A Pilgrim’s Digression

Having finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men recently, I am looking forward to this movie just about as much as any film in recent memory. This book (and apparently the film as well) is not for people who expect a satisfactory, happy conclusion. Negative reviews I have read concentrate almost exclusively on the lack of an ending in which the bad guy gets killed.

For example on the subject of how the book ends, one reviewer writes that “…McCarthy–in keeping with his nihilistic view of the universe–has Moss [the protagonist] killed off before such a climax can even take place. Perhaps in an attempt to one-up McCarthy on anti-climaticism, the Coen brothers have him killed off-screen.”

It sounds to me like the Coens aren’t one-upping anyone, instead sticking very closely to the book. In the book, there is a rather gaping hole in the ending during which Moss is killed. McCarthy does not describe the shootout, leaving it completely ambiguous about what happened and who killed who, or even if Anton Chigurh, the psychopath that has been chasing Moss, did the killing himself. Nora Ephron has written a rather humorous piece for the New Yorker, in which she and her movie-going partner try to figure out what the heck happened in this film. She even goes to the book, to which the film is apparently so faithful that even reading McCarthy provides no answers.

I have to admit, I found the darkness at the heart of this book so disturbing, I can’t say that it was an entirely pleasant read. It’s uncomfortable to find a writer apparently with no desire whatsoever to make his reader feel even the slightest bit hopeful that there might be good at work in the world. Before “No Country,” I read his novel The Road, which if anything is even more bleak. How much more bleak can you get than post-apocalyptic humans who cook and eat a newborn infant because there is no food left to eat anywhere on earth?

Additionally, Anton Chigurh, the psychopath at the heart of the bleakness in “No Country,” is a representation of Satan himself, as far as I am concerned. It is not that he is unconcerned with questions of good and evil–in his philosophical moments, he does take up the issue–but that he just doesn’t care if there is a right or wrong or not. In one scene in the novel, the sherrif, Ed Tom, comments that the problem with drug dealers today is not that they don’t fear the law, but that they don’t even give the law a thought. That is most disturbing, and extrapolated to Chigurh’s morality–his unconcern for right or wrong, and by extension God–that is most disturbing. Sometimes, he lets his victims live on the toss of a coin, and if someone actually wins, he is as uncaring as if they had lost. Nothing concerns him, certainly not human life. He allows people to live, and he takes their life with equal impassivity.

I happen to like, dark, bleak pessimistic stories such as this. Having written that, I doubt I will be able to persuade my wife to see the film with me, because she hates such movies. I am quite looking forward to it, though. McCarthy in the hands of the Coen Brothers…seems like a match made in Heaven, or perhaps Hell.

Last weekend, while entertaining Brendan in Wal-Mart while Lynn did the shopping, I was browsing the DVD aisle and happened to see that The Addams Family is now available on DVD.

“Hmmm,” methinks to meself, “I loved that show when I was a kid. How much is it? Ah, only $19.99 for season one.”

So I picked it up.

I’ve written before about how much TV I watched when I was a kid. Television was on all the time, usually tuned to the TBS Superstation after school, from around three to seven. TBS broadcast all the great TV shows from the sixties and seventies that had been released to syndication. But The Addams Family was a rare treat.

It seemed like it was not in the usual rotation of shows. Every season, TBS would switch things up by showing Green Acres instead of The Beverly Hillbillies, for example. But The Addams Family was not shown often. The Munsters were the prevalent monster sitcom for most of my childhood.

However, what little I had seen of The Addams Family made me a devotee. It was much better than The Munsters, I thought. And that theme song! It was like Gilligan’s Island: once you hear it, you will never forget that song as long as you live. You will be on your death bed and you will still be able to sing:

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky / Mysterious and ooky…”

Sad to say, I won’t remember any of the poetry I memorized in my briefly intellectual youth, but I will remember the theme songs to my favorite TV shows.
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A two hour recruitment advertisement for the Marine Corps.

