Juggernaut

"Juggernaut" (Richard Lester, 1974) With the letting loose of the whirlwind that is "2012" this week, I thought I'd pay homage to a neglected, but sterling example of the "Disaster Movie"—the modestly budgeted, very smart "Juggernaut." Made in the shock-wave of such star-culling epics as "Airport," "The Poseidon Adventure," "Earthquake," and "The Towering Inferno" that had the gall to ask: "Who Will Survive?" in its posters, "Juggernaut" played the same game. See? All the stars are lined up like ducks in a gallery reading to be pinged, just like those other all-star slaughter fests.

"Juggernaut" plays the game differently, though, while maintaining the conventions. This film is as soapish as the others in terms of interpersonal relationships. But in other disaster movies, people are collateral damage to the epic depiction of crumbling masonry. Lester's film is all about character—the "disaster" is man-made, the people at-risk are portrayed intimately, if not by stars, by strong character actors (Clifton James, Shirley Knight, Michael Hordern, Cyril Cusack, Julian Glover, Roy Kinnear—Lester's favorite buffoon is given a part to shine in this film—Ian Holm, a pre-fame Anthony Hopkins) you begin to care about. The cast is filled with faces who would become more familiar in later roles, but the two leads are Omar Sharif at his dyspeptic best as the Captain of the threatened ship and Richard Harris, who was never better than he is in this movie.

The cruise ship SS Britannic is half-way across the Atlantic Ocean when the line's president (Holm) receives a phone call from "Juggernaut" saying there are seven barrels of high explosive rigged to go off the next day at a predetermined time. Unless a ransom is paid, the bombs will go off and the ship will sink. With the ransom, instructions to defuse the bombs will be sent. Any attempt to defuse the bombs will casue them to explode. Holm's president wants to pay the ransom quickly, but the British government threatens to pull his operating subsidy if he negotiates with terrorists. While Hopkins' Scotland Yard detective attempts to find "Juggernaut," bomb expert Tony Fallon (Harris) and his crew are sent out to the Britannic, dropped in the ocean, and clamber onto the boat.

The focus shifts to Fallon, who sees all defusing jobs as a form of psychology—he's not trying to figure out the bomb, he's trying to figure out the man who made the bomb, and the tense scenes of Fallon examining one bomb to relay instructions to his crew are a whispered monologue of a man on the edge of death attempting to read the mind of the puzzle-maker in a battle of wills.

For director Lester, who is fond of games and puzzle solving, the film is one of his obsessions brought to life with the bomb design being particularly devious. Given its nature, one is put immediately into the Fallon mind-set that he is battling a man and not a bomb. And it is this interplay, where one man must rely on his skills and his knowledge, rather than the tides of Fate, that make "Juggernaut" sail past the other films in the sub-genre.

The Damned United

"I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one." — Brian Clough

There are two major industries in Britain that have created rabid fans: football and Peter Morgan-Michael Sheen movies. Football we know all about. What we colonists call "soccer" is an obsession carried in the hearts and minds and livers throughout the entire rest of the world (as a matter of fact, you could probably make a connection between loving this injury-inducing sport and embracing universal health-care!).

The team of Morgan and Sheen, which started with "The Deal" and "The Queen," continued with the play and film "Frost/Nixon" (and will continue with Sheen again playing Tony Blair in Clint Eastwood's forthcoming "Hereafter"), here takes on the insular world of FC football and the storied career of Brian Clough, who took the second division Derby County Club into the first division and then the championship, and in a fit of hubris, took on the management of Leeds Utd, the club of his arch-rival Coach Don Rievie and was fired after 44 days. Here, though, the focus is not on the playing field, but the kicking and gouging going on in the mind of Clough.

The feats Clough accomplished were done with aplomb, ego, a big mouth and a vindictive drive to show up the other teams in the leagues, especially Leeds. But, that drive also gave him a tunnel vision when it came time to manage Leeds, which was done with a "new broom" approach, angering the players, the club's board and the fans who saw the team fall to its worst season in ten years after only six games. Consequently, he got the sack. As fast as his success was acquired, he fell ten times faster.

