Saturday, July 23, 2011

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (David Yates, 2011, UK)


It seems obvious to describe the final chapter of this series as "magical", but that's the sort of emotion Yates' skillful direction drummed up, with an occasional, graceful touch that previous entries just didn't accomplish (not to slight the perennially underrated Azkaban, or the finale's sweeping, moody Part 1). Moments such as an urgent interview with the Grey Lady's ghost (Kelly MacDonald, a woman who seems almost unbearably earnest in every role) with the capacity to seem completely earnest in every role) have a greater gravity than in prior installments, the camera lingering on her blue, translucent face as she imparts the necessary information for Harry to locate Voldemort's prized MacGuffin. Unfortunately, the film still contains needless slapstick and daffy humor that serves only to undermine Yates' fantastically executed action setpieces; does every moment of resolved tension need a quip or punchline to lighten the mood before plunging into the next harrowing scene? These tonal oddities are thankfully overshadowed by an increased visual emphasis on the faces of the characters, their long, harrowing histories visible on their features as previous events take front and center stage. Perhaps the most immaculate bit of filmmaking in the whole affair is the much-anticipated revelation of Snape's character, which transcends mere exposition by assembling a montage of dreamy flashbacks, shot for the first time, new interpretations of footage from the previous films, and in one notable case, the addition of a new perspective on a frequently-revisited scene. One of the series' major weaknesses has always been the individual scripts which too often failed to emphasize seemingly trivial yet crucial moments that would gain significance in the plot's later episodes, choosing instead music montages and sandbox play within Hogwarts; the editing here is skillful enough to make you think the scripts have been subject to meticulous oversight from the beginning.

The final ten minutes or so offer a bizarre dichotomy of quality that can be directly traced to attitudes about the necessity of strict adaptation. The showdown between Harry and Voldemort is extended to a breathless, high-intensity duel that ranges across the ruin of Hogwarts and shifts between several perspectives. This was a wise and necessary choice, since the anticlimactic final duel in the book took all of a paragraph, preceded by about five pages of stilted, expositional dialogue between the two archenemies. After the duel, and a wonderfully understated moment between the three leads, we're treated to a dreadful visualization of the novel's lame "19 years later..." epilogue, which offers nothing crucial to the plot or characters, except that, yes, everyone got married and had kids and gave them awful names and sent them packing off to boarding school, how sweet. Am I supposed to continue liking Harry with the knowledge that he named his kid Albus Severus? Doesn't he realized what awful adolescents the men with only one of those names turned out to be? The aging job done on everyone is abysmally terrible (did they do anything to Rupert Grint besides give him a beer gut? Sound off in the comments!), and it's a sad, mawkish note on which to end the series, though not bad enough to negate the impact of the last two films, and the series as a whole, which won't disappear from public consciousness for many years.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Best Show Ever: The Case for "Breaking Bad"


Given that I've spent a lot of time in the last week or so, leading up to tonight's season 4 premiere (10 PM EST on AMC!), thinking about Breaking Bad, I figured I ought to try and squeeze a good blog post out of it.

A few quick facts, for those hopelessly out of the loop: Breaking Bad stars affable, middle-aged TV star Bryan Cranston (formerly of Malcolm in the Middle) as Walter White, a genius-level chemist trapped in a high school teaching job which he initially supplements with shifts at a local car wash. He has a son with cerebral palsy (Walter Jr., played by R.J. Mitte) and he's losing interest in his marriage to Skyler (Anna Gunn). In the pilot, he's diagnosed with lung cancer, and turns to manufacturing high-quality crystal meth to provide for his family after he dies, with the help of a former student-turned-small-time-dealer (Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul). Season 3, which ended on a nail-biting cliffhanger for Walt and Jesse, ended last June. The show has now been off the air for over a year, and the much-lauded third season, in which the show defined itself as utterly unlike anything on the air now or ever, has sparked the discussion: is Breaking Bad worthy of being called the best TV show of all time? The main sticking point is David Simon's still-venerated Baltimore crime epic The Wire, which I will discuss here.



First: I think that this question is a bit premature (but I'm going to talk about it anyway, because I want to). The Wire has five full seasons and a solid finale. Many consider the show perfect; though I admire it, I think it contains glaring flaws. Breaking Bad, on the other hand, has only two full, thirteen-episode seasons (the first was a brief seven-episode run). Also, it has taken some time to find its own voice: the second season is a remarkable work of television, but the third finds a groove that sets it apart. The Wire basically arrived on television fully formed. In time, Vince Gilligan's creation may prove to be a superior work of art. But the discussion will only get more interesting.

So: what makes Breaking Bad a great show? I argue that it is the purest example to date of the sheer potential of television as an art form. AMC has marketed the show recently as an adrenaline-pumping thrill ride, and while those who have watched it know that the shootouts and explosions repeated in every spot are uncommon occurrences and scenes of urgent conversation and tense, occasionally funny confrontations are more frequent, the show's main appeal is its unpredictability. Here, a direct comparison to The Wire proves useful: Simon's show is an ultra-realistic take on the police procedural that overlays traditional dramatic narratives on his bleak view of a crumbling American metropolis. A canny viewer of the show knows that in all likelihood, the bad guy is going to get away in the end, the corrupt politicians are going to keep pocketing your money, and the detectives are going to keep drinking. Simon's editorializing and classical storytelling (the word "Dickensian" is thrown around by journalist characters in the final season) make the show compelling, but not unexpected.