I have probably said enough about the film 300 in that one sentence. The reader can then make a judgement about whether my review is favorable or unfavorable, depending on one’s feelings towards the Marines.

I use the Marines comparison because the film depicts an elite corps of warriors, the ancient Spartans, fighting to a glorious death in the battle of Thermopylae. The title, 300, refers to the number of Spartans King Leonidas led against the thousands of Persians who tried to conquer Greece in the fifth century B.C. Its glorification of the all or nothing, black or white, “with us or against us” military mindset will be either a recommendation or a disqualification for some. My own impression is somewhat ambivalent, since I am powerfully attracted to this kind of movie, but wary of the dangers of propaganda.

My first notice of this film occurred last week when a group of students from a local military college, having just seen the film, came into the coffee shop where I was sitting and began raving about it. It occurred to me then that I was going to like this film; it also occurred to me that might be a dangerous thing. It is impossible to watch this film and not draw comparisons between the ancient threat of Persian domination and the modern threat of Muslim terrorists. Already having become satisfied with my conclusion that the current war on terrorism is over-hyped, I did not appreciate a reminder that the stakes may be higher than I am figuring.

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A good historical or biographical film rarely turns out to be a masterpiece; Good Night, and Good Luck proves the point, failing to rise above the level of a good, interesting documentary.

The comparison to a documentary is apt because so much of Good Night is archival footage from the Murrow television program on which the story is based. The camera rarely leaves the set of Murrow’s program See It Now, except to follow the reporters who are the main characters to a bar for a celebratory scotch. Essentially, the program is a recap of the events surrounding Murrow’s decision to publicly abandon the journalist’s credo of impartiality and to take a stand on a controversial issue.  The move would prove portentous for broadcast journalism.

The occasion for this decision is a news story that almost passes unnoticed: an Air Force lieutenant is summarily discharged because his father reportedly reads a subversive Serbian newspaper. Murrow takes on the topic as a way of taking on Joseph McCarthy, the then-powerful Senator investigating Americans from all walks of life for Communist ties. Eventually, Murrow faces McCarthy personally, and McCarthy’s personal attacks on Murrow lead to his eventual downfall.

Like a good documentary, Good Night is historically accurate and thought-provoking. What strikes the viewer is how little has changed in forty years, and it leads one to wonder if anything has changed in a hundred years, other than clothing styles and people’s taste in music.

A sub-plot involves CBS news anchor Don Hollenbeck, who commits suicide after being repeatedly attacked in print by Hearst columnist Jack O’Brian, a conservative supporter of McCarthy. One of O’Brian’s columns attacking Hollenbeck is read on screen by an actor, and presuming the article is actually an O’Brian piece, it is as vicious and scurrilous as anything written by Ann Coulter. Among other things, O’Brian accuses Hollenbeck of reporting the news from a “slanted” leftist perspective and makes accusations about Hollenbeck’s association with the communist party in the nineteen-thirties.

Unfortunately, much of this film is merely reportage of the variety described above: e.g., the actors assemble in a bar to read the newspaper reviews of last night’s program, and read them, they do. Clooney seems not to have learned the rule that good fiction writers know by heart: show, don’t tell. Good Night is a story told to us by gifted actors. It’s a good film worth seeing once, but probably no more.

However, seeing it once provides the viewer some valuable perspective on our own era. The news media is under daily assault from the modern day equivalent of Joe McCarthy and Jack O’Brien. Instead of communists, the right has a new bogeyman, “liberals,” a term used interchangeably with Socialist, Communist, and Democrat; and the right routinely refers to liberals as terrorist sympathizers.

McCarthy’s charge that Democrats and communist sympathizers give aid and comfort to “the enemy,” is echoed in charges from Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and others, that liberals give aid and comfort to the enemy with their persistent criticisms of the President and his foreign policy.

