The Tempest (2010)

We had been hearing about Julie Taymor's The Tempest for nigh on two years now, ever since Helen Mirren was announced to be playing the role of a female Prospero (called Prospera - catchy!). Imagine our delight and excitement when we learned that they were also adding some of our favorites - Chris Cooper! Djimon Hounsou! DAVID. STRATHAIRN! - to the mix.

However, The (girl) Tempest is a big mess; incoherent and over-the-top visuals coupled with a chopped-up Shakespeare that's barely recognizable. Most people agree (statistic!) that Shakespearean plots don't resonate with modern audiences anymore - twins, shipwrecks, fairies, love at first sight, those wretched proletarian comedy subplots, people being deceived by masks or a pair of pants - ha! We are not so easily duped as those Elizabethan yokels. And that's not why us modern folk usually watch the Bard - we watch it for his epic, fancy talking (so Elizabethan! so complicated! so fancy!). So when you remove the talking, you're left with a lot of silliness. And when you amp up the ridiculous elements with Xena: Warrior Princess-style CGI and loony, masala-style close-ups, the audience (or, at least, the PPCC) feels overwhelmed and eventually alienated. Nothing really could resonate in all that bombastic mishmash.

The plot: Prosper(a) (Helen Mirren), the exiled Duchess of Milan, is living on some random island with her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones). She is a great magician, and she uses her dark arts - along with the help of her enslaved fairy, Ariel (a gender-less Ben Wishaw) - to destroy a passing ship in a passing thunderstorm. Onboard are none other than all her political rivals: her conniving brother Antonio (Chris Cooper), King Alonso of Naples (David Strathairn), his brother Sebastian (Alan Cummings) and the kind-hearted consigliere (or somesuch) Gonzalo (Tom Conti). They are all shipwrecked together on one side of the island. On the other side emerges Alonso's son, Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), and - from a third angle - the dim-witted shipmates, Trinculo (a mighty Russell Brand) and Stephano (Alfred Molina). Add the controversial character of Calaban (Djimon Hounsou, in burnt, peely skin) to the mix, and you have the cast. Mostly, the story is about all of them bumping into each other and eventually bumping into Prospera, where they all apologize and Miranda says, "O brave new world! That has such people in it!" The end.

Hacking the text to pieces was really a shame, since so much was lost or garbled - ultimately appearing superficial and daft. Ferdinand and Miranda see each other and are immediately smitten. It's idiotic! OK, that always happens, but here, it's idiotic and inarticulate. This is also a shame, since the cast is really top-notch, and they do quite well given their muted, over-simplified dialogues: Helen Mirren is, of course, amazing in her role, and yes, there is some ephemeral interest in seeing the Prospero-Miranda dynamic become a mother-daughter thing. (It makes the Ferdinand treatment make a bit more sense, at least.) Similarly, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming do well; while David Strathairn just mopes. Alfred Molina and Russell Brand basically do slapstick, and Djimon Hounsou's interpretation of Calaban is bravely, troublingly close to slave stereotypes. (We've seen productions where Calaban was played as a ghoul-buffoon; here, he's a proud, dignified, angry slave.) Ben Wishaw was fine, though his occasional breasts and lack of genitals distracted.

There were some strange moments, when the music and imagery came together to produce scenes from Dune; we half-expected Helen Mirren to declare, "Yes! For he is the Kwizatz Haderach!" Think fuzzy, reverb-heavy electric guitar slamming down on minor power chords, coupled with epic shots of Prosper(a) standing on cliff precipices.

It's a shame this movie emphasized its million visual ideas (much to its detriment; like the over-stuffed Daywatch) rather than its story or text. Even genuinely striking visuals were lost in the mush; one great moment, for example, was when Ariel explains to Prospera that all the nobles - while given a good scare - emerged scratchless from the shipwreck. In that moment, we see David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alan Cumming and Tim Conti suddenly emerge, fully upright, in the rocky ocean, as if the water level itself was decreasing. A quirky, fun visualization of being unharmed! Alas that it was just a brief gem in a messy sea of good, bad and ugly.