Morgan as screenwriter lets the mighty fall gently, depending on the grace that is shown, and whether the eyes are open during the trip. Idi Amin and Nixon, locked in their delusions, get no sympathy. Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair are allowed insight as they're falling. Clough gets that insight after he hits rock-bottom, and Morgan's frequent collaborator Sheen registers every triumph in flashing teeth and every hurt in darkening bags under his eyes. Sheen, as a performer who's made a living playing performers, knows the degrees to which the face can display a false-front and genuine pain. During an introductory press interview before taking over for Rievey, it's a cocky Clough who, with no prior knowledge, already thinks he has the team licked, with secret winks, flashing tongue and a smarmy way of laughing at his own jokes. After a dressing down from the Leeds captain, he'll maintain the same confident smirk on his face, but his eyes will dull with fear as soon as the player turns his back. If Sheen felt any disappointment in not playing the "Nixon" part of "Frost/Nixon," he's compensated here for playing a personality of similar insecurities, but with an antic theatricality that the former President was never capable of. It's Sheen's show, but he's given ample opposition and support from Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, and Colm Meaney, who plays Coach Rievie with an irascible sense of entitlement.

Director Tom Hooper keeps things low-key in a BBC vid kind of way (thankfully dropping the peculiar framing that marked "John Adams"), but it isn't too long before one notices that, more and more, he's placing his Clough in ever tightening offices, hotel rooms, and locker-room corridors—an outsider trapped in his own prison of obsession and focus. One sequence is brilliantly twisted in its scope, or lack of it: as a much-needed match goes on outside, Clough stews and twitches inside his dennish office behind the stands, listening to the crowd reactions, not daring to emerge into the light to watch. Perversely, whenever a Derby goal is scored, the crowd leaps to its feet blocking out the only outside light to his office, casting him in darkness. You know that whatever Clough wins, he's lost.

"The Damned United" is Matinee.

2012

"...And I Feel Fine"

Earth to Roland Emmerich: "Cut it out!"

Between "Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow," and, now, "2012," the German director has now destroyed the world three times.

Well, enough is enough. Gaea's getting pissed.

And so am I.

Seventeen special effects companies, including Sony and Digital Domain (two heavy-weights and they're not even the first ones listed) were employed to create the global carnage on display in this flick, and there's still a recession going on. The attention to detail and dedication to photo-realism is the only evidence of professionalism in the enterprise. That's entirely appropriate as the only reason to see this monstrosity is to witness things blow up "real good." That they do. Los Angeles develops wrinkles and cracks that even Joan Rivers' supply of Retin-A can't erase and falls into the Pacific. Yellowstone faithfully incinerates in a verrry slow pyroclastic flow that the hero can out-run. Las Vegas becomes the new Grander Canyon (they were going to knock those buildings down anyway!). Hawaii's a volcano (but the surfing's great!). Washington D.C. becomes more chaotic than it already is.

I'll admit it. There is a giddy, monstrous 2-year old's glee in seeing the White House (which Emmerich imploded with a shiny blue destructa-beam in "Independence Day") being destroyed again—this time by the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, propelled on a Potomac tidal wave (That's about as "high concept" as this film gets). And St. Peter's. Tibet.* All the hots spots become much hotter. The fly-over-and-through of Los Angeles over the splintering clover-leafs and under collapsing buildings is a thrilling roller-coaster ride through Hell with digi-people clinging to collapsing floors, all manner of auto-mayhem and even violence by Rolling Donut sign. But if you were to take out all the countdowns to disaster in "2012" ("We've got five minutes before everything blows!!") and just include the disasters, you'd have a 20 minute highlights reel, rather than a 158 minute poorly written series of contrivances and coincidences.

And everything blows, anyway.

You'd almost think the thing was worthwhile with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, John Cusack, Danny Glover, George Segal and Thandie Newton in the cast. But they're only mouth-pieces for exclamatory dialog and furrowed brows. Seems the whole thing starts with a planet alignment, which triggers solar flares which sends out neutrino's that miraculously microwave the Earth's core and destabilize the Earth's tectonic plates, reverse the Earth's magnetic field and create monster tsunami's. Now, in this world-wide scenario, everybody in the cast has only one degree of separation to everybody else, so that they can look with surprise at their monitors and intone "Wait! I know that man/woman/dog!" Coincidences are the order of the doomsday, and little dialog goes unmatched without the appropriate chunk of irony whistling through the air and squishing the speakers with a thud. It's the kind of movie where hubby says to wife "I feel like there's something pulling us apart" right before a fissure opens up between them. When St. Peter's Basilica starts to collapse, the cracks split down the Sistine Chapel right between Man and God's fingers. Roland Emmerich is not a subtle director. No man whose ambition is to make a better "Godzilla" movie can be.

