Doctor Who: Midnight (2008)

Some mood music, while you read.

We at the PPCC are huge sci-fi nerds, and yet it has taken us a long (loooong) time to get into that one mighty pillar of sci-fi-ness, Britain's Doctor Who of Britain, starring Britain, co-starring Britishness. Okay, we tease, but, damn, that shit is nationalistic! Which is fine. Most spec fic is notoriously US-centric, after all. Anyway, we're glad we finally initiated ourself. In addition to being nationalistic like crazy sauce, it is also addictive and silly and fun and full of everything.

It's difficult to review a PILLAR, so instead we'll focus on a few things:

• The episode, Midnight, and how it's awesome and a good intro. (Review)
  
• Some Doctor Who themes, and how they run the gamut from awesome to stupid to huh-ness. (Thoughts)

Allons-y, then!  

Episode review: Midnight

Doctor Who episodes seem to come in three varieties:

• Really trashy, ridiculous, and occasionally awful one-off episodes, featuring a Monster of the Week. As some of our friends assured us, "You do know it's a kid's show, right?" (No, we didn't! But now we do. Oh, how we do.)
  
• Really spectacular, mind-bending one-offs.
  
• Mediocre-to-good episodes that are usually redeemed by giving us one more crumb along the Great Path of Understanding the Doctor, usually accompanied by a Great Emotional Moment for the Doctor as well. These are exciting.

Midnight falls into the secondary category. It's the perfect gateway episode; you can watch it while knowing nothing of the Doctor and his Interminable Journey. But, of course, the experience is much richer if you do know a bit, since Midnight takes several Doctory themes, and then subverts them in refreshing ways.

Midnight begins on a fancy, diamondy planet called, uh, Midnight. Which is ironic, since it is brilliant and sparkling and very, very sunny. It is also totally hostile to any form of life; the sun being "x-tonic", which is technobabble for "zapping killer laser beam-like". The Doctor (David Tennant) and his Companion, the wonderful Donna Noble (the wonderful Catherine Tate), are taking a (much-deserved) break on Midnight, which markets itself as a party planet. The Doctor decides to go on a nature tour, while Donna lounges by the pool.

On the nature tour, we're introduced to a variety of Typical Human People: there's the suburban couple (Daniel Ryan, Lyndsay Coulsen) and their sullen teen son (Colin Morgan), the bumbling professor (David Troughton) and his geeky assistant (Ayesha Antoine), the flight attendant (Rakie Ayola; called a "hostess" in the episode, since apparently it's also 1950), and a middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Sharp). After lampooning modern commercial flight (endless, chattering entertainment options, tiny peanut packets, and so on), the journey is underway. The Doctor makes a few friends, people joke, and obviously something horrible is looming on the horizon.

We won't give away the horribleness, because much of the episode's genius is the smart and inventive (and cheaply-produced!) monster that we meet. If it's a monster at all. But it's something straight out of The Twilight Zone or Hitchcock: the fear and tension is slow, subtle, and gripping. One subversion of the Doctor Who routine is that the Doctor is as ignorant as everyone else on the ship (and in the audience) as to what the It thing is. Nothing is supposed to live on Midnight, and yet it seems something has? (Note that we can't even conclusively say that something has. One lovely interpretation of the episode is that there was nothing there at all, and everyone just freaked themselves out.)

A second subversion of Doctor Who's usual stuff is that, for once, humanity isn't celebrated, but instead retreats immediately into the banality of evil. When confronted with something difficult to understand and potentially violent, the passengers become scary and bestial themselves. It's reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's comments on seeing the "ragged scaffolding" of suburban civilization strip away, and how rattling that can be. For Doctor Who fans and the Doctor himself, it's especially rattling: usually, humanity has a big ol' crush on the Doctor, and is always happy to be helped. Here, they're skeptical, paranoid, hostile.

Anyway, the craft in this episode is just brilliant. The dialogue: building up tension, revealing aspects of the It thing's otherness slowly, taking sudden turns. Argh, as a writer, the PPCC burned with jealousy at someone having had such a good idea! The music. The acting: Tennant is always pretty damn good, but his role-reversal during the climax was so well-done. As with Lesley Sharp, especially in the earlier moments of being possessed, when she's/it's "learning". Ah! So good. Bravi, bravi.  

Big thoughts  

First big thought: Doctor Who is Buddhism

In fact, it might be as Buddhist as Groundhog Day, and that's pretty damn Buddhist. Except, whereas Groundhog Day is uplifting because it shows us nirvana (the ultimate happy ending), Doctor Who just grounds the PPCC down with its nihilistic woe. Seriously, how can this be a kid's show? HOW?! It is misery by design.

The most obvious Buddhist links are, first, the regeneration, and, second, the eternal woe. Oh, the woe.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and it tends to repeat again and again, until we can break out of it by building mindfulness and compassion and non-attachment. Once you break out of that cycle of life and rebirth, you turn into Bill Murray - i.e. a Buddha, an enlightened being. In Mahayana Buddhism, there's an intermediate stage, called a bodhisattva - that's someone who delays nirvana, staying amongst the merely-stuck to teach about loving-kindness and being all nice and stuff.

You could argue that the Doctor's a bodhisattva. But we wouldn't. Because while he is pretty helpful and sorta nice and all that, he's also fighting the same battles over and over again: those Daleks never seem to die, do they? Nor does the (wonderful) Master (nor should he!).

Similarly, you'd think the Doctor would have learned, by now, that attachment leads to suffering (second Noble Truth in the ol' Buddhism). But he doesn't - constantly seeking out Companions, and constantly, ahem, effing them over. They never seem to emerge unscathed from their adventures. Seriously, after you've lost various Companions to death, dismemberment and being locked in a parallel universe, JUST STOP, DUDE.

So, it's Buddhism, but it's Buddhism at its saddest: the moment after the First and Second Noble Truths (life sucks, and the sucking will go on forever), and before the Third and Fourth (wait, maybe I should stop all this). To use a Christian analogy, it's like modeling a story on the moment after Jesus dies, but before he's resurrected. It's just miserable, dude.

 IS THIS WHAT YOU TEACH YOUR CHILDREN, BRITAIN?!

Which brings us to the second big thought.  

Second big thought: Doctor Who is Nationalism

 "Oh no," someone gasps. "They're headed towards Earth!"

Cut to outline of the UK.

The ostensible backstory is that the Doctor loves Earth like peanut butter loves jam. And that's fine. But Earth is basically Britain. And not only that - it's England. Scottish David Tennant wasn't allowed to keep his Scottish accent because, of all the regenerations a rogue Time Lord could make, of all the species, the genders, the heights and the everythings, the dude's gotta be a white English male every. single. time. Rumor has it the newest Doc, Peter Capaldi, will be retaining his Scottish accent, but this was - apparently - a major BBC decision.

Sometimes, the nationalism stuff is grating. But we know that we have no leg to stand on; most sci-fi is heavily skewed towards the US, and few people even seem to notice. At other times, the nationalism stuff is hilarious and wonderful, such as when an ailing Doctor - remember, this guy's a magical, super-smart, self-healing, time-traveling alien - is on the brink of death and then healed by the power of a CUP OF TEA. (Seriously, that was brilliant.)

Another wonderful byproduct of the Who's nationalism, is its portrayal of workaday Normal British Folk in all the supporting characters: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the London shopkeeper. Donna Noble, who's "just a temp from Chiswick!" And their funny families! Everyone is pretty modest, even mediocre. What's nice about the show is that it celebrates this normality for the inherent brilliance it can conceal.

Third big thought: Doctor Who is fandom

Fandom is nice. Fandom is fun. And Doctor Who has a huge, gigantic, long-lived fandom that seems to go on and on in every direction, and rival the Trekkies in terms of historicity and population density. Many of our good friends are Whovians. Some of the latest Doctors themselves - Tennant and Capaldi - are Whovians. And then you've got things like Adventure Time fans and fun, smart YouTube channel fans, and references all over the place. And the fanfiction! Oh, the fanfiction. We don't even want to go there.

For whatever reason (we still haven't pinpointed it), this miserable, lonely Time Lord has captured everyone and their mom's attention - including ours. The PPCC has basically put everything on hold while we finished off the Tennant years. And now we've still got all of Matt Smith to go - oh God.

