Deborah Lipp

New Shows
I saw the Grey’s Anatomy episode that served as a pilot for Private Practice, and I thought it stunk stinky stink stuff. A lot of pretty people competing for camera angles and whining about the angst and agony of being successful, wealthy, gorgeous professionals.

Having decided not to ever subject myself to it again, I nonetheless ended up zombied in front of the first ten minutes or so of the premiere, and let me tell you, the pilot was Shakespeare compared to this shit. Private Practice makes you forget that Addison was ever an interesting or compelling character on Grey’s; that’s right, it’s so bad it can travel back in time and make other things retroactively bad. That’s pretty bad.

The Bionic Woman does a lot right and has enough going on that some people will be interested in watching. But not me. Although I love seeing Miguel Ferrer and Will Yun Lee in supporting roles, the central characters are incredibly stiff. Casting also has a thing for huge blue eyes, so several characters kind of look alike. Our title character (Michelle Ryan) has a romance with the big expert on bionics (Chris Bowers), and this romance is life-altering for both of them, but it’s got anti-chemistry. When they have sex, I want to count ceiling cracks. And the rest of it seems very by-the-numbers, very television: Here’s our cool hero, here’s our cool villain, look how we’ve “subtly” established that the kid sister is a computer whiz, and hey, look, technology. Whatever.

Reaper is actually pretty charming. The premise is that a slacker’s parents sold his soul to the devil (Ray Wise), payable on his 21st birthday. The pilot opens the day Sam (Bret Harrison) turns 21. There’s definitely wit and I definitely laughed, aided by the fact that this episode was directed by Kevin Smith. The sidekick, played by Tyler Labine, is trying too hard to be Jack Black, but overall the tone works. It’s a lot like Dead Like Me, except not annoying. Sam’s Satanic job is to collect souls who have escaped from Hell and return them. Thus you have a little adventure and f/x every week, and some humorous fights (this week the “vessel” of collection was a Dirt Devil, next week it’s a remote-controlled monster truck). Plus, Sam’s job is actually pretty moral—he’s fighting demons—so he isn’t minding it, and you can already see the ironic character arc where do-nothing Sam learns to be a good guy while serving Hell. Plus there’s the hopeless crush on the “just friends” girl.

New Seasons
House was the best thing on television for two years, and limped along (no pun intended) last year on a great cast with considerably weaker writing. Unfortunately, season 4 is looking a lot like season 3. The pilot introduced some new twists, but the medicine was stupid, and the outrage was the wrong kind of outrageous. Robert Sean Leonard, as House’s only friend, was absolutely brilliant this episode, totally stole the show, but I don’t see the holy shit I can’t believe I’m watching this dazzle of year one.

Heroes started kind of okay. I mean, it was a very fine episode, reuniting us with characters, checking in on how things have changed, establishing some important mysteries, and introducing some new heroes. But overall, it seemed like an episode for the established fans. I don’t see how this particular episode could have succeeded in bringing new viewers on board. Which is a shame, because it really is an excellent show.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) 10/10
Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) tells the tale of how he got flown to Hollywood for a screen test. There he runs into his childhood sweetheart Harmony (Michelle Monaghan) and is introduced to a detective known as “Gay Perry” (Val Kilmer). Gay Perry is supposed to teach Harry about real detective work for his upcoming role. Soon Harry, Perry, and Harmony are embroiled in a complex murder mystery that hearkens back to the Johnny Gossamer detective stories that Harmony adored as a child.

I was completely surprised by Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. First, because I had a mistaken impression of what I was renting—the title, and the reviews I’d quickly skimmed, gave me the impression it was a spy movie parody (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is a phrase associated with James Bond). But in fact, detective movies are a very different genre than spy movies, and this film plays in the detective realm. I’m not even sure I’d call it a parody. Certainly it is a comedy—a very witty one—that plays with Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane sensibilities, but it’s not interested in sending up those movies. It’s really just interested in having fun, while commenting wryly on the difference between reality and the movies.