And what Emmerich is re-making here is "When Worlds Collide,"** a 1950's sci-fi flick that imagined Earth hit by another planet, and its treasures, two-by-two's of animals and a lottery-chosen clutch of humans are rocketed off to the convenient companion planet that precedes it. Here, the art is rounded up, libraries accumulated, animals airlifted, and although a lottery is mentioned, the folks who go in the arks are world leaders (naturally), the folks who can afford to pay 1 billion euros per seat, and anyone conniving enough to smuggle themselves on-board. The Best and the Brightest. Everybody else becomes part of the new petroleum deposits the survivors will profit from in the future.

It was at this point, I would have been happy to see everybody die, but no such luck. The last few minutes of the film are disaster heaped upon disaster, with survival dependent on the actions of one man—guess who? But, my concern was what exercises I could find to relieve the pain in my eyes from rolling them so much. They don't sell aspirins in the lobby. Not even chocolate-covered ones.

Truth be told I don't enjoy writing reviews for bad movies, as there's more inspiration in good ones. But I'll leave it with this quote from the director (in a New York Times profile by Tyler Gray) complaining about people's reactions to his making a film like "2012" in a "post-9/11 environment."

"If I cannot destroy a big high-rise anymore, because terrorists blew up two of the most famous ones, the twin towers, what does this say about our world?”

Our world is fine, Rollie, no thanks to you. But it says your priorities are really shitty.

And the only way to make it good to us is to make all your digital models of people caught in wholesale slaughter based on your likeness.

Verstehen sie?

Verstehen sie nicht.

"2012" is a Cable-Watcher.**

* But not Mecca. Fatwa's need not apply. Kinda lily-livered of Emmerich to not risk personal destruction when destroying the world for his art. Don't they have "sins of omission" in Islam?

** And just our luck, that master of the cinematic form Stephen Sommers ("The Mummy," "Van Helsing," "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra") is making his own direct re-make of "When Worlds Collide" to be released in 2010. Oh, the joy.

*** Part of the mission of these reviews is to promote the theatrical experience when it is deemed important to the presentation of the story. It is tempting to say that "The Big Screen" is the only way to watch "2012," because there are so many little demons in the details. But, no. The story is so lunk-headed and gleefully clap-happy nihilistic that the best presentation is merely putting a bow on a cess-pool.

Pirate Radio

"Rockin' the Boat"

The legend of "Radio Caroline" (and similar ships of the line) is one of the great stories of broadcast rebellion...and opportunism; during "The British Invasion" of Rock n' Roll the government-run radio stations (the BBC) limited the amount of "pop" to a minimum of hours. Seeing a demand among the populace for more, a small band of entrepreneurial renegades hired a ship, built a powerful transmitter on it and began defiantly broadcasting over the Island with rock n' roll—advertising-supported rock n' roll. Other ships did the same. At one point, another pirate operation, Radio City, commandeered one of Britain's off-shore defense forts from World War II and began rocking out.

"Pirate Radio" (released April in Britain as "The Boat That Rocked") is the latest in a string of 2009 releases that take the premise of a true story and make an easily digested, formula film out of it. The movie and its producers would have you believe the British ministry felt a moral imperative to stamp out pop music, the very thing that was filling the government coffers with tax dollars, and the radio-pirates were acting in a fit of rebellion and righteous indignation at their musical muses being silenced. They were on a Mission to bring the Music to the People.

Nah.

They wanted to make money. It was a bunch of guys who saw an opportunity to make it in a market that wasn't having its needs met. So, they created illegal, unlicensed operations that played 24 hour rock in international waters. Nothing succeeds like excess. And "The Beeb," run by the country's Post Office, didn't like the pirates because they were competitors, siphoning funds that they believed to be rightfully theirs. The word "pirate" isn't used lightly. But money is not sexy enough subject matter when dealing with rock music, despite that you can't have one without the other, positively or negatively.* And movies about turf wars work best where there's actual turf.