There's still so much to say - how Doctor Who compares to Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, since we do think they are two sides of the same (weird) coin. Or the weird moments of transcendental, pulpy space opera in Who - especially when they talk about the Time War (and it sounds like the line-up for a heavy metal festival, "the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres!"). But we'll leave that to another day, as it's 1AM here and a Time Lord has just regenerated in our laptop!

Out of Africa (1985)

Romantic and uplifting, Out of Africa tells the true story of Karen Blixen, Baroness and Badass. Watch! As Karen whips lions in the face! Stare aghast! As she sharpshoots more lions in more faces! And be amazed! At how she macks on aaall the fine, handsome men of colonial East Africa.

Beginning in snowy Denmark in the early 1910s, Karen (a wonderful Meryl Streep) realizes that things with Random Danish Hunter Man are not working out, and so she'll settle for Hunter Man's Brother as her husband-to-be. That is, the sardonic Swedish aristocrat, Bror Baron Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) - at least, we think that's his name. The newly-minted Baroness Blixen then sails down to East Africa, where - still reeling from the X-hour journey - the Blixens are officially wed and welcomed into Your Favorite Expat Group. Except this expat group is quite fun, what with the adorable British dinosaur, Lord Delamere (Michael Gough), the sexy Oxford Orientalist, Berkeley (Michael Kitchen), doing what all good Oxford Orientalists of Times Past did (learn the local language, love the local people, and march around conquering things), or the also sexy American, Robert Redford (Robert Redford).

Actually, Redford is supposed to be playing another British aristocrat, Denys Finch Hatton, but - after reading Finch Hatton's Wikipedia page - we've decided he's actually just playing Robert Redford.

Anyway. So many men to choose from! And so much work to be done! Karen immediately establishes herself as Badass Fem Lady, thus dispelling some of the immediately problematic aspects of this film for a PPCC's tender, post-colonial, feminist soul. When Mr. Bror Baron tries to throw his weight around, Karen throws it right back at him! When Bror Baron confronts sexy Robert Redford, demanding to know why he wasn't consulted that they should get all up to the lovemaking (uh, spoiler? but come on, you know what this film is about!), Redford said he "did ask... and she said yes." YES! When colonial noob Karen stumbles into the "Men Only" bar of the colonial club, and is promptly thrown out, we realized this movie was actually going to throw us a few feminist bones now and again. Indeed, it passes the Bechdel Test! And the bar scene is eventually reversed in one of those great Bar Scene Where -Isms Are Challenged things.

What we found surprising (and refreshing) about this film is that - kinda like a few other sweeping colonial-revival 1980s epics - this actually feels like a relatively even-handed, sympathetic and smart portrayal of early 20th century East Africa. We see intelligent details, such as the way Nairobi subtly changes over the years that Karen is in Kenya. Or the presence of the Indian Kenyan community. Or the burgeoning development projects, such as Karen's school. Or the commodification of the safari. We have interesting musings on the glamor of the Maasai, the issue of land grabbing, and - best of all - the opportunity Kenya provides for Karen to break out of her conscripted gender role and, well, whip a lion in the face if she has to. Damn, girl.

The performances are uniformly strong, with Meryl Streep obviously reigning supreme. This movie really is hers, and she is lovable, inspiring and smart. We found Robert Redford a bit stale, he's essentially just a beefcake (though his liberal attitudes towards relationships - we're all just free birds! - were interesting). Much more intriguing was actually Klaus Maria Brandauer as the adulterous Baron Blixen. This could have easily been a straight villain role. Indeed, when we read the wiki article about Karen Blixen long ago, we read him as such. For the love of God, he gives her syphilis! So it was surprising and surprisingly tender to see how honest, adult and even caring their marriage of convenience is portrayed to be. There was a real energy between the two actors. Another intriguing, though small, role was the somewhat tragic, but oh, so charming, Michael Kitchen as Berkeley. Indeed, though Redford is on the cover, much of the film has Karen (and us!) gazing lovingly at Berkeley. Given that some homies on the Internet have created animated GIFs of Berkeley scenes, we take this to mean we're not alone.

BUT! BIG BUT OF CONCERN. Isn't this all very problematic?! We loved the uplifting, positive spirit of the film. This is an East Africa which is beautiful and kind, with lots of love and warmth. Thus, it's already a MUCH nicer portrayal of the region than, say, this or this. But - well, is it legit? Or is it all just whitewashing colonialism!? Let me know, Internet!

The Four Season (1981)

Alan Alda's The Four Seasons is a typically Alda-y trip through comfortable, bourgeois domesticism. It's homey, almost to the point of blandness, and there's nary a plot to be found. But that doesn't necessarily make it unappealing.

Following three middle-aged married couples (a very sweet Alan Alda and Carol Burnett; Len Cariou and Sandy Dennis; Jack Weston and Rita Moreno) over four vacations (hence the title), the film is mostly about all the tiny quirks and peccadillos that make up very intimate friendships and marriages. The tone of affectionate annoyance is widespread; even as the audience, you feel like you've already lived a life with these people, and you kind of hate them (and love them). The only plot point with any real narrative drive is Nick's (Len Cariou) divorce from his first wife (Sandy Dennis), a spacey, inscrutable photographer, and marriage to his second (Bess Armstrong), a bouncy blonde half his age. Yet even this - a relatively tired tale of midlife crises - is upended by Alda's warm, humane treatment of the characters. As much as they're all neurotic, 1970s Me generationists, they're still three-dimensional and capable of surprise.

Indeed, while some of the climactic moments feel like inorganic set pieces for stereotypically Freudian breakthroughs, some were still quite engaging: Bess Armstrong's grief at everyone's resentment, Alan Alda's unexpected meltdown. And the gimmick of seasonal check-ins was nice. That said, another 1970s Alan Alda film does this much better: Same Time Next Year, in which a pair of lovers meet every year for an adulterous tryst, and we live the 50s, 60s and 70s with them. That film had the same amount of cheese, but often felt truer and more urgent.

People singing in Nanni Moretti films

As a commenter on this vid said, "I love people who sing out of key. It's expressionist."


Palombella Rossa (1989)
Silvio Orlando and some swimmers singing Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire.



Palombella Rossa (1989)
Nanni Moretti and the crowd singing Franco Battiato's E ti vengo a cercare.



La messa è finita (1985)
Nanni Moretti singing Bruno Lauzi's Ritornerai.



La stanza del figlio (The Son's Room, 2001)
Nanni Moretti, Giuseppe Sanfelice, Laura Morante and Jasmine Trinca singing Caterina Caselli's Insieme a te non ci sto più.



Caro Diario (1993)
Nanni Moretti dancing to Silvana Mangano's Anna.

Has anyone seen Habemus Papam yet? And, if so, is there any singing? The PPCC hopes so.

Café Express (1980)

Like a number of commedie all'italiana, Café Express is a tragedy dressed up as a comedy. Also, like other picaresque Neopolitan Odysseys (e.g. Mi manda Picone), dissembling, poverty and surreality factor heavily.

Michele Abagnano (Nino Manfredi) is an illegal coffee vendor riding the night train between Naples and Rome. With his broken shoe and wooden arm, he cuts a sorry figure. Though, since he's played by the charming Manfredi, he's also wonderfully lovable, always ready with a joke and sympathetic ear. The film ambles along, dropping in with Michele as he visits the various characters in the various cars. In this way, and the fact that it takes place overnight, the film resembles an episodic, nocturnal, ensemble piece like Jagte Raho or After Hours: that is, it mixes the strange with the immoral with the funny, all steamed up with some schmaltzy philosophizing on the nature of man.



With each car, Michele's story changes: in one, his wooden arm is a war wound, in another, an injury received as he saved children from a burning home. Even if he's a warm and gregarious presence, he's also evasive and, thus, mysterious. The only thing we know for sure is that he has a 14-year-old son, Cazzillo (a very cute Giovanni Piscopo), with a congenital heart defect - we know this for sure because we actually meet Cazzillo, as rascally as his father, when Michele finds him shaving in the train's bathroom. (Okay, that whole scene was adorable.)