Speakeasy (2002)

We were kind of hoping Speakeasy would be a hidden gem, something demonstrating the grassroots screenwriting talent that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Project Greenlight was supposed to uncover. Unfortunately, Speakeasy - the runner-up for Project Greenlight's first year - demonstrates only how mediocre and uninspired screenwriting can be.

Failed magician Bruce (David Strathairn) lives a monotonous, suburban existence with his wife, Sophie (Stacy Edwards), and scrappy black labrador. One day, he gets in a minor traffic accident with Frank (Nicky Katt), a pawn shop owner, and they become friends. Sophie's father (Arthur Hiller) is deaf and Sophie doesn't like this - in fact, she's not on speaking terms with him. Frank's daughter (Gage Golightly) is also deaf, but Frank is OK with this. One day, a former classmate of Sophie's, now a successful psychiatrist, Dr. Addams (Christopher McDonald), starts flirting with Sophie and giving her informal therapy sessions at the local coffee shop.

The writing and direction, both by Brendan Murphy, crawl along with amateur aimlessness - the tone is indistinct, the point mysterious. At times, we sensed that it was going for an American Beauty-type vibe of quirky, semi-philosophical cynicism. But we really can't be too sure, since the music was so campy and the writing so full of lazy clichés. Some melodrama is weakly injected via Sophie's "therapy" - where she relates the various traumas of her youth, and Dr. Addams becomes a caricature of jealousy - but it's forced and inorganic.

Such a shame! That moody, red-lit poster deceived us - we had imagined all sorts of grimy, exciting storylines full of envelope-pushing, slightly surreal ideas. You know: David Strathairn is a unicorn hunter addicted to magical space glitter; his ladyfriend is only one incarnation of a hive mind. Music by The Mars Volta. Dystopian. SOMETHING LIKE THAT. ANYTHING. Not this unimaginative pap.

Passion Fish (1992)

John Sayles is a great director. He sets up clever symbols or reassuring stereotypes and then gleefully subverts them. Passion Fish is not his strongest film (we liked Limbo more), but it is another interesting, atmospheric look at a broad philosophical question set within a particular American niche culture.

In this case, it's about the painful, crucial clash between harsh realities and dreamy fantasies, and the setting is 1990s Louisiana. May Alice (Mary McDonnell) wakes up one morning to find herself paralyzed from the waist down. A successful soap opera star, she has just been in a car accident. With his wonderful economy of storytelling, Sayles shows us shots of May Alice the Misfit of Rehab. She falls further and further into depression, eventually retreating to her childhood home in rural Louisiana, where she spends her days drinking, watching daytime television and scaring a series of caretakers away.


Soap opera as Greek chorus and weird Freudian fantasy projection of our own harsh realities.


The restorative properties of fine Louisiana flora.

That is, until Chantelle (Alfre Woodward) arrives. Chantelle is quiet, evasive even, but also straightforward and steady as a nurse. She provides May Alice the support she desperately needs to get her life back on track and, as the physical therapist constantly chides, build her strength.


Both damaged, both on the road to recovery.

Meanwhile, a parade of characters troop through the family home. There is May Alice's hard-drinking dandy of an uncle (what shoes!). There are her former childhood enemies and her vapid New York City friends. And then there are the men. In a rare subversion of typical gender norms in film, this film not only passes the Bechdel Test (with flying colors!), its only two recurring male characters are sex objects. One is Sugar LeDoux (Vondie Curtis-Hall), a Frenglish-speaking Creole (or is it Cajun?) strutting peacock who flirts and charms Chantelle relentlessly. The second is Rene Boudreaux (David Strathairn), a Frenglish-speaking Creole (or is it Cajun?) sweaty handyman who flirts and charms May Alice relentlessly. While Chantelle of the Harsh Reality proceeds into sexy manfriendship with caution, May Alice of the Crushed Fantasy falls hard and fast into thick, soap operay, David Strathairny love. LOVE, she says.


