Punished for my enthusiasm.
If you were reading this blog back in 2007, you may recall my early and intense enthusiasm for the candidacy of a certain Senator Barack Obama. I was convinced of his electability as a candidate and thought very highly of his positions on important subjects and, accordingly, I was one of the first 10,000 people to donate to his campaign. True story.
Over the course of the long slog in 2008 I probably ended up donating a few hundred bucks. As you can imagine, I was pretty much over the moon when Obama handed McCain his rear end in November. I honestly thought were going to see some real change around here.
As it turns out, there has been change, but it’s been of the highly incremental sort. Despite being elected along with a huge margin of Democratic support in the House and Senate, he insisted on governing like a Reagan Republican and still the other side refused to play along, crippling even the modest proposals he put forth. I’m still kind of amazed the Affordable Care Act actually passed, albeit with some procedural trickery. I expected the second coming of FDR. What I got was The Gipper Returns.
Now having said this, I’m still going to vote for Obama come November. Any Democrat, even a deeply flawed one, is a better choice than some out-of-touch, hateful Republican with a hard on for screwing poor people, starting wars and making life easier for the most privileged among us. No matter who wins the Republican primary, Gingrich or Romney, the Republican option is going to be a terrible one.
Even though I’m voting for Obama, I’m not donating this year. Not a penny. It’s not just that I’m disappointed with Obama, which I clearly am, but the simple fact that I don’t have extra money to give away. As exciting and carefree as the writer’s life may seem to those on the outside looking in, the truth of the matter is that the pay sucks and it comes in bursts, anyway, so most of the time you’re squeezing every last dime out of your last payday waiting for the next one. I’m just not in the position to donate.
You would think that explaining this to the staffers from the DNC or the Obama campaign would make some impact. They call asking for some astronomical amount (one call suggested a donation of $500) and when I tell them I’m broke they whittle it down to $10 or $20, but they never get the message that I’m not willing to donate at all. And they call every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Yesterday I even got a call after I’d gone to bed. I was pretty goddamned pissed, particularly when I answered the phone and told them I was in bed, only to have the caller hang up on me.
[REVIEW] Jaws: The Revenge
It’s been a long time coming, but we have finally reached the end of this particular road. This is my review of the last Jaws film: Jaws: The Revenge, a stinker from 1987 that is widely regarded as one of the worst films of that or any year, and a far, far cry from the masterpiece that was Steven Spielberg’s original.
The conventional wisdom regarding sequels is that they are progressively worse the further along you go. Occasionally you encounter an exception like The Godfather, Part II, but for the most part this is completely true. I’m sure if I tried I could come up with a fairly lengthy list of film series that meandered their way into the crapper over the course of their lifetime, but I don’t think any of them would represent the same precipitous drop off in quality that we see in the Jaws movies. Has there ever been a series that started off so well, and yet ended up in such an ignominious place, as these? I honestly can’t think of anything else.
I do have to be somewhat fair to Jaws: The Revenge, and this is pretty much the only time I’ll say something nice about the movie, but the fourth film is actually better than the third. That doesn’t by any means indicate that it’s good, but it does give us some perspective on just how rotten Jaws III really was. There’s nothing in Jaws: The Revenge that can top for sheer badness the special effects of the swimming shark underwater in Jaws III. And despite the fact that Jaws III had arguably better actors than Jaws: The Revenge — minus Michael Caine, who’s good in everything — in the persons of Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr., the latter film bests the former in that arena as well.
[REVIEW] The Road
Cormac McCarthy is an author it can be hard to get a handle on. He is unquestionably talented, as his prose can be spectacularly beautiful, but he can also be absolutely impenetrable when the mood strikes him. The Road is probably his most accessible work after No Country For Old Men, as evidenced by its selection for Oprah’s book club and its subsequent best-seller status. I’m not sure a book like Blood Meridian would have the same market penetration.
Because it’s a relatively straightforward narrative — again, like No Country For Old Men — The Road makes for good source material for a movie. Not a feel-good movie, but a solid one from a storytelling perspective. It should not be surprising, then, that The Road the film is oftentimes as effective as its inspiration.
Normally I spend a hundred words or so in these reviews summarizing the set-up of the movies I’m writing about, but The Road is so simple that the set-up encompasses the whole thing. Maybe that robs some of the joy of discovery from the film, maybe not. You’ll have to decide.