Things take a very sour turn after Michele pisses off a small gang of thieves, and the film swings from a sentimental Italianate tragicomedy to an enraged screed against an unjust society. As well as a plea for magic(al) realism as a weapon against (Anglo-Saxon? oligarchic?) hegemonic notions of "reality"? Maybe. As Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, "So what I said was true. From a certain point of view." Similarly, Michele - and, to his horror, his son, Cazzillo - live by this creed of a malleable reality. It certainly feeds the stereotype of Neopolitans as knavish story-spinners, and it certainly makes for great surrealist cinema. What is the truth? We'll never know for sure. And, even if we did, would it change the tragedy (or funniness) of the situation?

Props to the final shot, with the self-posessed, urchiny Cazzillo making his way through a 1970s Rome, a little hawk in search of prey. That was fabulous. And props, as always, to lovely Nino Manfredi, our favorite interpreter of Romanness (even though, in this film, he's Neopolitan - and whoa! that accent!).


(Though Italian speakers can watch the movie here.)

Look Back in Anger (1989)

There's something perversely compelling but ultimately tiresome about Look Back In Anger, the classic "kitchen sink drama" about an Angry Young Man. In fact, the protagonist's name, Jimmy Porter, has become something of a shorthand for "the Angry Young Man" - or, if you're like the PPCC, "self-important misogynistic asshole".

What's amazing about Look Back in Anger is how autobiographical it purportedly is. John Osborne, the playwright, was also notoriously horrible to his loved ones - after repeatedly insulting her, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. Like Jimmy Porter, the cruelty of his language was infamous. And what's amazing is that someone so, well, self-involved and dick-ish, could have been able to write anything remotely three-dimensional at all. It's a wonder he managed to create characters other than Jimmy Porter - especially Jimmy's long-suffering wife, Alison, and friend, Cliff.

Anyway! Jimmy Porter (Kenneth Branagh) is a working class candy shop owner somewhere in an anonymous English town. He seethes at the unfairness of it all, particularly classism and, uh, the existence of women. His hatred for these two things he takes out with relish on Alison (Emma Thompson), his passive, upper class-slumming wife. A diarrheic talker, Jimmy hates the complacency, the conformism, the hypocrisy of modern English everything. He rails and rails… and rails… and rails some more, for good measure. His (only remaining?) friend, the adorable puppy-like Cliff (Gerard Horan), tries to keep the peace between Jimmy and Alison. Eventually, Alison's childhood friend, the righteous and churchy Helena (Siobhan Redmond), comes to visit and attempts to bark back at Jimmy.

All of this building tension - a tension that goes from being pleasantly coiled to excruciatingly awful to watch - is punctuated by rare moments of sweet, almost needy, affection: when they're not screaming at each other, Jimmy and Alison cuddle and coo about being a "bear and a squirrel", Alison and Cliff cuddle and coo ("My lovely!" Cliff always exclaims), and Jimmy and Cliff wrestle and rough-house like schoolboys. It's a strange, compelling roller coaster of ups and… well, not so much downs, as when the roller coaster breaks off the tracks and goes flying away.

Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are always reliably good in theater-driven stuff. Judi Dench directs, but it's a limited, anemic direction, still speaking theater language when it should be speaking movie.

The play itself has been lauded for bringing realism (and, we guess, nihilism and rebellion) to the English stage back in the 50s. It is certainly shockingly gritty by even today's standards - again, not so much because of the poverty or unwanted pregnancy stuff, so much as the cruelty of Jimmy and Osborne's relatively sympathetic treatment of it. It's as if Osborne is trying to tell us Jimmy is a prophet, someone who (as the "citation needed" intro of Osborne's wiki tells us) "argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behavior and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit." Now, we have a personal bone to pick with such a philosophy: mostly because we think compassion is the only universal wisdom, and behaving like an asshole isn't so much shaking off the shackles of a hypocritical, stifling society, as it is, well, being an asshole.

If we may go a bit Tiger Beatdown on Osborne and Jimmy for a moment, as well, we've always heard this ultra-individualistic, pessimistic philosophy proselytized by, well, angry young men. Angry, desperate egotism and self-pity of this sort, when coupled with disenfranchised young white men (as Jimmy and Osborne are), always makes us think of (1) misogyny! and (2) racism! And, indeed, you can read Look Back in Anger as a post-colonial play: Jimmy as a broken-down, post-imperial UK, with nothing else to conquer, wallowing in ennui and feelings of low self-worth. (Hey, Laurence Olivier, who was all about injecting patriotism into theater, thought Look Back in Anger was an offense to his "sense of patriotism and theatre".) In that respect, as a self-aware sympathetic satire of wounded, post-imperial British pride, Look Back in Anger is almost acceptable - but we're wary of giving Osborne too much self-reflective credit, especially since he was kinda right-wing and it smells throughout that he agrees with Jimmy. He certainly seems to think Jimmy's categorical hate of anyone upper class or female (or, worse, upper class and female!) is righteous and true. And he wasn't totally self-aware: as demonstrated in the completely ridiculous moment when another character, the father-in-law, listens to Alison describing Jimmy's various abuses and then compliments Jimmy on his "way with words" (?!). Why doesn't he just say, "Good heavens, that Jimmy fellow should become a playwright! He could revolutionize the stage with his witticisms!" Dude, he put a sockpuppet in his own play. What a troll...

La messa è finita (1985)

La messa è finita (Mass is finished) is an early Nanni Moretti film that exhibits many of Moretti's trademark moves: domestic bliss and domestic hell (both filmed enticingly), a counsellor distracted by his own anxieties, long shots of Moretti from behind as he wanders through his comfortable apartment and an easy-going, bourgeois sensibility.

Moretti's thinly veiled alter-ego is, in this case, Giulio, a young priest. We follow Giulio as he moves to a new parish, closer to his parents in Rome, and mingles with the community. People come to him with all sorts of problems - generally, heartbreak - and, as things strike closer and closer to home, it begins to weigh on Giulio. He lashes out, an angry young man, and (as usual, in Moretti films) gets no closer to the elusive truth. We suffer - all his movies seem to say - but it can still be beautiful. "My life is beautiful," Giulio declares, even as he cries about all his problems.

La messa è finita is guided by thin threads of plot, but it's not as completely impressionistic as Moretti's later (and stronger) film, Caro Diario. Nonetheless, it's filled with the same abrupt cuts and vignette-style scenes as his other later (and much stronger, if not best) film, The Son's Room. Its meandering, circling style may bore or alienate some viewers, but we love it - in fact, it fills us with a deep, soothing contentment, similar to a Morandi painting; the beautiful in the mundane.

The film's conclusion doesn't leave as much of an impact - Moretti achieves that feeling of fraying, tender relationships with much greater clarity in The Son's Room - but it's always nice to spend a couple hours walking behind him. Recommended.

Starman (1984)

This year, we are particularly thankful for Netflix. Gobble, gobble!

Starman is a 1970s feel-good sci fi road trip movie. It's not mind-blowing, and its ultimate message of peace, love and good vibes is a pretty dull platitude. But director John Carpenter's color palette - with its vibrant hues and amazing (AMAZING, I TELL YOU) use of lighting (REALLY BRILLIANT) - makes up for what the story lacks in excitement.

Before Voyager became V-ger, it crash landed on a sparkly planet in the system Whatevs. In response, said planet sent a tiny spaceship to crash into the brisk Wisconsin countryside. There emerges Alien Blue Orb who, after drifting into the log cabin of one grieving widow, Jenny (Karen Allen), assumes the form of Jenny's dead husband, Scott (Jeff Bridges).

AlienScott, after stretching out his new legs and testing out his new vocal chords, promptly telegraphs a message back to his planet (using his eyes and some bizarre camerawork) before kidnapping Jenny, appropriating her Mustang and gunning it for a crater in Arizona (his pick-up point, apparently). All this happens while the Feds - led by the belligerent Fox (Richard Jaeckel) and the sensitive ex-hippie Shermin (Charles Martin Smith, from American Graffiti!) - are hot on their trail.

Much of Starman is, as it sounds, pretty ridiculous. It's also not a terribly inventive take on the worn tale of a stranger in our strange land. Pointing out humanity's idiosyncrasies and contradictions through the lens of an alien traveller can sometimes be illuminating and fun ("double dumb-ass on you!"), but Starman takes it a little too easy. The caricatures Scott and Jenny meet on the road - from the diner waitress to the deerhunter (!) to the cook - are cute, if not terribly memorable. Scott and Jenny themselves are likewise meh - Jeff Bridges's foxy foxiness hidden beneath his layers of Weird as AlienScott (he walks like a pigeon) and Karen Allen's usual pluck and ass-kickery dulled and mellowed by the constant grief.