Chantelle and Sugar.


May Alice and Rene.

There are two reasons we didn't heart this movie as much as Sayles' other work. First, he has a tendency to be really, really strong on the fast-paced, spare storytelling style - when the Black Sox are setting up their paydays, when Alaskans bemoan their self-inflicted purgatory - and, in Passion Fish, he gets bogged down with the whole cycle of self-pity/self-healing. Given that the restorative properties of soulful, rural areas is already well-established in cinema, a lot of this could have been sped up. (Though having Mary McDonnell use the Yank accent for moments of self-pity, and the drawling Louisiana one for moments of clarity and equanimity was a nice touch.) Second, we were disappointed that he didn't push some of the envelopes further. For example, mixed ethnicities are an integral characteristic of modern Creole and Cajun cultures, so it was a let-down to see the two couples pair off along racial lines. (By the way, did you know that David Strathairn is of mixed heritage? Pacific Islander and Scottish. Yeah.)

(By the way, when David Strathairn said "bon chance!": sexy mantimes!)


Gratuitous David Strathairn shot. Yes, he pwns this blog these days. Deal with it!

But don't let these mild criticisms deter you. This is still another strong entry by our current favorite director. Can we call him an auteur? Or, perhaps a more urgent question: why is there no John Sayles Box Set?! Why is it not in our hot little hands!?! Right now?!!?!

The Rivalry (2009)

Okay, so this isn't a movie, but whatever.

We finally got our hands on the audio recording of The Rivalry, a play that was performed at the LA Theatre Works in 2009. Written by Norman Corwin, The Rivalry examines the legendary marathon debates between incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas and a young(ish) Abraham Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. It stars Paul Giamatti (!) as Douglas and David Strathairn (!!!) as Lincoln. Holy mother of God.

So we haven't reviewed it yet, but the HBO miniseries, John Adams, was something of a Big Event here at the PPCC, and it rekindled the flame we have in our hearts for American history. Gosh, we do like our American history. And Civil War stuff is one of our favorite topics. Hence our nerdgasm upon seeing Paul Giamatti, of John Adams fame, and David Strathairn, of glorious John Sayles movies and, of course, Good Night and Good Luck, in a play about that fertile, fascinating period.

The play does a great job of capturing the character of Lincoln (we're not as familiar with Douglas - shamefully). Apart from being, well, really tall and vaguely noble, not many know that Lincoln also had quite a high-pitched voice, suffered from recurring bouts of serious depression, and was famous for telling good jokes. This is all (wonderfully) exploited in the play, what with Strathairn's wry, drawling debate style and - typical for Strathairn roles - underlying sense of the dignified yet damaged. Giamatti brings his John Adams-the-firebrand passion to the role of Douglas - indeed, the story is told from his point of view, and it really raises the historical figure of Douglas out of his "racist guy who lost to Lincoln" hole (well, in our heads) to someone much more complex and intriguing.

Mostly, we just follow the debates - the main argument between the Democrat Douglas and the Republican Lincoln was over slavery, and whether states had a right to maintain their slavery-enabling status quo, or whether the Federal government was justified in abolishing slavery on a nationwide scale. The debate over this issue was eventually one of the things that split the country in two - something both Douglas and Lincoln are anxious to avoid during these debates, even if both are pessimistic. And the debate itself is passionate, if unnerving - they debate over the relative inferiority of races (and if such a hierarchy exists), over the Declaration of Independence's interpretations ("…that all men are created equal…"), over the rights of the state versus the rights of the nation. Everything is done with great passion, debating cleverness and respect. The arguments are exhilarating and maddening.


Woohoo!

There are also brief, revealing interludes - the "backstage" moments between the two men and, occasionally, Mrs. Douglas (Lily Rabe). In fact, one of the best bits is when Mrs. Douglas runs into Lincoln on the train; their candid confessions and respectful disagreements are touching. Is it time for shameful, totally inappropriate yet totally awesome historical fanfic? WHAT?! I'M JUST SAYIN'. It's probably out there already, knowing the intertoobs. (If you find it, tell us.) (Actually, maybe I'll just get down to writing it myself.)