I'll beg forgiveness on this for the writer-director is Richard Curtis, who has managed to fill his movies with sharp utterances that we find ourselves wishing we were smart enough to make as comebacks. He says things better than we mortals do, and luckily he chooses to caper in the comic realm, having started as a writer on ""The Black Adder"," and ""Mr. Bean"," and graduated with such rom-com's as "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill," and "Love Actually"—his directing debut.**

Stylistically, the thing is a mess. A fast multi-screened 60's-styled opening that operates like some flipping PowerPoint nightmare explains the back story fast and loose, and from there pin-points a fictional ship, "Radio Rock," operated by Oliver (Bill Nighy, who does a fine balancing act of appearing totally stoned while being exceedingly "British"), and a crew of good-for-nothing-but-jamming disk jockeys, led by a token American "The Count" (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his nemesis, the beloved rake Gavin (Rhys Ifans), other jocks divided between "characters" and burn-outs and a just-arrived newbie named Carl (Tom Sturridge) who serves as the audience's surrogate for reams of exposition. This ship of fools maintains a fixed position in the North Atlantic, frustrating the efforts of one particular minister, Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh, just as twittish as he can be) and his assistant...er...Twatt (Jack Davenport) to bring them down by any means necessary. It sets up a neat heroes and villains scenario that completely messes up the history, but tries to gin up some advocacy towards the wackos broadcasting without a license to shrill.

The main story is the government versus pirates scenario where the government is a tidy, repressed bunch of stick-uppers and the disc jockeys are slobby loose cannons on deck. Carl's story of being sent to the ship, for reasons unknown, by his Mum (Emma Thompson***) after he's been expelled, and his subsequent attempts to de-virginize himself is second in priority (Gemma Arterton and Talulah Riley are the "bits of crumpet"—if I can use the period vernacular—employed in the attempt), and its filled out with petty bickering on-board ship and various personal crises among the disc jockeys. Hi-jinks on the high seas.

That all sounds perfectly dreadful in summation, but Curtis is deft in the details, providing a lot of genuinely earned laughs, and pulling off some nice little moments—one example being a post-heart-crushing of Carl, where he sits dejected in the ship's meeting room, where he's soon joined by fellow crew who try to boost his spirits with chocolate and crisps. When he has none of it, they begin to eat the cookies and drink the drink until he finally pulls his head out and nibbles with them. The unspoken lesson: you have to shoot while the geese are flying, chappie. That it's done without words and with "Bean-ish" comic timing makes it good writing and good film.

But, if Curtis and crew deigned not to complicate the story particulars, it's assured that they wouldn't take the film into uncharted dramatic waters, so they turn it into a "crisis" where "the people" triumph, conflicts are washed away, everybody gets paired up and Rock n' Roll will never die.

And artists get a penny per disc sold, if they're lucky.

The film did poorly in its Anglicized form, where it was shown at a length of 140 minutes, which is excessive for any comedy. For the titularly changed "States" version, twenty minutes were cut, but it doesn't solve a basic problem. Today's audiences may not have the same flavor of love of rock music as director Curtis does. The market is super-saturated with it on all levels, and a people's version of piracy, through peer to peer networks, has exposed what was thought of as devotion as merely acquisitiveness. How much love can you have for an artist's work if you're perfectly happy to rip him off? **** This is the market-place the film is preaching to and trying to reach.

So enough talk of saving rock music to sell the movie. It's a sham. What is there is genuine laugh out-loud moments, a persistent air of tart larkiness several cuts above your standard "Carry On" movie and a killer soundtrack of innocent-sounding 60's standards. It's fun.

"Pirate Radio" is a very cheap bargain-price Matinee.

* Unless you download your favorite artists' music illegally, of course. Then they get screwed. Ain't devotion grand?

** He also co-wrote the two "Bridget Jones' Diary" movies and for "The Vicar of Dibney"

*** Thompson does a lovingly vapid 60's hipster, with cigarette holder, moonish sun-glasses, and Mary Quant checkered coat, reminding one of Vanessa Redgrave in her "spacey" days. And I guess you can't do a 60's movie without putting January Jones in it, so she's there, too. Here's a thought: Most of the women in the film, save the on-board lesbian who takes care of "the boys," are duplicitous. What's up with that?

**** And, not to belabor the point (BUT!) radio stations have a blanket agreement with music publishers (BMI and ASCAP, say) to pay the artists for the music played. The Pirate stations were under no obligation to do so, and probably didn't. So much for promoting rock.

