Deborah Lipp

The House, M.D. season premiere is tonight. Be there.

Step Up (2006) 7/10
Tyler (Channing Tatum) is a street kid who loves to dance. Nora (Jenna Dewan) is a dance major at the Maryland School of the Arts. When Nora’s dance partner is injured, Tyler steps in, fusing his hip-hop style with her formal training.

Step Up aims to be this generation’s Fame, although it has more in common plotwise with less thrilling fare. It combines exciting, terrific dancing with the thinnest of plots, engineered by the same software that engineers every Michelle Trachtenberg movie.

Let’s be clear: I’m recommending this movie. If you enjoy dance, you’ll enjoy it. It uses real dancers, which weakens the acting, but makes the dance worth watching. It pulls back from the MTV style of rapid-cutting long enough to really show you the dance; we see the bodies, the feet, the moves. It has a veneer of authenticity, and you can take your kids.

But let’s also be clear that the veneer of authenticity is as calculated and formulated as everything else. It all comes from the test-marketing.

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Capturing the Friedmans (2003) 9/10
In 1984, Arnold Friedman is arrested for child pornography. While searching his home, the police discover that Friedman is a teacher, and has computer classes at home. Soon he is under suspicion of molesting a large number of students, and suspicion falls upon his youngest son Jesse as well. (Documentary)

Capturing the Friedmans challenges our ideas of what we know, and of what conclusions we can draw. 1984 was the height of the McMartin daycare case, and there was a lot of hysteria about the evils of child care and the dread thing that could happen to children.

But Arnold Friedman was not the innocent victim of a bizarre accusation. He was a pedophile with child pornography hidden in his home. The suspicions cast on him seem to have been based in fact. But were they?

The Friedmans were a family fascinated by videography. The documentarians were blessed with access to a large number of homemade family videos taken before and during the case. We watch as a family disintegrates before our eyes. One brother, Seth, declines to appear in the film. David, the eldest, believes his father is utterly innocent, even of pedophilia, regardless of any evidence. David is furious; with his mother, with the media, with everyone. The youngest, Jesse, is simply resigned and sad.

The film finds a very few of Friedman’s accusers who are willing to talk. Some stand by their stories and some do not. One young adult tells of the enormous pressure put on him as a child to confirm that Arnold molested him, and finally caving in. An investigator speaks, in all seriousness, of how important it is to pressure children and put words in their mouths. He seems sincerely to believe that this is best for the children.

Yet there is something wrong here. There is no way of reading this as tragic victims versus outrageous accusations. The uncomfortable perch is between somewhat guilty parties (at least in Arnold’s case) versus accusations with a grain or more of truth. The accusations are fueled by, but not an invention of, hysteria. They are blown up, expanded upon, and nurtured, until their scope is beyond belief.

While this happens to the community, what happens to the Friedmans? Each deals alone with anger, shock, and terror. They don’t come together as a family; they shatter, and to a great extent, they remain shattered twenty years later.

This isn’t a comfortable film, nor is it a lurid one. It asks us to look at what we see and simply, calmly, think. It is remarkable how difficult that is. For some people in the film (and indeed, for some people who have reviewed it), it remains out of reach.

Two For the Money (2005) 7/10
Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) was a college football star until he trashed his knee. Now he predicts football outcomes for a 900-line. There he’s discovered by Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), who owns the biggest sports tout operation around. Lang becomes Abrams’s protege, caught up in a whirlwind of high-end gambling, and in Abrams’s marriage to Toni (Rene Russo).

This is the kind of movie that never quite makes the radar of the casual movie-goer. It has a small but strong cast, an interesting premise that’s hard to describe (as the preceding paragraph illustrates) and lacks the kind of hook that fills theater seats. I would probably never have seen it if I wasn’t in a hotel room with nothing to do but browse HBO’s offerings.

For all the whir and buzz of high-stakes gambling and hard-sell phone banks, Two for the Money is fundamentally a character study. Brandon is lost without football, and allows Walter to make him into a new person; “John Anthony, the Million Dollar Man.” Walter is a gambling addict who likens himself to an alcoholic bartender; he serves but doesn’t drink. Yet with Brandon/John, he seems to be gambling again—on his protege’s career.

Most interesting is Renee Russo as Toni, doing devoted wife as if you’ve never seen one on-screen before. She is luminous in the role; solid in her commitment to her husband, honest about his many faults, frightened of the direction he’s taking. I can’t say the movie would be worth watching without her. She’s really something.

Pacino is terrific here. He’s over the top in that patented Pacino way, but he’s playing a character; he’s definitely Pacino playing Abrams and not Pacino playing Pacino which, let’s face it, gets old. McConaughey is more of a cipher, but he’s playing a character who doesn’t really know himself.

Two for the Money meanders, and isn’t quite sure of itself. It oversells certain points, and then backs away from other points that should have been solidly nailed. Unfinished business with Brandon’s father is alluded to, but just when you think we’re moving into some satisfying family drama, the script backs away, and leaves us with Brandon’s surrogate father (Abrams) instead. That felt like a gaping hole to me. This was one example of a dot not being connected; I felt writer Dan Gilroy didn’t know the difference between hanging back for subtlety, and avoiding the issue because you don’t know how to write it. Maybe the “based on a true story” aspect inhibited him.