Now, if they only turned these debates into an anachronistic, ironic, Jon Stewart-flavored punk rock musical, life would be complete.

Evidence of Blood (1998)

Evidence of Blood is a B-movie mystery that aims low-middle and hits pretty squarely. The only real reason to watch this film is for the charming and attractive David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell, who mostly do what they usually do (dazzle us with their raw physicality).

Set in wintry Georgia, with southern accents that come and go, this is a land of jeans, diner coffee and pick-up trucks. Crime novelist Kinley (David Strathairn) returns to his hometown after the death of his childhood friend. While there, he uncovers fresh evidence on a 40-year-old murder mystery that still haunts the town to this day. The convicted murderer's adult daughter, Dora (Mary McDonnell), is also busy with bringing her deceased father to justice.

There are some of the usual noir trappings - mysterious car headlights following the hero at night, explorations down wells (also at night), nightmares and lots of sexy sweating into bedsheets, the parallel between serial killers and the crime fighters and their perverse obsession with violent acts, and lots of people going, "Just let it go, ya hear!"

But this is like Diet Mystery, and even the southernness is lightly done. At least, David Strathairn can't seem to decide whether to do the accent or not. Whatevs! That's OK! He and Mary McDonnell are so lovable regardless of what they do or how hard they try. They have a nice chemistry as well, what with Mary McDonnell's Laura Roslin-style searching stares of warmth and goodness coupled with David Strathairn's Jumpin' Joe-style evasiveness. Nice "jelly roll", guys. PPCCkapow!

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.

Limbo (1999)

Oh man. We forgot how incredibly good this movie is.

Limbo, a moody, intelligent film by John Sayles, is set in present-day Alaska. The state stands in for Limbo itself - if you define Limbo as a state of in-betweenness that goes on forever and ever. Because Alaska is struggling between its past and its future (with a present that tries to market one to the other), between being a frontier to the existential vacuum (visiting retirees and drifting non-people populate the state, and murder-suicides occur regularly "when people get too bored") and being a real home, a place to settle. What it most certainly is not is definitive.

This state of floating, anxious in-betweenness extends to the characters as well. Donna de Angelo ("woman of the angel", an excellent Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is a lounge singer living in her own purgatory - too good for total obscurity, not good enough to make it big, she lives a non-life traveling around the country and singing in anonymous bars. Her dark, teenage daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), grudgingly accompanies her. When the de Angelos meet "Jumpin'" Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), both are smitten. And we learn that the perpetually cautious and, well, jumpy Joe is drifting along as well - wounded from long-festering survivor guilt, he broods as a dark fixture at the town's main bar.

Limbo, the film, is presented in two distinct acts. The first act is a complex, layered (and often very funny) introduction to the characters and the world they live in. Sayles layers cross cuts over each other, playing with dialogues to create one strange, cohesive monologue about the State of Alaska (which might as well be the State of Being, considering how existential the story is). The scene in the bar, with all the seemingly unrelated conversations, is a great example of this. Also weaving in and out of this noise is a tour guide, who serves as a Greek chorus. When Joe's half-brother, Bobby (Casey Siemaszko), and his dubious drug dealing past show up, the tour guide walks by telling her retiree audience (and us) about "desperate men" that come to Alaska, ready to kill and be killed.

The second act has its own Greek chorus as well - now embodied in the mysterious, 19th-century frontiersgirl diary that Noelle finds, once she, Donna and Joe end up stranded on a remote, uninhabited islet after a very, very bad mix-up between the Gastineau brothers and some other drug dealers. Noelle reads from this diary every night, and the parallels between the previous inhabitants - a family of three, scraping out a frontier life by fox pelting - and the current trio are obvious to the point of being blunt. That bluntness is OK, though, because of how poignant and universal the feelings are. Joe, Donna and Noelle may be literally stuck in a suspended state of existence, a no man's land, but we are all prone to existential angst and asking the big questions. Why? What?