In the end, neither the alien nor his final message of loving your brother really struck us as much as that stark change in lighting when the spaceship passes over Karen Allen's face. How did they do that? No, seriously, how? It was incredible, and very beautiful.

Talk Radio (1988)

We don't know much about freedom of speech. Which probably sounds funny, given that we regularly air our views on a globally visited website for fun. But seriously - we don't know much theory about it. We know there are rules against hate speech, and there are rules against yelling "Fire!" in a crowded movie theatre, but we've never really explored it.

Talk Radio, the classic play-turned-movie written by and starring Eric Bogosian, directed by Oliver Stone, explores one of America's most frequently used self-descriptions - a land where free speech exists. Misanthropic, self-loathing, sarcastic and genius Barry Champlain (Eric Bogosian) is a "shock jock" on a local Dallas, Texas, radio station. He periodically belittles and humiliates his late night callers - and indeed his callers run the gamut of society's detritus: rapists, neo-Nazis, drug addicts and idiots. The show - Night Talk - is insanely famous, if only for being provocative, Barry is very rich, and now, thanks to the efforts of his eager exec (a young Alec Baldwin), Night Talk is about to go national. Barry receives this news with a mix of outrage, horror and elation - frantically, he calls his ex-wife, Ellen (Ellen Greene), to come to Dallas to visit him.

Talk Radio reminded us, in tone, of Frank Miller's visions of America: it is a post-industrial wasteland in every sense of the word. It is morally bankrupt, alienating, sinister, dystopian, disgusting and very, very vapid, populated entirely by stupid sheeple who subsist entirely on pornography and violence. Homosexuals, feminists and non-whites are periodically bashed by the multitudes of narrow-minded bigots (minions of the Man, I guess) - and those bigots are in turn hated by Barry (or Frank Miller's gloomy superheroes), who acts as a sort of court jester.

This sort of high-minded gutter porn is, normally, not really our thing.

It's not really how we see things in America or elsewhere, and we even have some beef with this sort of mainstream misanthropy (which we'll discuss in more detail below). For now, suffice to say that we can take it in small doses and only if done in certain ways - e.g. by telling ourselves this must be what it's like in Dr. House's brain. And like all good Angry Young Misanthropes, Barry is funny. His jokes are scathing and rapid; they yoked shocked barks of laughter from us, or else they just left us bewildered by the sheer audacity. "How do you dial a phone with a straitjacket on?" he demands of one caller. "I don't care what you think!" he tells another. "No one does!" Often, he just hangs up on the person mid-sentence, mid-sob, mid-scream.

The ultimate message seems to be about the inherent dangers of free speech - evil bigots might try to violently shut you up, after all - and, therefore, the inherent disappointment we should have in ourselves with wasting our precious right by filling our minds and airwaves up with vapid nonsense. "What do you want to talk about?" Barry demands, spittle flying. "Baseball scores? Your pets? Orgasms?" When people in America, China, Cambodia and everywhere have fought and died for free speech shouldn't we honor that by… well, not wasting it all on pap? (Okay, we did feel a pang of this disappointment when we saw someone mention on a tech blog about how all our bandwidth gets choked up by Lindsey Lohan videos being e-mailed around.) Even as Barry claws towards success (and there's a great extended flashback which shows his meteoric rise as a shock jock), he is horrified that he should be so popular: in one memorable monologue, he rages at this popularity.

Yes, the war is coming! Yes, the world is shot to hell and you're all goners! Everything is screwed up and you like it that way!

This may as well be Barry talking directly to us. "You're fascinated by the gory details!" he screams. And it's true, we are. This movie is full of gory details - and you couldn't help but watch it.

In fact, this ironic/not-ironic hypocrisy of making a film about free speech's importance where the main speech freer meets a sorry end is endemic to the entire history of the play. There's a weird, Brechtian interplay between Barry versus his listeners, and Barry versus us. He is criticizing us; we may be nodding in sage agreement that bigots are bad and we shouldn't waste our airwaves on them, but here we are… wasting our airwaves on hateful people getting humiliated.

But the weird interaction between reality and the play goes deeper than that. This was a play based on a real event which was based on a fictional novel. It gets even stranger. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2007, several of its advertisements were censored. The feedback loop between Life and Art never seemed so narrow.

(A more detailed explanation of why we don't like Mainstream Misanthropy, as exemplified - to an extent - by this movie and - to a larger extent - by Frank Miller's and Alan Moore's graphic novels, such as "The Life and Times of Martha Washington" and Watchmen: why are homosexuality and feminism always equated with the end of society? This is almost always spouted sarcastically by, we are meant to believe, an indignant hero who is not homophobic and patriarchal. But we think that just by normalizing this language as "one of the typical reasons 1980s society was seen to be going down the tubes" is even dangerous in itself. You can't always expect people to detect the facetious!)

Anyway, this is definitely recommended - it's a challenging, electrifying piece.

Eight Men Out (1988)

Man! Make it John Sayles Week at the PPCC, this guy is on fire. New favorite rediscovered director!

So much is going on in Eight Men Out, the layered look at the 1919 Chicago "Black Sox" Scandal, but the first thing we thought of was: has any economist written a paper about this? Because this whole story is just screaming for a game theory model.

It's also, like any really good sports movie, an allegory for something much bigger - here, pragmatism versus transcendentalism/faith - and, like our other favorite sports movie, The Damned United, it is fundamentally about defeat. Heck, this movie could be called The Damned Divided.

Back when anyone really cared about baseball - that is to say, back in 1919 - the best team in the country - the Chicago White Sox - were enjoying a powerhouse season, and they were shoe-ins for the upcoming World Series. Betting on baseball games had also become a strong undercurrent to the sport's culture, and this film follows the story of the White Sox's notorious choice to throw the World Series in exchange for $100,000 per player (about $1.3 million in 2010 terms).

The eight players "out" came from a variety of backgrounds and did it for a variety of reasons. Sayles, ever the efficient storyteller, weaves their stories together and gives us fully-fleshed out characters even in one or two scenes. "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) is the team's star and an illiterate innocent. "Buckie" Weaver (John Cusack) is the team's passionate heart - he plays for sheer love, and is the only player to hear of the conspiracy and refuse to take part. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) is - as usual for David Strathairn characters - an older player, and a sympathetic, damaged has-been who is struggling to make ends meet for his family.

When the slimy-in-a-strangely-adorable-way gamblers, "Sleepy" Bill Burns (Christopher "1.21 Gigawatts!?!" Lloyd) and Billy Maharg (Richard Edson), approach the more crooked player (and by that, we mean the one that should have been an economist), "Chick" Gandil (Michael Rooker, of Slither!), the conspiracy to throw the Series is hatched.

"I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know, if I was the best at something. I mean, we're the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain't a ballgame. Yeah, but look at who's holding the money and look at who's facing a jail cell."
-Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) commenting on risk exposure - he may as well be talking about the financial crisis of 2007

As in Sayles' other film, Limbo, a Greek chorus is present in the form of two reporters, Ring Lardner (John Sayles himself!) and Hughie Fullerton (Studs Terkel!!!! The Pultizer Prize-winning historian!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!). You can think of Ring and Hughie as a number of things: at the meta/Brechtian level, they are Sayles and Terkel, real-life commentators watching history happen. They are also the Statler and Waldorf of the film (whimsically cynical), and the C3P0 and R2D2 (OK, well, Sayles is really tall and Terkel really short). Honestly, it was just so amazing on so many levels to have them in this film.

What's great about this film is how it clearly and carefully examines the tangled complexity of the scandal - the exploited, underpaid players, the team warring against itself (John Cusack's role was particularly poignant in this regard), the multiplication of risk and the invention of wealth as the conspiracy goes up the ladder to Big Money (God, it's the mortgage-Wall Street-entire American economy crisis all over again!). But a nice theme that kept popping up throughout the film was the impermanent transcendence of a gloriously good ball game. Like Michael Sheen's doomed Henry V Brian Clough in The Damned United, these players hanker at immortality - and they're on the edge of it. There's a touching scene when Buckie talks about the pure bliss of playing a good game. And indeed, some of the younger players - and their young fans - still dream these dreams. The older wash-outs like Eddie Cicotte and Abe Attell (Michael Mantell), a crooked boxer-turned-crooked gambler, have given up on these dreams and chosen to embrace mammon instead.