Don't Make a Scene: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Scene 33)

The Story: This is one of those scenes in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where, in the Python series, a British Officer like, for instance, "Brigadier Arthur Gormanstrop (Mrs.)" would interrupt protesting the sketch was merely "silly" and be halted forthwith immediately.*

Silly, yes.

And an exercise in extremes. Build-up/Dissipate/Surprise/Build-up/Drag-Out/Dissipate. The threat of a creature "so foul, so cruel that no man has fought it and lived" turns out to be a rabbit. That's one turn-around. But a rabbit that leaps impossibly, screeching and tearing out the very sinews and gristle of its opponents. That's another turn-around. We're given an over-the-top (and under-budgeted) cheap-jack Peckinpavian action sequence with puppetry and spurting blood as the berserker-bunny tears through the ranks of the Knights (and "Brave" Sir Robin at this point is very rank), leading to one of the best battle commands in movies ("Run away!"), and my favorite line of the sequence: "That rabbit is dynamite!" The only solution, as it usually is in Arthurian legends and movie epics, is a combination of religion and warfare which, in theory, should be exclusive, but has had so much practice, the two are seemingly inseparable. "Brother Maynard, fetch the Holy Hand Grenade!"

Oh! And love the shot of the Knights seemingly emerging from a skull's nose-holes. Can't decide who might have planned that shot: Gilliam or Jones?

The Set-Up: When last we left Arthur (Graham Chapman) and his Knights of the Round Table, they had encountered Tim the Enchanter (John Cleese), who offered to help them find the Holy Grail by leading them to the carved last words of Olfin Bedwere of Rheged in the cave of Caerbannog, guarded by a creature most foul, most cruel "with great big nasty teeth."

Well, they're there.

Action!

Scene 33

[clop clop whinny]

KNIGHT: They're nervous, sire.

ARTHUR: Then we'd best leave them here and carry on on foot. Dis-mount!

TIM: Behold the cave of Caerbannog!

ARTHUR: Right! Keep me covered.
KNIGHT: What with?
ARTHUR: Just keep me covered.
TIM: Too late!
[chord]

ARTHUR: What?
TIM: There he is!

ARTHUR: Where?
TIM: There!

ARTHUR: What, behind the rabbit?

TIM: It is the rabbit!

ARTHUR: You silly sod! You got us all worked up!

TIM: Well, that's no ordinary rabbit. That's the most...

TIM:...foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent...

TIM: ...you ever set eyes on.
ROBIN: You tit! I soiled my armor I was so scared!
TIM: Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide, it's a
killer!

KNIGHT: Get stuffed!
TIM: It'll do you a trick, mate!
KNIGHT: Oh, yeah?
ROBIN: You mangy Scot git!

TIM: I'm warning you!
ROBIN: What's he do, nibble your bum?
TIM: He's got huge, sharp-- he can leap about-- look at the bones!

ARTHUR: Go on, Boris. Chop his head off!

BORIS: Right! Silly little bleeder. One rabbit stew comin' right up!

TIM: Look!

[squeak] The rabbit leaps in the air and attacks Boris, biting off his head.



BORIS: Aaaugh!
[chord]

ARTHUR: Jesus Christ!
TIM: I warned you!

ROBIN: I done it again!

TIM: I warned you! But did you listen to me? Oh, no, you knew it all, didn't you? Oh, it's just a harmless little bunny, isn't it? Well, it's always the same, I always--

ARTHUR: Oh, shut up!
TIM: --But do they listen to me?--
ARTHUR: Right!
TIM: -Oh, no--

KNIGHTS: Charge!

[squeak squeak]

KNIGHTS: Aaaaugh!

[squeak squeak]

KNIGHTS: Aaaaugh!

[squeak squeak]

KNIGHTS: Aaaaugh!

[squeak squeak]

[squeak squeak]

ARTHUR: Run away! Run away!!

KNIGHTS: Run away! Run away!

TIM (exits laughing): Haw haw haw. Haw haw haw. Haw haw.

ARTHUR: Right. How many did we lose?
KNIGHT: Gawain.
KNIGHT: Hector.
ARTHUR: And Boris. That's five.
GALAHAD: Three, sir.

ARTHUR: Three. Three. And we'd better not risk another frontal assault, that rabbit's dynamite.

ROBIN: Would it help to confuse it if we run away more?
ARTHUR: Oh, shut up and go and change your armor.