Thus what is most terribly striking about the similarities between 1954 and 2006 is how “McCarthyism,” defined as using unfair and unfounded allegations of subversive activities or beliefs in order to suppress dissent, has become so commonplace in our society. The daily hammering of liberals in the new Hearst media, as represented by Clear Channel Communications, occurs without so much as a whimper of objection among the majority of Americans and their legislators. And unfortunately for us, there are no Ed Murrows to prick the windbags of talk radio.

The travesty of our day is that there is no effective voice of the opposition in this country. That ought to trouble even the most complacent conservative among us. Without effective opposition, even the best government can come to believe the delusion of its own infallibility.

M. Night Shyamalan seems to be living up to his own bad press. Variously termed “arrogant” and “difficult,” he has lost some of his gleaming, wunderkind sheen, in the years since The Sixth Sense premiered. According to a recent USA Today article, when Disney read the script for his latest film, Lady in the Water, they withdrew from the project, at least in part because Shyamalan gave himself a co-starring role in the movie.

We aren’t talking about a Hitchcock-like cameo, either. Shymalan plays a character named Vick Ran, also referred to as “the vessel,” a writer whose work will change the course of human history. Too bad as an actor, Shyamalan can’t change the expression on his face. He’s a bad actor, as bad as Hayden Christianson, almost as bad as Keanu Reeves.

Also, I couldn’t quite get over the egotism of Shyamalan casting himself in the role of “writer as world savior.” The fact that his character is murdered for his teachings, at some point beyond the end of the film, only makes his egotism that much more outrageous.

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Rather than writing a full-fledged film review of one movie, I want to post a few brief thoughts on films I’ve seen recently.

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“As falls Wichita, so falls Wichita Falls.”

The line is written on a bathroom wall in one of the Wichita, Kansas, strip bars owned by Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid). The line comes back again at several odd moments in the film, most odd of all at the end, when the protagonist, Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) writes it on the back of an RV with a red Sharpie.

Then the RV abruptly backs up, knocking him to the ground.

There must be something important about that statement concerning the apparent symbiotic relationship between Wichita and Wichita Falls, but like many elements of the film The Ice Harvest, meaning is not easily discovered.

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More than a month ago, I watched the film Before Sunrise. Last night, I finally got around to watching the sequel, Before Sunset. Set in another European city, Paris, this film reveals what happens when the two characters, Jesse and Celine, meet again after nine years. Apparently, Jesse kept his appointment for December 16, 1994, and was waiting at the train platform for Celine…who did not show. Much of what follows between them in 2004 is an expression of regret for the intervening years.

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One benefit of being a parent is that one becomes quite familiar with the range of children’s animated and educational programming on film and on television. Oddly, contrary to what one might think, the purely educational programming is typically pretty dreadful (“Barney” and “Dora the Explorer”) while the lighthearted, animated programs are actually quite good (“Spongebob Squarepants,” “Wallace & Gromit,” and the Pixar films).

Perhaps the key to this counter-rational phenomenon is that programs such as “Wallace & Gromit” are written to entertain both children and adults, while programs like “Dora the Explorer” are created to fill a dubiously necessary function of “educating” children via the television.

I am not the kind of parent who believes television is all bad for children. It would be hypocritical of me to believe that, since I watch so much TV myself, and have done so ever since I was a child. I monitor what my child watches, but mostly for quality of content, not for educational value. Therefore, Wallace & Gromit: the Curse of the Were-Rabbit perfectly meets my standard for excellence in childrens’ programming.

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Netflix reviews of the film Kontroll invariably make it sound like an action-adventure film, “…featuring nail-biting races in pursuit of crooks” and characters “all of whom are desperately racing against time and their surroundings to find one another.” I didn’t quite view the film in any of these ways.

While not as plotless and deeply philosophical as many European films, Kontroll is an odd mixture of comedy and mystery. In typical European fashion, the mystery is solved in a vague, inconclusive way, so really what makes this movie worth watching are the odd-ball characters and the comedic touches.

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