And this movie is tremendous fun. Starting with the opening narration (“My name is Harry, and I’ll be your narrator”), it whips along at breakneck pace, tossing off bon mots faster than I can look up the correct way to pronounce them. Downey and Kilmer have terrific chemistry, and Monaghan, while not a great actress, keeps up with the twists and turns gamely. In fact, this is more a screwball comedy than anything else, with Monaghan and Downey providing the romantic banter, with a second (and more prominent) layer of banter between Kilmer and Downey. Monaghan is no Rosalind Russell, but she makes a fine Girl Friday.

Through Harry’s narration, KKBB tells you about detective stories (particularly the fictional Johnny Gossamer) while contrasting them with real murder mysteries. Inevitably, you know you’ll find the plot becoming increasingly like the fictional sort, to Harry and Perry’s chagrin. There are a few small missteps—the “aha” moment that you expect at the end of any detective story was too opaque, and an obvious joke about “there are always exactly sixteen deaths” could easily have paid off with sixteen deaths (instead there were about ten).

Still, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a movie full of charm, wit, and good will, while still having a satisfying sense of menace.

So I haven’t watched my winsome Serenity DVD straight through yet, but I did watch with the new commentary track on. Whedon did a cool thing, which was to watch his original commentary track before recording the new one so that he was sure not to repeat himself.

Anyway, the commentary was good, except that with these group commentaries, you can’t always tell who’s talking. Adam Baldwin is especially tricky because a Firefly fan is used to his accent, and that’s not real, so he sounds nothing like Jayne.

Anyway, Joss was saying that the original script was 190 pages, and he had to get it down to 120, and Nathan Fillion asked him what was in the 190 page version (Ron Glass said “Me! Me!”) and Joss said “Basically, all of Season Two” and one of the guys asked “What about the second half of Season One?” And Joss said, “Good point! But no, I always pictured Miranda as being at the end of Season Two.”

Which is, like, amazing to me.

I have to say, when I saw the movie (and I guess I shouldn’t spoil it by saying what Miranda is or anything), I didn’t have the sense that Miranda was planned as the solution to certain series mysteries. It felt like it was the movie version. So I’m stunned to learn that, indeed, the answers to so many of our questions were intended to be found there all along.

Probably the coolest tidbit on the commentary. My respect for Whedon just grows and grows.

3:10 to Yuma (2007) 10/10
Rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale), desperate for money, agrees to join a group of gunmen bringing notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to justice. They’re riding to Contention, Arizona to put Wade on the 3:10 train to Yuma prison. But Wade’s gang is still free, Wade himself is dangerous, and the road to Contention is fraught with hazards.

What does it take to be a great Western? What would it take to make you want to see a Western made in 2007—a remake no less? For me it starts with mise en scenè; the cinematography, production design, costumes, and actors have to conspire to make it feel real. I’ve got no use for a fake Western—a bunch of goofy actors playing dress-up and fooling around with guns. Make the characters interesting; the world you’re showing me is hard, so let me see what hardening has done to people. There will undoubtedly be action, so film it well and make it exciting. Story counts, and since actors do love to play dress-up, give me talented people whom I’m interested to see in this context. Add a good script with a clear narrative that holds some surprises, and you’ve got me.

3:10 to Yuma delivers on all counts, and then exceeds any expectation I brought into the theater.

Let’s start with the main characters. Bale and Crowe are equally the leads, each with a significant and compelling character arc. As they travel together—the classic reluctant road trip, a staple of comedy and drama alike—they discover a commonality. Each is clear he is nothing like the other; Evans is moral, a good husband and father, rooted in his ranch, while Wade is straightforward about his own evil; “You have to be rotten,” he affirms, to do what he does. Their moral difference honestly separates them and is not prettied up, but their intelligence and dignity draws them together, because here are two men set apart from the worlds in which they live. Evans is smart, insightful, thoughtful; he is better than the moneylender who is close to destroying him, than the drought which has brought him low, than the ranch hands he can’t afford to hire. And Wade, pensively sketching nature and quoting Proverbs, lives in a world of thought and imagination that neither criminals nor Pinkertons can touch.

