Monday (5/18/09) 8:21pm - ... wherein Peter posts a Weekly Media Update.
Movies: A Very Long Engagement
TV: Andy Richter Controls the Universe [2x09-2x13], LOST [5x16] [spoilers]
Books: Richard II [Arden, 3rd ed.]
A Very Long Engagement
This was a book that didn't really want to be a movie.
The basic idea is that Mathilde (played by Audrey Tautou) is engaged to Manech. Manech is sent off to the trenches of World War I. He dies under slightly odd circumstances at a trench called "Bingo Crépuscule." Mathilde, who is convinced Manech *survived*, pieces together what happened that day.
It's a great idea for a novel. The story alternates back and forth between Mathilde's efforts and the goings-on in Bingo Crépuscule. It creates something of an epic story, following Mathilde around France as she interviews subjects and gathers evidence, and explores the lives of everyone involved in Manech's fateful day.
The problem is, it doesn't feel well-suited to a feature film. We wind up with a heroine who is usually either not doing anything -- just listening to the latest anecdote, say, or reading the latest government document -- or not doing anything cinematic -- sure, you can show Mathilde looking around in a big library or puzzling over an epistolary cipher, but it doesn't really look like much on the screen.
What's more, the movie doesn't really stick with its central character. All of its real action is in the flashbacks to the trench. And those flashbacks don't really tell a story. The only possible 'central character' to that storyline is Manech, and Manech doesn't really *do* anything. Instead, these are more like a bunch of independent vignettes. If anything, they function as a sort of mosaic that collectively tells us the complicated business that happened at Bingo Crépuscule. And that mosaic is interesting only inasmuch as it solves the mystery of "What happened to Manech?"
The problem is, there isn't really an interesting mystery there. We find out at the start that Manech was sent off into no man's land and certain death. Apart from one oh-so-whimsical rant from a dying madman who saw the whole thing, it's not a situation that really needs explaining. At best, maybe we're mildly curious about how Manech survived, since it seems unlikely that the guy who made Amélie would adapt a downer about a winsome heroine who discovered that, no, her fiancé really *was* dead.
So we alternate between the modern storyline where not much happens, and the flashback storyline where there isn't really a story, and it's hard to muster much interest in either. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin, at least for my viewing experience, was that I didn't even particularly sympathize with Mathilde, after a while. I suppose I am a stony-hearted anti-romantic, but I figure, a guy goes into no man's land in WWI, that guy's going to get shot dead. If his fiancée thinks different, she's suffering from a pitiful sort of mania. I know I should get with the spirit of the film -- "Oh, isn't that romantic? Isn't it a sign of twu wuv? *swoon*" -- but all I felt was bleak realism. This war belonged to Wilfred Owen, not Pablo Neruda.
And so it goes, for over two bloaty hours. It needs all that time, you see, to fully explore all these flashback stories from people who aren't the protagonist.
It's certainly pretty to look at for that entire, lengthy, running time -- Jeunet somehow gives World War I the same heightened, twee-as-f**k look one associates with, say, Pushing Daisies or with other Jeunet movies. It's interesting from an artistic angle, if a bit discombobulating when applied to trench warfare.
And it's certainly a clever idea, having a stalwart heroine piece together all these interlocking flashback narratives.
It just doesn't want to be a movie, is all.
Andy Richter Controls the Universe [2x09-2x13]
So I picked off the last few episodes of Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and they were exactly the same as all the other episodes. There was nothing as inspired as the coat made of puppies or Conan O'Brien's turn as the Pickering CEO. The only bit that came close was a B-story where Byron accidentally becomes a pimp.
Generally, though, the plots were standard sitcom problems, made slightly more wacky with quick callout jokes and a certain level of constant absurdity.
This disc also had the bonus features. Since this isn't a TV DVD from Shout! Factory, the bonus features are pretty much crap. In this case, it was mostly just one making-of featurette, which was 90% talking-head footage of actors all fawning about each other in the usual ways. The phrase 'lightning in a bottle' was trotted out, and so on. (The more time goes by, the more I appreciate commentaries like Ron Moore's merciless-but-true analysis of "Black Market".)
(Side note: I'm still wrapping my mind around the fact that Matthew Weiner, who would go on to create Mad Men, was a supervising producer on this show. That's got to be up there with Joss Whedon writing for Roseanne in the 'does not compute' category.)
LOST [5x16] [spoilers]
LOST is a show that I'm loath to recommend to anybody.
I have a great time with it, but I suspect I'm watching it wrong. For the most part, I'm not watching a story about interesting characters. I'm not even too concerned about what the answers to the show's myriad mysteries are. Mostly, when I'm watching LOST, I'm watching a game. The writers have set up hundreds of questions. I want to see if they can pull off answering them.