Anyway, in The Road it is some ten years after a terrible calamity has stricken the world. More profound than a nuclear apocalypse and not as workaday as a zombie plague, this cataclysmic turn of events has left the planet completely devoid of animals, living plants and (mostly) people. Viggo Mortensen plays a nameless survivor who has a young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) he has raised completely on his own after his wife’s death. We meet the two of them on the titular road, traveling with all their belongings in a battered shopping cart, scavenging food where they may and trying to avoid the horrible, cannibalistic bad guys that patrol regularly.
My son does not have superpowers.
The other day I watched the special preview of the new Fox show, Touch. I have some thoughts on the subject.
Just to be clear at the outset, I enjoyed the episode quite a bit, so if I sound critical of Touch it’s not because I’m slamming it. I do think that Touch is going to have some serious issues maintaining the complex storytelling method it lays out for itself in the first episode, but that’s just the writer in me talking. I’d rather discuss something more fundamental to the show, something that parents of children with autism will probably identify with.
In Touch, Kiefer Sutherland’s character is the single parent of an eleven-year-old boy who has never spoken, who shuns physical contact, obsessively counts kernels of popcorn before eating them and who spends most of his time (when he’s not disassembling cell phones) writing dense rows of numbers in various notebooks. Though the show goes out of its way to say that Jake (David Mazouz) was misdiagnosed as autistic — we never get a clear explanation of just what he’s supposed to suffer from — it’s pretty clear that the child is autistic. Or rather, that he represents the common media portrayal of autistic children.
Pretty much from Rain Man onward we’ve been primed by the entertainment industry to believe that all autistic people have tremendous gifts to offset their social and physical issues. Quite often these are related to numbers, such as when Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man instantly counts the number of fallen toothpicks on a diner floor, or picks up on what cards have been dealt in a game of blackjack. And it is true that some tiny percentage of autistic people, children included, have some amazing abilities. The real truth of the matter is, however, that most autistic people are not gifted any more than the average person is, and their condition is crippling.
Some autistic children are so withdrawn that they don’t walk or even sit up under their own power. Some don’t speak, or use very few words or jargon. Some have social deficits that are impossible for them to overcome, even within their own families. Most will spend their lives as dependents, either of their parents, their extended family, or of the state. There’s no magic wand that’s going to make them all better if we could just understand them. Autism is a handicap. It can be severe or minor, but it is a handicap.
[REVIEW] Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
It’s probably pretty safe to say that 2009′s Sherlock Holmes was something of a delightful surprise for most people. A few critics had unkind things to say about it, but by and large the reception to this reimagining of the Sherlock Holmes character was positive. I thought it was terrific, and when a sequel was announced I was quite pleased.
I think what interests me most about the negative aspects of the Sherlock Holmes reaction was how self-described purists of the character took issue with its portrayal of the master detective as a sometimes slovenly, two-fisted fighter who also happens to be a super-genius. Interestingly enough, there’s not much in the film’s take on Holmes that’s different from what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. We know from the literature that Sherlock Holmes was a habitual drug user, was only happy when he was working a case and was able to throw down with the best of them if the need arose. Maybe Holmes as written didn’t lay the smack down with the regularity as Sherlock Holmes depicted, but he did beat the hell out of Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, just to name one incident.
Detractors of the first film also don’t give enough credit to the performances of the leads, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. Downey in particular is spectacular in the role of Holmes, bringing a real sense of grounded, good-humored character to what can be a very tweedy part. I love Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, but I think Downey may actually come close edging out Rathbone for the title. Jude Law also got to shine in a refigured Watson role that made a good deal more sense than Nigel Bruce’s buffoon — though I like that, too — given that Watson was supposed to be a decorated veteran with combat experience. Add to this some clever turns by supporting cast members and inspired direction by Guy Ritchie and you have something very special. Of course you can always read my review of the original if you want more detail, though I tended to write much shorter reviews back in 2010 than I do now.
So where do we go from here? Onward to the sequel!
If you want to stop reading after this sentence, you can, because I will sum up the next 600 words for you thusly: if you liked Sherlock Holmes, you’re going to like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Enough said, really, though I will say more.