Each man is introduced in a way that paints a vivid portrait. We start with Evans; a sound in the night alerts him, and he’s awake, armed, terrified, enraged, and helpless while thugs burn down his barn. His face in the firelight says it all. Then we move to Wade, still and relaxed on horseback, sketching a bird until his gang comes to tell him they’re all ready for the brutal robbery that begins the film’s action. He leaves the sketch behind, on a branch. Now we know these men.

There’s a level at which Ben Wade is monstrous; “He’s the devil” the friend I saw it with said. Played with quiet good will by Crowe, he seduces everyone around him with his words; asking questions, probing, seeding doubt. At the same time, he’s immensely powerful; unarmed and in handcuffs, the marshal of Bisby is clear that five guards are not quite enough.

Like most Westerns, 3:10 to Yuma is extremely masculine, but the two women with speaking roles are treated with an unusual level of respect. (As an aside, there’s an extra in one of the towns, a whore leaning up against the wall, who seems convinced that this is her Big Break. She’s blurry and in the background, and acting her heart out. It’s pretty funny.) Neither Alice Evans (Gretchen Moll) nor the barmaid (Vinessa Shaw) are clichés; they aren’t stupid or objectified or whores or madonnas, they’re people.

Actually, the film is populated entirely by people. Few are stock players. Small roles played by Peter Fonda and Alan Tudyk, for example, seem rich; these are individuals, not just whoever is on a horse with a gun.

The movie isn’t afraid to make us laugh, but it’s deadly serious. It is in many ways conventional, but unexpected things occur. The sense of place is solid; you know where you’re going and how you got there—I find that lacking in many movies, where I often feel lost.

There’s a brief love scene between Ben Wade and the barmaid that encapsulates everything that can go wrong with movies, and goes right with this one. These quickie seductions are usually too brief, or too dirty, or too chaste, or too mean-spirited, or in any of a dozen other ways, too unbelievable, and stuck there because movies need sex. But this scene…wow. It has context, meaning, and real seduction. When he comes closer to her she is ready, when he touches the back of her neck, she is startled in exactly the right way, and receptive in exactly the right way. It was sexy, and it was touching.

The whole film is like that, side-stepping a thousand wrong turns and making right ones, again and again and again.

Man of the West (1958) 10/10
Link Jones (Gary Cooper) takes the train to El Paso to hire a schoolteacher for his homesteading community. But when the train is robbed and Link and fellow passengers Billie Ellis (Julie London) and Sam Beasley (Arthur O’Connell) are stranded, Link leads them to his old home, where he confronts his outlaw past in the form of his uncle (Lee J. Cobb) and the rest of the gang who robbed the train. Directed by Anthony Mann.

The conventional wisdom is that Sergio Leone launched a new kind of Western with A Fistful of Dollars and his subsequent “Spaghetti Westerns;” a dark, dirty Western of gritty violence, betrayal, and rape. But before Leone there was Anthony Mann and the “psychological Western.” Beginning in 1950 with Winchester ’73, Mann explored the psyche of men who were torn between the evil they had done and would do, and the goodness in their hearts. Most of these movies were made with Jimmy Stewart, but the last of them, Man of the West, was made with Gary Cooper.

I’ve seen three of the Stewart-Mann Westerns, and I’ve loved them all, but nothing prepared me for Man of the West, which was less reminiscent of Mann’s earlier movies than it was prescient of Leone’s. I mean there’s dark, and then there’s dark.

Or, to put it another way, Man of the West blew my mind.