Despite these dissatisfactions, Two for the Money delivers strong performances, intimate, complex relationships, and interesting characters.

I have no rational reason for being so upset about the JonBenet Ramsey arrest. None. Except that when I heard, my first thought was “I thought the parents did it.”

That’s what I thought. Am I the only one? The parents of JonBenet Ramsey were tried by media and found guilty. With no arrests and no hard evidence, the mags & rags pumped out the speculation and the minutia and fed us a scenario such that only the parents could have done it.

And meanwhile these people lost their daughter.

A dead daughter, the media circus, and the loss of reputation; the total devastation of reputation. They must have thought that history would remember them as murderers. They must have spent ten years dealing with how that felt, on top of everything else.

And here I am speculating again.

Because that’s what we do. We read the stories and we imagine. We put ourselves in their shoes. We project and we think our projection constitutes rational thought. We think we’re all CSI and we can put the pieces together and aren’t we clever. We do it about serious things like murder, we do it about trivial things like the Anniston-Pitt breakup (which wasn’t trivial to them, I’m sure). It’s in the intonations of lunatic pundits like Limbaugh and Coulter. It fuels our conversation and our television and our fantasies. And rarely, ever so rarely, do we realize we are making it all up.

Get this people. We are making it all up.

That is all.

Update: We don’t even know today what we thought we knew yesterday.

Enduring Love (2004) 7/10
Joe (Daniel Craig) and Claire (Samantha Morton) witness a hot air balloon nearly crash in the field where they are picnicking. Joe and four other men try to save the boy trapped inside. When a gust of wind lifts the balloon back up, four let go; one holds on too long and dies in the fall.

All of this serves as a prelude. The movie which then unfolds involves Joe’s remorse and growing obsession with the accident, and its effect on his relationship with Claire. Complicating things is Jed (Rhys Ifans), another would-be rescuer who is now obsessed with Joe.

The pacing of Enduring Love is kind of lovely. The relationships are played out in silence and touch more than in conversation. The cast is good. There are oddities and gaps as well; like the people here seem never to have heard of stalking, or grieving, or trauma. Sometimes, when I’m watching these slow-paced things, I get to asking myself ‘is this beautiful and Art, or is this lame?’ Such analysis cannot bring a conclusion; instead, it’s better to check in with the gut experience, and on that level, I was totally buying it. I wanted to see what happened next.

The subtext is strange and fascinating. Joe is some sort of scientist/professor/author; it’s not clear if his area is behaviorism or evolution or what, but he talks a lot about how emotion is meaningless except as an evolutionary force. Love is something that evolved to make us fuck. Nothing has meaning except as a means of perpetuating the species. At first his friends are bemused by this, but as he becomes more distant and confused in the wake of the accident, as the absence of meaning becomes more painful in the face of his guilt, they offer less sympathy.

Jed is the opposite, a spiritual person obsessed with love and meaning. Jed and Joe are the first to find the crushed body of the dead man, and immediately Jed suggests they pray together. Joe wants nothing to do with prayer, but Jed persists.

When Jed begins stalking Joe, the latter takes forever to realize this is untoward behavior. On the one hand, it’s annoying. On the other, it’s striking evidence of how badly Joe is reacting to the accident; he assumes that Jed is having the same reaction, and so doesn’t read the obvious signals about what Jed’s behavior really means. It’s obvious (to me anyway) from their first post-accident meeting that Jed has romantic feelings towards Joe, but Joe doesn’t catch on. He’s a narcissist, who sees the world in terms of his own experience; of course a narcissist feels neurotically responsible for an accident. And of course a narcissist thinks that other people feel what he feels, and doesn’t inquire further.

Is the movie homophobic? I’ve seen it criticized as such; as playing on the crazed gay stalker stereotype, and contrasting it with the sweet heterosexual couple we root for. Poor Claire, competing with the crazy gay man! But the odd thing is that homosexuality is here paired with religion, and heterosexuality with atheism. Sort of the opposite of the current right wing thought control.

Joe doesn’t believe in love, only in the procreative urge. His biological determinism has no place for homosexuality; it’s inherently homophobic, because any feeling that doesn’t drive towards reproduction is, in Joe’s philosophy, perverse. He never says this about Teh Gay, but he does give a lecture asking if misplaced love, or the loss of love, isn’t a “perversion” of the evolutionary force. While he never mentions homosexuality (at all, which is pretty weird in a lecture about sexual motivations), he uses the words “perverse” and “deviant” just before Jed shows up, so hello reading between the lines.

Jed is deranged and creepy. He is also trying to awaken Joe spiritually. One truth he brings is that love (in his view) is always and first God’s love (hence the title). The implication seems to be that if God brings all love, then and only then can homosexuality be a blessing from God, whereas if biological determinism rules the day, Teh Gay is Teh Wrong.

Of course, all of this leaves pleasure and orgasm entirely out of the equation, which makes it a dumb argument. But it’s fascinating to see God on the side of gays for a change, and straights on the side of atheism and evolution. Food for thought.