

Critc: Okay. Bernard and Joan Berkman (Jeff Daniels and Larua Linney) are writers and the parents of two teenaged sons. Bernard’s career has evidently seen better days, while Joan’s writing career is just taking off. Professional jealousy leads to a separation. Bernard moves from the family’s Brooklyn brownstone to a place across the park. In the aftermath of the divorce, the whole family struggles to adjust. Bernard tries to seduce one of his students, Joan dates the tennis pro, and the sons engage in various forms of antisocial behavior.

Purpose:

Critic: It’s a story about divorce.

Consumer: I don’t know what it’s about. Divorce I guess.

Critic: It’s a story about pride, ultimately. About putting our image of ourselves in front of our relationships with our family, about ambition versus socialization. Bernard can’t let go of his self-image as a brilliant novelist, and this poisons all his relationships. The oldest son, Walt, plagiarizes a song to bolster his image as a rock savant.

Consumer: Laura Linney is awesome. And looks beautiful, too.

Critic: I have to agree with you there, but we need to save that for the next section.

Consumer: Oh. Okay, then it’s a story about divorce. Divorce sucks.

What Works:

Consumer: Laura Linney works, don’t you think so? Great hair. And I like Jeff Daniels’ beard too. And Walt’s romance with the girl is kind of cute.

Critic: There are some wonderful scenes in this movie. The opening scene with the whole family playing tennis is pitch-perfect. Some of Jeff Daniels’ work is sublimely tragicomic here. The way he can’t see his own faults, the way he’s incapable of true self-reflection. It’s good stuff. Daniels and Linney are both outstanding. They don’t have to scream and shout to convey the kind of complicated emotions that accompany a divorce.

Consumer: I also like the music. Good 70’s rock.

Critic: The storytelling is top-notch. When I look at a movie, the first thing I try to deduce is how much weight each scene carries. That is, how important is the scene to the plot, how engaging is it as a standalone piece, and how well does it advance either the arc of the characters or the theme of the movie? Almost every scene here, from that perspective, ranges from good to excellent.
What Doesn't Work:
Consumer: I got bored. Nothing happened! Jeff Daniels didn’t even die when he was hit by the car. Now that would’ve been cool.

Critic: I think they were trying to avoid the cheap ending.

Consumer: Still, I got bored.

Critic: Yep, I have to agree with you. Ultimately the movie could not resolve itself. Who is the main character? We knew they were all in trouble, but who was going to be the repository for all that angst, who was going to function as our vehicle to the resolution? Usually, in stories like this, the formula is:

Most sympathetic + Most troubled = Our hero.

In this case, the youngest son was the most troubled (and all the characters were somewhat sympathetic), so I had Frank Berkman picked out as our hero. But then near the end of the third act we find that it’s the oldest son, Walt, who is going to lead us to a resolution.

Consumer: And he never does, though. He just rambles to that shrink.

Critic: Right. We get the theme of the movie in one of the last scenes. Walt tells a psychiatrist (a character inserted far too late) that he used to go to the natural history museum with his mother, but he was afraid to look at the squid and the whale exhibit because the idea of these two great creatures fighting one another always frightened him. In the final scene, Walt runs to the museum and looks at the squid and the whale. Ah, symbolism! Water as the subconscious. Two great beasts, representing Walt’s parents, who in turn represent a primal human conflict between ambition and socialization, battling to the death. Now that Walt can look, does that means he’s cured? That he’s undergone change? It wasn’t enough of an ending for me. If you’ve come this far in the movie without setting up an ending, don’t even try. Just roll the credits.

Consumer: You just gave away the ending!

Critic: (sniffing) There’s no ending to give away.

Consumer: Well, I would’ve liked to see more Billy Baldwin as the tennis pro. I thought he was good although his clothes were awkward and his face was kind of squishy.

Critic: In Hollywood, that’s known as “acting.” Charlize Theron won an Oscar for bad clothes and a squishy face.

Consumer: Get a haircut and a new Izod shirt, Billy, and go back to being a hunk like in Sliver when you seduced Sharon Stone.

Critic: (clears throat)

Verdict:
Consumer: Let me take this. I say go ahead and rent it. Everyone in the cast is fun to look at, even Jeff Daniels, and it’s one of those funky movies, the kind that makes you feel like you’ve been listening to a folk singer in a coffeehouse. Afterward you want to go buy art even though you don’t like art.

Critic: Surprisingly, I agree. Not for the same reasons, but I agree. Rent it for the acting and the excellent writing. Just don’t expect the emotional payoff that comes with a resolution.