Link Jones, brilliantly played by Cooper, is a complex man, overwhelmed by the longings and fears within, so much that he is not so much silent by nature as driven to silence, forced there by his frequent inability to voice a simple truth; his truths are all so complex. At first he seems awkward, almost goofy, but gradually we understand he is nervous and struggling with self-restraint. He carries to El Paso all the money that all his fellow homesteaders have saved to hire a schoolteacher (who will require a year’s salary in advance in order to relocate to such a remote settlement). He is nervous with the money—too nervous; the inside man on the train job takes notice—and then he is despondent when it is taken. With nowhere to go, he returns to the home he abandoned long ago, but the train robbers have beaten him there. He and his companions are taken prisoner, and the rest of the movie is played out as a tense hostage situation. Can Link free his fellow passengers? Can he avoid returning to the life of crime he despises?

The tension is brilliantly drawn, and the ugliness of the crooks (Cobb, Jack Lord, and John Dehner chief among them) is stunning. There’s a brilliant scene where the bad guys try to force Billie to strip for them. Brilliant in the sense of disturbing, frightening, even nauseating. In a sense, this scene epitomizes everything that’s great about this movie. Link is heroic but ineffectual. The bad guys are crude, nasty, and without limits. Billie is a real woman, not “the woman,” and her humiliation is all the more real for it. The whole thing is startling.

And it just keeps up like that. Link trying to think his way out, and the rest, very aware that’s exactly what he’s doing, but needing to keep him alive anyway, thwart him at every turn.

If you’ve been keeping up with my reviews, you know I’ve been on a Western kick for a while, maybe a year now. I don’t know why I’ve never heard of this one before, why so many other Westerns are more famous, and this masterpiece is collecting metaphorical dust.

Shaft (1971) 7/10
John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a super-cool private detective and ladies’ man. He is hired by a black mob boss (Moses Gunn) to find his kidnapped daughter. Quickly he is in the center of a web of competing interests from the cops, the white mob, and a Black Panthers-type group.

It is easy to see why this movie had such a huge effect. It is remarkably well-made, with a powerful sense of immediacy and pacing. The soundtrack is compelling, and the whole thing has a great sense of wit. I expected to find the movie kind of cheesy, to tell you to truth; one of those films more beloved for its idea, for its place in film history, than for its actual quality. But for all its flaws, Shaft holds its own as a film that excites and interests the audience.

There are times, though, when Shaft is overwhelmed by its own posturing. John Shaft must be the coolest, he must know what’s going on at all times, he must be infinitely sexy and sexual, and he must be bombastic enough to lord all this over everyone else on screen.

It’s impossible to discuss Shaft without discussing race. Shaft suffers a little under the weight of its own racial stereotypes. There are certain things, it seems, that a black star must do in a blaxploitation film to prove he is powerful and free of the constraints of racism. It is not enough to overpower the white establishment in the form of the white cops and criminals who just can’t keep up with him. That part is actually very cool; it’s all about Shaft’s power as a man and a person and a hero and specifically as a black man, and it’s extremely entertaining. But he also has to establish dominance over specific groups in ways that are formulaic and not entirely comfortable.

To be this kind of hero, Shaft must bed multiple women, and at least one of those women must be white, and he must treat her badly. He must exert dominance over a Jew, and over a homosexual. Every time I see one of these movies, there is always a subtle or not so subtle hint of both anti-Semitism and homophobia. And it totally feels like that’s a necessary part of the formula. The sexism is not subtle; the women are pawns and dupes, but the real misogyny is reserved for the white woman, who screams curses at Shaft as he leaves. And again, formula. It feels like a checklist of “proofs” that must be fulfilled in the film. These scenes were present even in Badass, a film about blaxploitation, with Adam West playing the object of homophobic scorn. In that film, even the positive Jewish characters are intensely stereotyped and schticky.

None of this makes for comfortable viewing, and if you don’t have the ability to turn off the part of your brain that reacts to that sort of thing, maybe you won’t like the film. But if you’re a film buff, especially a classic film buff, you already watch plenty of movies replete with casual racism and sexism. What’s interesting is that this one, even thirty years later, can seem so different to a white audience. You get used to stereotypes running the way they run, and if they change direction, that feels weird. As a Jewish woman, I reserve the right to be a little disappointed that yet another film genre maintains the anti-woman and anti-Semitic status quo.