The movie is ultimately philosophical, but it can easily be enjoyed as a quasi-satirical, Altman-esque character piece of America's forgotten corners, as a touching romance between Joe and Donna, and as a Cast Away-type survival adventure. The three leads are very strong. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is charming, vulnerable and, frankly, amazing when she belts out those bar tunes. David Strathairn's "tall, dark stranger" persona is very well-used - he seems perpetually uncomfortable, visibly tormented. And Vanessa Martinez was great - it's so rare to see teenagers (and teenagerdom) portrayed intelligently and realistically, without caricature.

Highly recommended.

Racing Daylight (2007)

If NPR ever decided to start making movies, Racing Daylight would probably be their first box office smash. (Or flop, actually.) Because Racing Daylight - a tweedy, low-fi look at a small, East Coast town's past and present - is very, very NPR. And it stars David Strathairn! You can't get more charmingly "this American life" than that. Cape Cod ho!

Sadie (Melissa Leo) lives a dead-end life on Sesame Street whatever street she lives on in Cedarsville, New York. Death and life are a bit blurred here in Cedarsville, since Sadie's been receiving spectral visitations from Civil War vets. When not seeing ghosts, she tends to her catatonic grandmother (Le Clanche du Rand) and pines mutely after the dashing handyman (and adorably nerdy Civil War freak), Henry (David Strathairn, looking pretty dashing indeed!). The ghosts meanwhile creep in and take over Sadie's life, flinging her back to the high romance of Cedarsville during the Civil War, when she - now named Anna - was pining much more vocally for the dashing soldier, Harry (David Strathairn, now with facial hair and even more dashing!), and her young, slightly dodgy "killer inside me" husband, Edmund (Jason Downs).

Filmed on a shoestring budget, with costumes and props seemingly from the Dollar Store, Racing Daylight has some moments which are adorable and quirky and charming, and many other moments which are scrape-out-your-eyeballs awful. Relatedly, the tone swings wildly around - is it a Gothic horror-romance? Is it a whimsical What's Eating Gilbert Grape?-ish look at the weird and wonderful of American's forgotten poor? Is it a David Strathairn/Civil War broad comedy gush fest? Any of these options would have been great. Unfortunately, Racing Daylight has shrieking violins in one moment and dueling banjos the next. It has some very good acting - such as David Strathairn's pitch perfect weirdness as Henry the Nerd, with his "Do you like facts?" non sequiturs - and some very bad acting - such as Melissa Leo going a bit too broad on the coy girlishness of Sadie-infatuated. The writing is rough. And, overall, everyone is very, very earnest - which earns some points, at least. Hey, we wouldn't mind sitting in a classroom or a museum and watching this while someone explained the threading work in Union uniforms. Hey, so we're earnest Civil War buffs too - sue us!

But should YOU watch it? ("Wait, wait, don't tell me!" we hear you cry.) Well... if, like us, you get your kicks from American history and, especially, facts, then yes. There just aren't enough Civil War movies out there, and it's always nice to see a smart Union uniform. Be warned, though, this is not by any measure a "good" movie. It's clunky, clumsy, awkwardly filmed and very cheap. If you want fancy, polished filmwork on the era, go for Glory (to cry), Gettysburg (to learn, and then cry), Cold Mountain (OK, we haven't actually seen this one) or Shenandoah (to Jimmy Stewart). If you don't need to focus on the Civil War, but instead would just appreciate a handheld tour through history with David Strathairn, preferably in a state of romantic poverty, then you can watch any number of excellent John Sayles films - Limbo (Alaska!), Matewan (West Virginia!), Eight Men Out (daaaa Bears!). If you don't have any of those at hand, this will do.

Oh yeah, and if you like Tom Waits' experimental industrial music with saws and banjos and other hard-to-identify instruments, you can watch this. The intro music is crazy!
<=== and what is that cover about?!