The film doesn't demonize mammon, though - instead, largely through David Strathairn's role as Cicotte, the need for financial security is given great weight and sympathy. It's practical, he has a family with young children, he's at the end of his career, and the "straight" path is exploiting him. The film really questions whether the transcendental can put food on the table, and it agonizes with the characters. There's a great exchange between Big Money, as embodied by the investor Rothstein (Michael Lerner), and boxer Atell:

Arnold Rothstein: Look, champ. I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. "Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say "Sit down, maybe you'll learn something." Well, I learned something alright. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands. Tell me, champ, all those years of puggin', how much money did you make?
Abe Atell: The honest fights or the ones I tanked?
Arnold Rothstein: Altogether, I must've made ten times that amount betting on you and I never took a punch.
Abe Atell: Yeah, but I was champ. Featherweight champeen of the world!
Arnold Rothstein: Yesterday. That was yesterday.
Abe Atell: No A.R. you're wrong. I was champ, and can't nothin take that away.

The terror of becoming a has-been is real: it's on Abe Atell's face when he sees Rothstein's waning interest in him. It's in Eddie Cicotte's strained right arm. Money lasts.

Sayles lets us tread the ambiguity for a while, but ultimately, the film sides with transcendentalism. There's another great exchange between the two crooked pitchers, Cicotte and "Lefty" Williams (James Read), when, after a string of thrown games, a listless Cicotte confesses he doesn't care about the money anymore. Lefty agrees: "Peculiar way of finding that out."

Another highly recommended one.

A Month in the Country (1987)

If there is one movie that is terribly, tragically underrated and unknown, it is A Month in the Country.

It's ironic because J.L. Carr's novel of the same name, on which the 1980s movie is based, is also terribly, tragically unknown. It just missed a Booker back in 1980, and instead won the Guardian Fiction Prize - a lesser trophy and, it seems, a punishment to anonymity. The movie, in the meantime, stars everyone's favorite English actors, Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh, as young World War I veterans struggling to cope with their traumatic experiences in the first, Elysian summer after peace is declared. It's great. Really beautiful. And there's no DVD for it!?!!


Colin Firth as Tom Birkin and Kenneth Branagh as Moon, both so young!

It's terrible, tragic and ironic, but it also makes sense - in a weird, double-agent-ironic way - that this small, understated story of remembering and loss should be on the verge of falling into the vacuum. The story is, after all, an extended meditation on nostalgia, grieving and renewal. It's about preserving yourself against the abyss; carving a space of light in a world where all seems dark. When Tom Birkin (Colin Firth) arrives in the tiny Yorkshire hamlet of Oxgodsby, he suffers from a stammer, a facial tic and terrible nightmares. He's also freshly divorced and still pining for his ex-wife, Vinnie (never shown on screen). He arrives in Oxgodsby in rainy twilight and makes his way to a gloomy church. His job for the coming summer months is to restore a decrepit, hidden 14th-century fresco from the church's ancient walls.

The pace is slow, matching the drift of motes in sunlight. Birkin meets another young vet, Moon (Kenneth Branagh), who has been paid to dig up the lost grave of a rich townie's ancestor. Moon is, like Birkin, still damaged from the war, though the quality of his suffering becomes an unexpected parallel with the mysterious artist's life. Birkin, when not drinking tea with Moon or brushing turpentine onto plaster, falls into quiet, intense love with the vicar's wife, Alice Keach (Natasha Richardson).


Love with the vicar's wife (Natasha Richardson)! The bit when she explains her apple savantness is so good.

Colin Firth recently waxed nostalgic about director Pat O'Connor's confidence in making this film: the story was allowed to breathe, actors were allowed to be silent. Indeed, the whole point of the film is the profound, emotional intensity that underscores this pleasant facade, and the uselessness of words. The trauma of World War I still lingers like a ghost in the landscape: and O'Connor does a brilliant job of never gazing directly at the war, but rather coming at it sideways. The most explicit war scene we see is the opening shot of Birkin struggling through the mud and barbed wire: the camera is zoomed tightly on him, we have little sense of context, and there's a sense of claustrophobia and horror. The haunting church hymns underscore the usual aphorism: war is hell (in the religious and literal senses). Similarly, Birkin and Moon's PTSD is a smothered suffering that we see only through the cracks of Birkin's twitch or Moon's nighttime howling.

But this story isn't about dwelling in the horribleness of World War I - rather, it's a realist, poignant look at slow healing. Oxgodsby's warm fuzziness is the perfect restorative for the broken vets, even if that healing is fragile and tentative. And the narrative is a looking back, so nostalgia is thick. The greatness of this story is the way it captures ephemeral beauty, a feeling that is vibrant and impermanent. Quite spiritual. And, like all art that does what it's supposed to, it captures and transmits an emotional quality.


We should probably mention that this film is, actually, in color.

The film is also a marvelous companion to the book - they both really enrich each other. And experiencing either is like breathing in purified rural gold. People, get thee to this film - or rather, get thee to preserving this rich work! We can't let gems like these disappear. Ahh, Angleterre. Where's good ol' William Blake when ya need him?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

(the book!)

Kin-Dza-Dza (1986)

Guest blogger Brianosaurus strikes again!

There’s nothing worse than being out of the loop on something you love. In my case, I love sci-fi. L O V E it. So recently I was a little distressed when I checked out IMDb's list of top 50 sci-fi movies and noticed that not only were there a few I had not seen, but more than a few I had not even heard of! (Note: see the bottom of the list to learn how IMDb calculates its ratings.) I had no choice: I had to start watching some movies.

Nestled at #34 on the list (between Night of the Living Dead and Solaris) sits Kin-Dza-Dza!, a fabulously funny bit of dystopian Russian social parody. The reader must take note that I’ve always had a soft spot for Russia. But Russian cinema (and literature) is often as bleak as a Siberian work camp. Kin-dza-dza!, directed by Georgi Daneliya, is refreshing in both its originality and clever humor.

Lots of sci-fi gets caught up in trying to explain itself. Kin-dza-dza! gets started so brilliantly that no explanation as to the who-what-when-where is required. Trust me, you’ll be hooked in the first 5 minutes like I was! All the viewer needs to know is that Vladimir (Stanislav Lyubshin, a Russian Roger Moore) and Gedevan (Levan Gabriadze) have wound up unwillingly on the planet Pluke (in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy).


Gedevan and Vladimir meeting the locals.

The story follows Vladimir and Gedevan as they try and make their way back to Earth. In order to do so they must navigate a bizarre and barren world which they know nothing about. On Pluke there is a seemingly nonsensical system of social hierarchy that, like many things in the film, isn’t explained because it simply cannot be. This is one of the reasons the movie works and I liked it so much. Just think about how much senseless racism and other social norms exist in our culture that can’t be explained. Unfortunately our travelers are on the low end of the totem pole and must, amongst other things, give homage to superiors in an amazing ritualistic display! (Unless said superior is wearing yellow pants, then they must do it twice!) Below is Wef and Bi (Evgeni Leonov and Yuriy Yakovlev, Russian Danny DeVito and John Cleese respectively) performing said display!


"Koo! Koo! Koo!"

Our protagonists wander the deserts of Pluke with the innocent misdirection of unprepared tourists. This allows the viewer to follow along and learn as they do. Not only is there a language barrier (for a concise Plukanian dictionary go here), but the entire planet is on a different system for EVERYTHING! For example, matches appear to be the most valuable item, and if you don’t wear your tsak (nose bell) you’ll get in trouble with an ecilop (police officer). Basically imagine you got dropped in the middle of Mos Eisley without Obi-Wan to cut off dudes' hands when things didn’t go right.


"...is a society without purpose."


Kin-dza-dza is a great movie. It’s simple and fun and pokes fun at (and makes us consider) our own society. I highly recommend it.

Note: This film is not currently available outside of Russia (where it was a hit). In order to watch it, you might be able to click here and here for a fan-subbed version of the film.