Shaft is a strong action movie. It exists in a very specific cultural and historic context, which makes watching it more interesting. But perhaps the best thing about the movie is that it doesn’t depend on that context, and stands on its own.

The Lookout (2007) 9/10
Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was a high school golden boy until a devastating car accident left him with Traumatic Brain Injury and two friends dead. Now he lives with a blind friend (Jeff Daniels) he met in rehab, and tries to learn how to remember what he did today. When a guy in a bar (Matthew Goode) remembers him from high school and befriends him, Chris finds himself caught up in a bank robbery scheme.

There’s several different movies going on here. There’s a film noir; an innocent guy getting pulled into crime that heads towards a frightening and dark end. There’s a character study; a fairly extraordinary one, cementing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s position as probably the most interesting young actor to watch these days. His Chris is never a caricature, he never blubbers or twitches his way through the role of a brain-injured young man struggling to find a self he recognizes inside a set of limitations he never imagined. Chris simply becomes more interesting every moment he’s on-screen (which is most of the movie). He is revealed in small things and large, in Thanksgiving with his family and in conversations with co-workers, and most especially in trying to find friendship with the set of hoodlums who manipulate him.

Jeff Daniels is also rich as Lewis, Chris’s friend and roommate. I love Daniels every time I see him; I’m always surprised by his depth and solidity. Which, why am I still surprised? Good question; more like I’m taken with his presence, he seems so real and true to himself I find myself catching my breath. This is Gordon-Levitt’s show without question, but Daniels is vital; the rest of the cast—Goode, Isla Fiscer, Carla Gugino, et al—are just serviceable, so without a second excellent actor I don’t think the movie would have really worked.

The third movie is the story about sequencing. “I wake up. I take a shower. With soap.” Throughout the film, Chris works on the narrative of a day, tries to remember how to put things in order. At the same time, he’s trying to put his life in order. Lewis (Daniels) tells him to do it like a story, instead of a list: Try “Once upon a time, I woke up,” he suggests. And Chris needs to do that, he needs to find the story of his life, to figure out his own narrative. In the middle of Chris’s narrative is a break, an accident, a change, a loss, and enormous guilt. The movie opens with this accident, and we see Chris’s culpability, not just because he caused an accident, but how he caused it. Chris was a spoiled and cocky boy doing the sort of things with cars that spoiled and cocky boys do. So in asking himself what his story is, he has to struggle with who he was, and what he did, as well as who he is now.

We don’t know all the pieces, not right away, and some not until the very end. Chris doesn’t know all the pieces either, and so it feels right that we should be confused in the way that Chris is confused. Not in a Memento sort of way, but gently, organically. There’s no Big Reveal, but there are revelations.

For all the crime drama, the guns and the really scary stuff, The Lookout is basically a quiet and subtle movie. It’s about waking up, and taking a shower. With soap. And it works.

I won the Serenity DVD. I am so happy. Winning ROOLZ.

There’s a new Serenity “Collector’s Edition” DVD being released, and by blogging about it, I cleverly make myself eligible to win a copy.

What’s new on the Region 1 DVD (that wasn’t on the first DVD) is:

• A new cast commentary with Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau, and Ron Glass. (Original edition had a Joss Whedon commentary, and that one is still there as well.
• Additional extended scenes previously only available on the Australian version.
• “A Filmmaker’s Journey,” previously on R2 and Australian versions but not US.
• “The Green Clan,” 3 minute featurette previously exclusive to the Australian version.
• A SciFi Channel special housted by Adam Baldwin with cast interviews. Never before on DVD.
• “Session 416.” The viral videos Joss did with River and released anonymously online before the movie. They will be shown in the out-of-order sequence they were originally released in. Never on DVD before.

So, that’s a fun toy to have.