So this gives me a skewed way of enjoying the show, and one that I don't think most of my friends would share. For me, the happiest moment of season five was when we started the time skips. As I remarked at length back in March, this was because it gave the writers a tool: now they could skip to any point in the Island's history and turn that vignette into the next thing that happens to our heroes. Soon, they settled into the late 70s, and started picking off DHARMA-related questions at a rapid tack.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm assessing the finale by some idiosyncratic criteria. Was it exciting? Sure. Did heart-wrenching things happen to the characters? Yeah. But mainly, I liked the finale because it set up powerful tools for the writers to resolve the rest of the questions.
Now we have Jacob and not-Jacob. Both of them are like queens on a chessboard, in that they can move practically any-damn-where. They've already shown Jacob, ageless, visiting the 815ers during various eras. So this establishes a precedent: Jacob could have been anywhere at any time, setting anything he wanted to in motion. Similarly, they've shown not-Jacob taking the form of the deceased John Locke. If you have a shapeshifter in your story, that can be used for a lot of explanations -- including (but not limited to) showing how dead people could have seemingly come back to life.
A lot of viewers are irritated that there's yet another layer to this onion. First LOST was just a microcosm, a story of survivors dealing with other survivors. Then, no, they're dealing with the Others. Then, no, there's a bigger picture, one that involves Ben Linus versus Widmore. Then, no, this is all part of a bigger deal that involves time travel and the DHARMA initiative. And now? Now all of these seasons might as well be a snow globe in the hands of these two godlike figures.
Perhaps it's logical to see the whole show as some kind of shell game, where the writers can keep stringing us along, expanding the scale and never really answering anything.
But there are two problems with that outlook. First, they have only one season left. That means there's no time left to expand our frame of reference yet again. Second, now that they have, effectively, *gods* involved in this conflict, the writers are in much better position to resolve what's come before. I've complained elsewhere that "God done it" is the least interesting way to answer the major questions raised by a show. LOST may make me eat those words.
Something else along the same lines: a lot of viewers were irritated with the endpoint of the finale. Juliet hits a nuclear weapon with a rock[1], we fade to white, and bam! -- done. We don't know if they've changed the timeline and blown themselves to smithereens[2], if they've knocked themselves thirty years ahead to catch up with the other LOSTies, or if they've reset things so that now they'll all relive season one with all the memories of seasons one through five.
Again, I see this as the writers setting themselves up for success. Now they have nine *months* to decide exactly what the effects of the Incident are (or, perhaps, to dot all the i's and cross all the t's on a scheme that they already have sketched out). They can sort out which actors are available and for how long. They can see if there are any more DHARMA-era questions they can pick off.
What they did set up a clean slate. Now they can put together season six exactly the way they want it.
So in that respect, I'm happy.
But what about the show itself?
I admit, I never got on board the plan to blow up the nuclear bomb. Honestly, the "Let's blow up the Island!" storyline reminded me of the "We have to go back!" storyline in one very specific (and irritating) way. The mission to return to the Island led to some brilliant dilemmas for the characters. It forced them to think about some deep questions -- whether their life on the mainland was worth keeping, and who they could trust, and what (if anything) they owed to the people they'd left behind. But then when it came right down to it, Mrs. Hawking's explanation of *why* they had to go back -- "Because we want to reproduce the initial conditions!" -- felt like utter malarky.
So here we have another painful dilemma: do we blow up the island? And again, it leads to some serious soul-searching: should we hit the reset button on the last three years of our lives? And although I've said before that I don't care much for LOST's various love-polygons[3], they do a commendable job of making the various romances relevant to the boom-or-no-boom decision. (Even I liked Sawyer busting out the line about Kate being just twenty feet away from Jack.)
But again, at its root, the decision is very, very stupid. They have no reason to think the explosion will do what Faraday said it might do (assuming it was perfectly timed). And more importantly, we the audience have no faith that it'll work. They haven't convinced *us*, so the whole thing is a bit feeble. Sure, it's funny when Miles points out that they might just be *causing* the incident -- but it's only funny because the writers have failed to make this part of the story make sense.
Apart from that?
Apart from that, it's just bits and pieces, really. I loved resolving what happened to Rose and Bernard (and Vincent). I hated to see Juliet getting chained into the pit (of course), but I hated it in a good way.[4] I loved seeing Lapidus again (seriously, Jeff Fahey was a genius bit of casting from the start).
Lastly, I loved the hints that Jacob has been arranging the 815ers in place all along -- it gives the writers a shot at explaining the freakishly coincidental connections among those people, but also it feels immensely satisfying that, in the end, this batch of characters is significant, and they're not just the ones who happened to survive the Wreck at Craphole Island. This could wind up being something very beautiful. They're on the right track.
In the end, I say the same thing to my LOST-quisitive friends that I always say: "Let me watch the last season; then I can tell you if it's worth your time."[5]
Richard II [Arden, 3rd ed.]