Ghost Busters (1984)

Ghostbusters, which may as well be titled Whitebusters, is, apart from its white-washing which we'll discuss below, a near-perfect film. Deeply ingrained into our 1980s childhood, some lines - such as, There is no PPCC, there is only Zool! - are eminently quotable and appropriate for all occasions. Or, even better, Choose the form of the destructor!

Set in the same bouncy, cynical, synthesizer-soaked 1980s urban landscape that the Enterprise crew found itself stumbling into once, a trio of paranormal aficionados are kicked out of Columbia University and their research grant terminated. While good ol' boy Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and nerdy Egon (Harold Ramis) are genuine in their interest in the paranormal, charlatan Pete Venckman (Bill Murray) is more interested in getting the girls and schmoozing with the crowds. His skepticism quickly evaporates, however, when the trio are called in by the New York Public Library to rid it of a spectral Victorian lady hovering through the stacks (and really messing up the Dewey index cards!).


This crazy town.


The three!

Without income, but with a renewed belief in the otherworldly apparitions which haunt Manhattan, they put a new mortgage on Ray's childhood home and decide to go in business as the Ghost Busters, paranormal exterminators. Business is slow at first, but when a posh apartment lady, Dana (Sigourney Weaver), starts getting harassed by her refrigerator - which, incidentally, opens onto another dimensions where ancient Sumerian demi-gods chant, ZOOOL!, into the steamy flames - business positively booms! And if demonic possession, floating grubby green things and 8000-year-old pissed off deities wasn't enough, the Ghostbusters eventually get harassed by the Environmental Protection Agency, as represented by the snide skeptic, Walter Peck (William Atherton).


One of the funniest ghosts: we love when he starts idly making loops around the chandelier and going, "Vroooom. Vroooom."

The reason we noticed this film's uncomfortable white-washing/colorblind racism/callitwhatyouwill, is because, when business really gets going, the Busters hire an additional member of the team: Jesus-loving, down-to-Earth guy, Winston (Ernie Hudson). And then we spend the rest of the move watching him get ignored - sometimes even, literally pushed aside! There were shots where the original three would have their conferences about what to do about Gozer the Gozerian, and Winston would just kinda be off to the side - we think Bill Murray was probably even blocking his line of sight! Then little, insidious things, like when the Busters have to cross their beams, and they each get a close-up shot of their face as they fire up - except, of course, for Winston, who is just shown in the end as being in the crossed beam group. So much for individuating him - out of a group of four, he becomes the only member who is truly amorphous, without distinction. It's really lame.


WTF? Why is Ernie Hudson stuffed behind Bill Murray's power pack?


WTF?

We don't think it's real racism, but we do think it's colorblind prejudices which are playing out in the details. And it brings an otherwise perfect, awesome movie down a notch. Blah.

Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984)

We kind of can't accept that Battlestar Galactica is over for us, and so we're desperately clawing at any possible debris which could have a BSG-related smell to it. Firefly? Hmm, kind of like BSG - only without the war and weird mythological stuff. But it'll do! Bob Dylan? Hmm, All Along the Watchtower is an important part of the BSG mythos. Very well! Hayao Miyazaki? Hayao Miyazaki?!

Yes, the transcendental visions of Hayao Miyazaki have a vague BSG connection in that:

1. Edward James Olmos AKA Old Man Adama voiced one of the characters in one of the films. 2. When we were still watching BSG, we visited a part of Uttarakhand that reminded us of Hayao Miyazaki vistas. Okay, sort of unrelated, but whatevs. (By the way, the Uttarakhand Tourism Board wants you to visit too!)

So, here we are, at the shores of Nausicaa and the Valley of the Winds. Before we begin: did you know that Nausicaa is the young princess who finds Odysseus washed up on her island and asks that fine naked man (played by Sean Bean in our head, always) to explain both his nudity and his lack of ship? And so begins his telling of... the Odyssey! Great.

But this Nausicaa is different, and much more Miyazaki-fied: the princess of a small, agricultural kingdom, the Valley of the Wind, she is one of the rare humans who can make peace with the oversized insects which crawl from the Toxic Jungle and threaten to override the little human settlements struggling to survive. One thousand years ago, giant soldiers laid waste to all the cities and took civilization down with it - after these "seven days of fire", a sort of un-Genesis, the Earth's environment was shot to pieces, and the remaining humans made a life clinging to the tiny pockets of land that didn't totally suck or poison them. Now two of the larger kingdoms - Tolmekia and Pejite - are warring over a powerful new weapon, and the Valley of the Wind is caught in between. It's up to Nausicaa, with her badass glider and Pikachu-type thing, to fix everything before Earth is ruined (again).


Some spectacular vistas.


Cannibalized WW2 bombers in an un-subtle but still powerful visual statement about Japan's post-war perspective.

Now, we haven't watched or reviewed a Miyazaki film in a long time, but the fact remains: you've seen one, you've seen them all. But that only means he's an anime auteur - every single film, while resembling the others in its environmentalism, feminism, ambiguity, mysticism and obsession with flight, is an enchanting, mesmerizing variation. The fantastic imagery is so palpably strange and beautiful! Here, we get glimpses into bizarre underworlds of petrified forests crumbling into sand, or rolling hills of undulating grasses. It's absolutely gorgeous!

Apart from being a visual treat, the music is similarly evocative (and sometimes even amusing). Heavy on 1980s synthesizer, it often sounds like a Ray Manzarek solo, though there are moments of such gut-wrenching, operatic emotion - when we arrive at the ruined kingdom of Pegite, for example - that you feel your heart beating in your throat. Yay!


That's Adama on the left, Captain Picard on the right.


Nausicaa: when not rescuing attractive, stranded Greeks, she's rescuing THE PLANET.

We enjoyed this movie very much and are considering it one of our favorites from Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli. The narrative storms forward with a compelling urgency that is sometimes lacking in Spirited Away or Castle in the Sky; yet we still find time to maintain that air of reflective meditation that characterizes all of his films. The voice acting is fine - Shia LeBeouf's being particularly distracting, but also heartbreakingly earnest - and there was a special pleasure in hearing Adama's voice complain about those crappy Tolmekian ships. Nothin' like the Bucket, eh!? Another enjoyable character was the smug, cartoonish Kurotowa (voiced by Chris Sarandon), who described himself as an "old, lazy soldier" and resembled an aging Lupin (the thief, not the sensitive werewolf) and provided some of the few genuine moments of comic relief.

The film's urgency also extends to the meta level - apart from the obvious environmentalism, the film is a plea for nuclear disarmament. The giant warriors resemble Godzilla in their vibe of post-nuclear mutant beasts, and Nausicaa makes constant demands for the Tolmekian and Pejite communities to lay down their weapons, once and for all. It shows how war ultimately scars the Earth, perhaps irredeemably, and the message is particularly harrowing in a post-Trinity world with very few Nausicaas indeed.

Working Girl (1988)

"I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up!"
-Working Girl

We love Working Girl.

There's no two ways about it. It's sexy, smart, feminist and purely lovable. It's got a sweet, clever humanism, managing to balance a dry sense of humor with a strong underlying Girl Power theme. It's one of our Personal PPCC Classics - a movie we always come back to, and, having watched it again today, a little older and wiser than last time, we admire it for its cheeky philosophical touches (more on those later).

First of all, Working Girl is about Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith). The setting is 1980s Manhattan, a land where men were men and admin assistants were still called "secretaries". But things were changing, and Tess - outwardly just another girl from Jersey with a towering hairdo, screaming-loud make-up and sneakers on her pantyhose - also harbors an intense passion for business. She struggles ambitiously, but finds herself repeatedly hitting the glass ceiling: her attempts to climb up the corporate ladder are invariably squashed, with the men implicitly or explicity degrading her to just another sex object.


Some not-so-subtle visual metaphors - in America, even women can make it! Yay!


Joan Cusak's look is GREAT in this film!

When one particularly sleazy boss (a young Oliver Platt!) basically pimps her out to his even sleazier buddy in arbitrage (a young Kevin Spacey!), Tess flips and quits. Her next job turns out to be under a woman, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). At first, things seem great: Katharine is the same age as Tess, and she gives a lot of lip service to helping her fellow sisters up the ladder. "It's a two-way street in here," she assures Tess, who glows at having finally found her "mentor".