Breaking Bad, on the other hand, feels improvised (and it is, creator Gilligan has cheerfully admitted), but successfully. The second season made use of a recurring flash-forward device to build a sense of dread, climaxing in the finale's apocalyptic repercussions for Walt's actions. Though it was compelling, and there were surprises along the way, you had a sense of where you would end up. Not so in the third season: a threat is introduced in the very first episode which has the feel of an over-arcing plot thread, but  at the end of the very next episode, the same threat comes knocking on Walt's front door. The writing staff toss aside convention and classical story arcs for the sake of constant unpredictability and even an episode which stops the plot dead in its tracks to give us a one-act play peeling back the layers of our heroes (in the loosest sense) even further, the only anchors for the audience remaining the astonishingly well-developed characters of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.

(An aside: as boneheaded and frustrating as the Emmys can be, Cranston's three consecutive Best Actor prizes are well-deserved. I challenge anyone to watch this entire series and name a better performance by an actor in the history of television. Also, I get great pleasure out of watching Michael C. Hall grimace and golf clap year after year. Aaron Paul also stepped up his game significantly in the third season, and struck gold last year as well.)



So what makes Breaking Bad better than The Wire? For me, it's simple. Any blogger or essayist waxing effusively about the virtues of Simon's benchmark show will inevitably drop the phrase "novelistic" into their discourse. To be sure, TV is not the same as cinema. But Simon is not a born filmmaker, and he knows it. The series is lacking in visual energy and unfolds, indeed, like a novel, each episode a chapter (Simon even includes an epigraph quotation after the theme song). The show is dense with procedural detail and long conversations in which even the most diabolical hood rat proves capable of uttering a profound analogy for the broken political systems of Baltimore.

Does this make The Wire a bad show? By no means. But it's not pure television: it's the work of a print journalist with a message so urgent and well-formed he didn't see the need to examine the medium's particular strengths and weaknesses. I often think that Simon's writing style, in which everyone speaks with his distinctive, literary voice, would have been better suited to a massive crime novel. But there's also the argument that The Wire, along with Arrested Development, broke down the conventions of conservative, episodic television (the police procedural, or the sitcom in AD's case) and showed the potential for invention within the boundaries of an hour-long drama.



But I would also argue that Arrested Development's importance to the existence of Party Down or Community does not necessarily make it better than either of those shows. Just as Breaking Bad's endless narrative experimentation and boundless visual energy elevates it above the comparatively conservative, occasionally preachy tone of The Wire (a character introduced in season 3 basically exists to function as Simon's mouthpiece and give monologues about how broken the system is, a cringe-worthy misstep). If all that separates television from cinema is the convention of episodes rather than individual short films (see FX's Louie), then the episodes themselves can defy narrative expectations in a way that feature film couldn't, at least without becoming "experimental" and losing its audience.

Argument in a nutshell: The Wire proved that it was possible to make a TV show that wasn't just trying to be entertaining TV. Breaking Bad establishes itself as a show that's not trying to be a movie, or a novel, or a theater piece. It's trying to accomplish the most within the medium of television by taking advantage of its strengths and remaining constantly restless, looking for the next big leap into what the audience won't see coming. In this way, it's a groundbreaking show, and in a way that The Wire and AD, each existing half-in-half-out of well-trodden TV territory, never were.

[If this clumsy essay has inspired you to check out BB, don't make the mistake of tuning in for the current season without catching up from the very beginning. Three seasons of twists and turns and constant character evolution should be experienced as purely as possible.]

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991, USA)


As a feverishly intelligent neo-noir experiment by a Movie Brat at the top of his form, it's comparable to De Palma's Femme Fatale, and though it lacks some of that film's wicked humor (a slow push-in on a teddy bear's face to the re-recorded Herrmann score is an obvious exception), for most of its running time, Cape Fear acts as a brilliantly, visually alive conversation about the movies. Scorsese's usual preoccupation with his favorite leading man is present here, but far more interestingly so as he uses the unstoppable Max Cady (the accent is great, and De Niro stops thankfully short of a Mitchum impression) as a probe with which to dissect the Hollywood thriller. The Peck and Mitchum cameos are also much more than respectful homage to a bygone era, as their minor characters both function as unhelpful (and potentially harmful) members of an ineffective system which cannot act to protect Sam Bowden and his family from a cunning lunatic. One of Scorsese's many changes to the material makes Nolte's Bowden a hypocritical two-timer who sneaks around with a young legal secretary and, many years ago, sabotaged Cady while acting as his defense attorney. "If you saw what he did to that girl!" he pleads self-righteously. Later, he reads the book of Job in bed and indirectly compares himself to a humble man of God who had everything taken away from him. Relentlessly complex, Cape Fear doubles in on itself over and over again, a film about how people re-interpret themselves and their situations through art. In the most captivating scene (apparently improvised in one take), Cady lures Danielle Bowden (a young Juliette Lewis) to her high school basement auditorium, where he emerges from the shadows of a Candyland-like set to prey on her insecurities and emerging desires, updating the black-and-white expressionism of The Night of the Hunter with gaudy colors and characters both fully conscious of the sexual charge in their conversation. In Scorsese's post-modern world, everyone knows too much (the psychopathic Cady talks at length about how he educated himself in prison), and struggles to interpret the world in a positive way for themselves. The image of Bowden's bloody hands washed clean easily in the surging river demonstrates how simply the appearance of a thing can be manipulated. Small observations: one of the best title sequences I've ever seen. I often wish that there could be a film with modern actors that really had the look and feel of an older, Technicolor film. This, made 20 years ago, is pretty close. My favorite film by Scorsese, and after The King of Comedy, his most unfortunately neglected.