Behold -- another bold foray into a Shakespeare play that I haven't yet read! With the histories, once you get past Henry V, Richard III, and (I think) one of the Henry IVs, I'm in uncharted waters. Frankly, I'd never really felt like diving into the histories. I know very little about history in general, let alone 15th-century English history, so I figured it would all be gobbledygook to me.
This edition's introduction didn't help much. The Arden editions are a crap shoot when it comes to the introductions, and this one comes up snake eyes. It's one of the worst introductions in the series. The editor, Charles R. Forker, has a number of bad habits, the worst of which is to illustrate his points with long concordance-lists.
If he says there is (say) a lot of dirt imagery in the play, we can't just take his word for it. He has to take a page or two to list out every metaphor in the play that mentions dirt. Frankly, one wishes he'd just use bulleted lists at this point instead of trying (and failing) to put the data into a readable paragraph. In any case, this sort of poor-man's concordance is no way to write a literary essay -- it's more like something I would have done in high school to pad out the page count on an English paper.
He also makes pretty tenuous claims of the sort that only a literary critic could love. When Richard says, "I wasted time, and now time doth waste me," apparently this references the sololiquy where he's holding the mirror -- because the line, you see, has a certain reflectional symmetry. Um, yeah. Way to force a connection that has *nothing to do* with how an audience experiences the play.
And does Mr. Forker spend a good dozen pages going over every tenuous piece of evidence that vaguely indicates whether the play was written in early 1595 or late 1595? Why, of *course* he does! One of the most important pieces of evidence in this controversy is a short RSVP inviting a gentleman to see "Richard" at a dinner in 1595. Maybe it's Richard II. Maybe it's some other play. Maybe it's a painting.
Nobody knows, but there are strenuous arguments on all sides.
That said, one can sieve out useful bits of information here and there. The section about the play's production history is somewhat interesting. (I was intrigued by the series of performances where Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternated in the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke.) And in spite of the tedious, long-winded concordances, Mr. Forker does point out some interesting figurative-language clusters to watch out for.
I suppose I found myself wishing for what I'd seen in many of the other introductions for Shakespeare's lesser plays: some sort of spirited defense of what's so great about this play, and why this play matters. I guess Richard II is well-liked enough that such a description was deemed unnecessary.
Then we move on (finally) to the play itself, which in Mr. Forker's capable hands, stretches out to three hundred and twenty pages. It's not that Richard II is an especially long play -- it's just that Mr. Forker likes to go a bit hog-wild with his footnotes. On most pages, the footnotes take up more space than the play. On many pages, there's just a bare sliver of dialog atop a large mass of small-fonted footnote text. Many of those footnotes are lengthy quotations from one of the history's putative sources -- interesting, perhaps, to people chasing down the history of the work itself, but little help towards understanding the play. (I finally gave up on reading the long stretches of history-texts in unmodernized Early Modern English.)
Whew. All these words, and I still haven't gotten to the play -- but perhaps this makes sense, since the play makes up only about 10% of the book.
But the play is an interesting curiosity. It's from early in Shakespeare's career, so there's awkwardness. It's one of Shakespeare's only plays set entirely in blank verse (no prose), and all of the speech is a bit precious and heightened. Richard himself is so precious and intellectual that he's nigh-useless as a monarch, and easily gets shouldered aside by the ascendant Henry IV.
Yet that same quality makes Richard unique. I don't see any other examples of a histrionic, self-pitying monarch, so the play did succeed in showing me something new. And setting him off against Bolingbroke -- an opponent who's more taciturn, less poetic, and more canny in his realpolitik -- holds my interest. I especially liked how, as far as I could tell, Bolingbroke never really 'won' -- sure, he got the crown, but he was so uneasy in his new position, so worried about possible threats, that he doesn't exactly ride off into the sunset. Maybe it's a system set up such that *nobody* ever really wins.
Not much new, podcast-wise. I've listened to a smattering of EscapePod episodes, but none of them have really stood out.
Music-wise, I'm still listening to Schumann's lieder.
For next time: Brokeback Mountain, more Sopranos, and I start in on Twelfth Night.
________
[1] ... was I the only one reminded of The Young Ones? -- see this clip ca. 3'30" and 4'08".
[2] ... in which case, Chris Allen owes
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jefpeanutbutter a beer.[3] Related question: women occasionally do make decisions based on things other than romance, right? Sometimes it seems like LOST doesn't get that....
[4] Me, I want to see Juliet reappear in the show at around 6x08 -- perhaps with an eyepatch, and certainly with a take-no-crap-from-anybody attitude. Maybe V will get cancelled.
[5] Completely irrelevant side note: any time a seriously angsty, epic drama finishes up, I think some subset of the cast and crew should reconvene and do a very trifling, very casual, six-episode sitcom. It would cleanse the palate, and give the artists a release valve for their years of accumulated silliness.
Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankthinkg.gif){kind=small} contemplative · Music: none |