Of course, things are not what they seem: when Tess proposes one of her brilliant business ideas to Parker, Katharine minimizes it. When Katharine then breaks her leg on a ski trip and gives Tess the keys to her flat, Tess finds Katharine's evil notes to secretly steal Tess's work and pass it off as her own.

The PPCC gets pretty into this film, so, at this point, we usually scream, "WELL, THIS WILL NOT DO!!! BRING ON THE CARPE DIEM!"


Could he be more wonderful? No.

And bring on the Harrison Ford! On the same day that Tess discovers that Katharine was stealing her business ideas, she also discovers that her blue-collar Jersey boyfriend, Mick (Alec Baldwin), has been cheating on her. Things seem pretty uniformly shit, until Tess hits on the idea of stealing her idea back from Katharine, re-doing her make-up and hairdo into Career Woman mode, stealing Katharine's clothes (ha!) and showing up at an exec drinks in order to meet and mingle. There, she meets fellow lion of the business jungle, Jack (a glorious Harrison Ford), who is immediately smitten. And, as luck would have it, he's also the go-to man for her business idea! It all seems to be falling back into place, but true love (and true business) never did run smooth... FOR LIARS! So how will Tess make it?!


We've been so inured in 30 Rock Alec Baldwin, we forgot this is what he used to look like!

Okay, so we love this film big time. BIG TIME. We love it for two reasons: first, it's well-made on almost every level. Directed by Mike Nichols, who made us cry for the evil lawyer-turned-good in Regarding Henry, this film has wonderful touches: nothing is ever taken too seriously, nor is anything mocked too much. The vibe is one of irreverent gentleness, and great sympathy for our girl Tess. Melanie Griffith is infinitely charming as the endearing Tess: she's a lovable mix of gentle and ambitious, innocent but sharply intelligent. Harrison Ford is rarely comic in this role, and he even pulls a Shashi by going a bit meta and mocking his own real life status as a stud (more on this below).

The second reason we love this film is that it's pro-girl power message is feminist without being too overt. Because unlike more bumbling attempts, Working Girl portrays the very real trials and tribulations we women folk have to face: the stare-downs from creepy men on the street, the hint of mocking when we stray from our traditional feminine roles. Just watch the men in the background as Tess passes: director Nichols never misses an opportunity to show how constantly, systematically objectified she is. Of course, it's cruelly ironic that this film was made by a dude, and that Harrison - the trophy boyfriend! - gets top billing. But the cheeky visual metaphor of the Statue of Liberty (a lady!) and the cunning musical metaphor of Carly Simon's all-girl gospely Let the River Run make up for these minor sins.


Free prize for anyone who can spot David Duchovny in this picture. His first appearance on screen!

And here's where things get great: Katharine and Jack are the new variations to this feminist tale. Katharine's the scary, predatory woman of post-feminism nightmares; she is aggressive, self-absorbed and demanding. Meanwhile, Jack is used both as a trophy boyfriend (director Nichols never misses an opportunity to objectify him! just watch all the women's expressions as Jack passes, or Joan Cusack's wonderful, "Coffee, tea... me?") as well as a way to undermine traditional norms of manhood while still, er, being manly. Partly this is because, well, he's Harrison Ford. But we also like to think that the movie's about showing how traditional gender roles don't have to end up with meek, subservient women and powerful, career-driven men - nor do women have to appropriate masculinity just to get ahead in business. (One of our favorite lines Jack says to Tess: "You're the first woman I've seen in one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman."). You can be a classy lady and a corporate warrior. You can be Indiana Jones and be unsure about yourself. And, if this fairy tale is to be believed, you can get the job and get the boy!

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Oh my God, that was brilliant.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is not only the best Star Trek anything we've ever seen, it might be one of the best films we've ever seen period. We haven't felt such sheer pleasure watching a movie since discovering the genre of zany 1970s masala. Oh, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where have you been all my life?

Buried under a stack of VHSs, apparently. But thank God, we unearthed it and can now say that there is a benchmark of demented genius. Now we know what to measure everything else against.


"Everybody remember where we parked!"

Picking up where Star Trek III: The Search for His Spockliness [sic] left off, the Enterprise's enterprising crew is chillin' on the New Mexico-like planet of Vulcan. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is still getting up to speed on everything from quantum physics to welfare economics, thanks to his new brain being all shiny and pure and unused. Meanwhile, a large, mysterious pod is floating through space emitting a high-pitched screech which sort of sounds like, "Eeeeeooooeeeeeeoooooeeeee." No one understands what is up with this pod, and, when it approaches Earth's atmosphere, the Earth people are alarmed to see that (1) the screeching doesn't stop, (2) machines stop working, and possibly (3) the oceans are evaporating.

The Enterprise crew, being that fraction more intelligent than everyone else (as required to be the heroes of the story), mess around with the screeching until it finally sounds like, "Eeee. Oooo. Eeeeeeee." Which, duh (Spock says), that's the cry of the humpback whale. Clearly the pod is trying to speak with Earth's whales (take that, anthro-centric sci-fi!), and only a whale will be able to respond and thereby free Earth of the pod's auditory tentacles of doom.

"But humpback whales went extinct in the 21st century!" Kirk (William Shatner) says, in a subtle injection of 1980s environmentalism. "I guess we'll just have to time-travel and go get one."


"Computer? Computer?"

At this point, the PPCC's head was filled with exclamation marks. Was this the best film ever?!!

And it only got better! Once they warp themselves back to 1986, the Enterprise crew parks their spaceship in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, ("Everybody remember where we parked!" Kirk tells the group) and embarks on their mission to, uh, find a whale to steal. The adventures each of them have are absolutely priceless: the aquarium, Kirk and Spock learning about "colorful metaphors" ("Double dumbass on you!" Kirk fumbles at one point), Scotty (James Doohan) managing 20th century computers, Chekov (Walter Koenig) trying to steal nuclear energy from a US Navy vessel (and even just trying to find directions to "zee nuclear wessels"), and on and on. Much of these golden comedy moments are on YouTube, but we won't spoil the punchlines for you: just do what we say and watch this film.


Kirk excuses Spock's behavior by noting that he "did a little too much LDS" in the 1960s.

And the comedy is just part of the fun! In true Trekkie style, the dynamic between all the crew members - and the visible affection they have for each other - is an absolute joy. This doesn't just extend to Kirk and Spock (though they're the top duo and in top form), but everyone gets a moment to shine and engage in character-defining ridiculousness. What's also great is that, while the vibe of this film is A Good Time in the style of 1980s iconic comedy sci-fi (e.g. Back to the Future), we can still squeeze in some interesting philosophical nuggets. Our favorite being McCoy's (DeForest Kelley) exasperated attempts to psychoanalyze and philosophize with a newly-resurrected Spock:

McCOY: Perhaps we could cover a little philosophical ground. Life... Death... Life. Things of that nature.
SPOCK: I did not have time on Vulcan to review the philosophical disciplines.
McCOY: C'mon Spock, it's me, McCoy. You really have gone where no man's gone before. Can't you tell me what it felt like?
SPOCK: It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference.
McCOY: You're joking!
SPOCK: A joke... is a story with a humorous climax.
McCOY: You mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death?
SPOCK: Forgive me, doctor. I am receiving a number of distress calls.
McCOY: ...I don't doubt it.

Heeee.

Our overall anti-Trekkie verdict: highly recommended. Run, don't walk.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Not to give things away but they do, in fact, find him.

Unwilling to pay another $X to see the 2009 Star Trek again in cinemas, and in our quest to get over our deeply-ingrained anti-Trekkie prejudice, we have decided to delve into the home VHS pile. This is what we found.

Disclaimer: Apart from the 2009 film, we've never seen any Star Trek. After seeing this, we can remember why we avoided it. Death to Trek, raaah!

Okay, that's mean. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is actually a rollicking good time, most of the time. Much of the humor is admittedly unintentional, but there's just so much sheer, pure love flowing between the characters, creators and fans of Star Trek, that it's hard not to get a little warm and fuzzy yourself. And with one macho guy, one grumpy guy and one emotionally-dead-inside guy frequently proclaiming their love for each other (often with tears!) -

SPOCK: [to Kirk] I have been and always shall be your friend.
McCOY: [to an unconscious Spock] I'm gonna tell you something that I... never thought I'd ever hear myself say. But it seems I've... missed you. And I don't know if I could stand to lose you again.
KIRK: [to Spock's dad] If I hadn't tried [to save Spock's life], the cost would have been my soul.

