It’s always a bad sign when my Hot Wife switches to Spanish, which she did after watching about 20 minutes of the premiere of Terra Nova.  She dubbed it Terra Mierda.  I won’t translate it for you gringos; just understand that it does not mean “World of Quality Entertainment.”

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Now, understand that it gives me no pleasure to report that Terra Nova is off to a crappy start.  None.  Anyone living in California knows lots of people who work in the Industry, from crew to talent, who rely on production to feed their families.  We want shows to be great, to be hits, to run for years.  And none of them got up and said “I want to take an interesting idea and turn it into a hackneyed, tedious death march.” Well, maybe the writers and producers did – the vicissitudes of chance do not account for how they managed to hit every tiresome cliché and make every bad choice available every time.

The conceit of Terra Nova is that a bunch of people from 2189 are sent back in time from a polluted, fascist Earth 85 million years to restart human civilization.  They face all sorts of ferocious dinosaurs, which is cool, and that have all sorts of bitchin’ guns, which is also cool.  Steven Spielberg is involved with it, and once upon a time he made movies I actually liked.  Fox is spending a fortune on it.  It should be kinda interesting and kinda fun.

But no.

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In his article on Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio and the controversy that ensued because of its pornographic imagery, art critic Dave Hickey noted that the efficacy of Mapplethorpe’s art was in enfranchising “…ultimately, that senator from North Carolina [Senator Jesse Helms] and insist[ing] upon his response.” In Hickey’s opinion, if you “deal in transgression,” the response and respect of a hipsterish art cognoscenti has no value. The only response that really matters is the outrage of the senator, ‘only the senator, the Master of Laws, the Father…” 

Robert Mapplethorpe was not the first and certainly will not be the last child who managed to outrage the father.  Criticism of religious and social order is not really a modern phenomenon and, however tempting, cannot be attributed to deconstructive neo-Marxists tendencies in American art. 

Child’s perpetual desire to dethrone father is usually matched by father’s not so subtle urge to devour his offspring. Some fathers need to be enraged, rebelled against, and dethroned. One could only wish that Saddam Hussein’s sons would’ve inspired a national rebellion against their father’s authority instead of becoming his instruments of torture and pillage. 

Director Ingmar Bergman, on the other hand, rebelled against the patriarchal religious order of rigid Scandinavian Protestantism. He upset many fathers, including his own pastor dad who did not approve of his son’s obsession with theater and the lantern’s ability to project images on a wall. 

But the efficacy of Bergman’s rebellion was in his ability to outrage the father, not as a juvenile, but as a child coming into his own. His rebellion was sincere, his criticism of authority genuine and threatening. 

It was also self-aware. As a true thinker and artist who could travel in time, Bergman knew that every child is just an intercourse away from becoming a father. Not surprisingly, one can find more religious insight and earnest attempt to understand the mystery of God in Bergman than in many of the more pious currents of his time.

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Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.  To recap, they were: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock.  And by “stirred some folks up,” I mean faced down a virtual lynch mob.  Who knew that Aronofsky supporters were fans of the film Fury? 

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections: (more…)

It always impresses me when an aged actor manages a comeback that is authentic, one based on more than mere nostalgia, one appealing to an entirely new generation of moviegoers. Jackie Gleason spent most of the 1970s appearing in pale television retreads of his 1950s heyday, and for most of that time he was absent from the big screen entirely. A revered comedic master, yes — but nevertheless his career as an innovator and taste-maker seemed long over. Then came Smokey and the Bandit, a fitting capstone to a long career of memorable portrayals and endless belly-laughs.

Born in 1916 in Brooklyn, Gleason was no stranger to tragedy. His sickly brother died when he was three, and his mother died when he was nineteen. But it was his father vanishing that gouged the biggest hole in his soul. “I was about nine when one day my pop didn’t come home,” Gleason said in later years. “A few days before, my mom and he had a violent argument and he took every picture out of the house that had him in it. That should have been the tip-off, but I was too young to know.” (more…)