- gosh, well, we at the PPCC were positively aglow with good vibes! No wonder these people generated slash.


Can these three possibly love each other more? The answer has been and always shall be... no. (Interesting side note: this film was directed by Leonard Nimoy!)

Because The Search for Spock is ultimately about love. Predominantly male love. The love of fathers to sons, sons to fathers, and friends to friends. The love of a captain to his science officer. A doctor to his captain. Etcetera.

We begin our masculine love journey with a tragedy: Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is dead. The spaceship Enterprise and its crew - Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Engineer Scotty (James Doohan), Token Symbolically Post-Cold War Chekov (Walter Koenig), Token Multicultural Sulu (George Takei), and Token Post-Race (but not post-gender, apparently, as she does nothing!) Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) - have just docked into a massive way station for some calm-time. But McCoy's been acting weird ever since Spock died - like, really weird. Brainwashed weird. And it soon comes to pass that Spock, before his death, MIND-MELDED (our favorite thing ever!) with the good doctor and is using the latter's brain kinda like a jump drive.


How would you like a taste... OF MY BRAIN?!


What's Spock's first name, anyway? Spockfield?

So what to do, before McCoy's brain just melts under the sheer weight of his Spockliness? Find Spock! They seek out his coffin on the planet of Genesis, the science project-gone-wrong of Kirk's well-meaning scientist son (?!), David (Merritt Butrick). Everything on Genesis ages really rapidly and violently. It can even make cells regenerate. Spock's coffin was shot out into Genesis. Convenient!

What's not so convenient: the arrival of a small band of angry Klingons on Genesis, led by a pissed-off Doctor Emmett Brown, Commander Kruge (Christopher "1.21 GIGAWATTS!?" Lloyd). Action-adventure ensues.


Why is it whenever we need Star Trek caps, we find something totally bizarre?

This was all very fun and a little demented and certainly gloriously space masala at times, but - gosh darned it - we just cannot take this stuff seriously. Maybe it's the Enterprise's carpeted hallways. Maybe it's those somewhat-too-tight pants everyone's wearing. The hokey faux Navy vibe? (Actually, we kinda dig that.) Whatever it is - despite Star Trek's excellent narrative structure, cunning and bizarre sci-fi ideas, and the great characterizations - we just cannot take it as anything more than funny and cute. Are we too old? Did we miss the boat?

Taking a break from our usual film analytics, can we just say something else? McCoy! McCoy McCoy McCoy. A grumpy, mint julep-jonesing doctor who introduces himself by his phobia? All gruff and twitchy and cynical and yet a total softie inside? A guy who professes his love by using cosmological comparisons?! BE STILL, MY HEART! OH, TOO LATE - IT'S DEAD, JIM! Leonard has killed it.

That is all.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Like a great looming shadow, so is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's impossible to write a blog on Hindi movies without mentioning the film a kabillion times - if only because of its outrageously offensive Orientalism, and the fact that Amrish Puri is in it. Yesterday, after a full-on Harrison Ford bonanza of film-watching, which included much of the Star Wars sixology as well as the underwhelming What Lies Beneath, we watched Temple of Doom. It was like the "oogledy boogledy!" icing on a crazy cake.

The last time we had seen it, we were young, impressionable Harrison Ford worshipers who didn't worry about things like Orientalism and just focused on how glistening his biceps were. Now, older and wiser, we can say: his biceps are so shiny! And his chest...! Ooh, la la.

Many apologies. This is a SERIOUS review about a SERIOUS problem: the wrongness of Temple of Doom. Because, as one of our viewing companions noted, if the government won't let you film in their country because your story is too racist and your top-choice screenwriter refuses to work on it because he finds it "ugly and mean-spirited", maybe it's time to rethink the story? Apparently not, Spielberg and Lucas decided.

In Temple of Doom, which could be titled Indy Takes On Asia, we follow the continuing adventures of Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, He of the Heroical Jawline), archaeologist, adventurer, stud. The story opens in China, where, after an unfortunate run-in with some Shanghai-based gangsters, Indy is almost poisoned to death, but saved by his sidekick, Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), and an antidote buried deep in the bosom of the blonde, vacuous Willie (Kate Capshaw, a self-proclaimed feminist - who knew!). Boarding the first plane they find, they fly off into the Himalayas, where the evil pilots parachute away, leaving them in charge of a plane without fuel. (An expensive way to kill someone, but no matter.) Indy and the gang are saved by the cunning use of an inflatable raft.


A KEY SCENE for worshipers of Harrison Ford's body. For the love of Harrison Ford, LOOK at that arm! That jawline!

After careening down the Himalayas, they flop into a river (the Ganges?!) and are swept into a poor, starving village. The despairing villagers inform Indy that one of their Shiva lingam stones has been stolen by the dastardly residents of the nearby Pankot Palace. Indy et al. assure the villagers that they will get their lingam back. After meeting the bespectacled, Anglicized "Prime Minister" of Pankot (Roshan Seth... who else?), eating monkey brains, beetle bums and snake-filled-with-snakes, the gang gets lost in the labyrinthine palace cellars. There, they witness a thundering, blood-smeared Kali worship session, complete with human sacrifice and Amrish Puri (yay!) in a feathered headdress. They also witness child slavery, and this is clearly not gonna fly. So after a very, very long and violent denouement, Indy gets the lingam back, curses Amrish Puri in his own Hindi ("Tum vishwas karte ho!" Harrison seethes, again and again), frees the children and manages to boost the village's agricultural yields in the meantime! Who needs the World Bank and Amnesty International when you've got Indy!?

One tiny point in this film's favor on the Sensitivity Scale was the moment when Indy, Willie and Short Round are welcomed to the village. Fed some paltry curry on a banana leaf, Willie refuses because it looks gross, and Indy starts to lose his patience: "This is more than these people eat in a week. Eat it. You're offending them and embarrassing me." We've actually faced some similar situations before (minus the demonic cult bit), and it's actually a nice little moment showing the inadvertent offensive behavior people can have, especially in places of poverty.

But that moment of enlightenment feels more like an accident than anything intentional.


When we go to India, we want (1) to have Roshan Seth greet us in spectacles with "PPCC, the eminent blogger?" and (2) chilled monkey brains for desert.

So: were we really offended by Temple of Doom? Is it really so SERIOUS? Its outrageously unrealistic representation of India is about as outrageously unrealistic (and in the same, zany, mish-mash aesthetic!) as the representations of the British in masala films like Mard or Kranti. A key difference is that, with confident and optimistic American-centric machismo, Indy just wants to help these poor north Indian folk... speaking not-Hindi... in a palm-treed village... by the Himalayas. That - this fuzzy feeling of wanting to help people - is already a lot more palatable for the PPCC than the underlying anger of Mard and Kranti, which uses the real historical problem of colonialism to make a film filled with racist violence and mutual ridicule. Of course, silly, racist Hollywood films and silly, racist Hindi films will probably have different tones (optimistic vs. pessimistic racism?) given the different historical contexts. Or are we being silly and racist?!

After all this talk, we weren't really personally offended by Temple of Doom. We knew what we were getting into. Because not only is it ignorant and, well, stupid, but it's also just bad. It does itself damage by the ridiculousness of its premise and presentation - over-the-top even for Indy! - and we're pretty confident that anyone of average intelligence who is older than 12 will recognize that you can't get your ideas about the world from the Indiana Jones series. Trying to apply logic or subtlety to Indy is like trying to make cheese ice cream: it's just not gonna happen! It won't work! What's more important is: does the stupidity and racism of Temple of Doom have possibly damaging consequences in real-life? We at the PPCC don't think so - apart from feelings of annoyance, like the caricatures of Americans in Karan Johar films - we trust in people to know that Indy is not really a good guide to the world. Are we too optimistic? Are we too optimistic because we're white? Do we sound like Harrison Ford when he speaks Hindi ("Row-kow!"
he tells people when he wants them to stop)? We'll let the reader लोग decide.