GALAHAD: Let us taunt it! It may become so cross that it will make
a mistake.
ARTHUR: Like what?

GALAHAD: Well,....

ARTHUR: Have we got bows?
KNIGHT: No.
LAUNCELOT: We have the Holy Hand Grenade.
ARTHUR: Yes, of course! The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch! 'Tis one
of the sacred relics Brother Maynard carries with him!

ARTHUR: Brother Maynard!

ARTHUR: Bring up the Holy Hand Grenade!
[chanting]

ARTHUR: How does it, uh... how does it work?
KNIGHT: I know not, my liege.
ARTHUR: Consult the Book of Armaments!

MAYNARD: Armaments, Chapter Two, Verses Nine to Twenty-One.

BROTHER: "And Saint Atila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'Oh, Lord, bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow thy enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.'

BROTHER: "And the Lord did grin, and people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large --"

MAYNARD: Skip a bit, Brother.

BROTHER: "And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three, no more, no less.'

BROTHER: 'Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three.'

BROTHER: 'Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.'

BROTHER: 'Five is right out.'

BROTHER: 'Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thou foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.'"

MAYNARD: Amen.

ALL: Amen.
ARTHUR: Right!

ARTHUR: One... two... five!

KNIGHT: Three, sir!
ARTHUR: Three!

[boom] The hand grenade explodes, blowing the deadly bunny up.

Some distance away, the police investigating the previous deaths (and now at the shrubberies of "The Knights who say 'Ni!'") hear the distant explosion and rush forward to investigate.

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

Words by Graham Chapman, John Cleese , Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin

Pictures by Terry Bedford and Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" is available on DVD from Columbia-Tri-Star Home Video.

* My mother-in-law would merely call it "far-fetched."

1776

"1776" (Peter H. Hunt, 1972) Reasons To Hate Musicals #1776 (Collect them all!) To hear this tell the story, the 2nd Continental Congress was split on breaking off from England, so, in a series of half-step measures, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson endeavor to draft a document stating their goals and intentions, having the Congress vote on it and sign it, and it happens on July 4th, 1776.

Okay. They actually voted on independence on July 2nd, not July 4th. They signed the Dec. of I. in August. They did NOT vote on the document FIRST and THEN declare their independence. The Southern senators did NOT walk out over a slavery clause in the Declaration (they didn't walk out at all), and Martha Jefferson did NOT make a conjugal visit to her husband Thomas (Ken Howard) in Philadelphia, while he writing it for the simple fact that she was stricken with complications from a miscarriage. Congressman Dickinson was the one with the unpopular opinion—that being not to revolt against England—not John Adams. Congressman James Wilson did not cast the deciding vote, nor was he yet a judge (nor was he non-committal about independence). Jefferson did not release his slaves, nor did Benjamin Franklin belong to an abolitionist society (until after the war).

Other than that, it's "perfectly" accurate.

But as Franklin (Howard Da Silva) says to Adams (William Daniels) at one point, "Don't worry, John. The history books will sort it all out."

They damned well better. If a Broadway musical can't hold true to George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," it's self-evident they wouldn't to the events of the Philadelphia Congress' vote for independence from England. But if a musical's purpose is to show us the process of sausage being made, it would be nice if it hewed to the actual facts of the manufacturing of sausage.

One shudders to think there might be someone who believes that this presentation reflects how the matters were actually resolved because nothing could be further from the truth, and as if getting the facts wrong weren't enough, there is an air of needlessly cute lasciviousness throughout the whole thing. Blame that on Peter Stone's book. Yeah, the Founding Fathers had their quirks (or they wouldn't be fathers), but I doubt they were as coy in their coylessness, as they are here.

Some of the songs are powerful: the anti-war "Mama, Look Sharp;" the sarcastic rebuke of high minded Northern hypocrisy, "Molasses to Rum," (which, frankly makes you uncomfortable and want to leave the room—and you're merely watching the thing, rather than, say actually transporting slaves). But, some of them are just excuses to romp and show the statues and paintings in the rotunda as silly high-steppers. Drinkers, sure. Slave-owners, damned right. Petty men, sure. But not small-minded, thank you very much. And not egregiously single-minded and goofy as Richard Henry Lee (Ron Holgate) is portrayed in "The Lee's of Old Virginia." The low point may be "He Plays the Violin" sung by Martha Jefferson (a dubbed Blythe Danner), which, after a night of connubial bliss, sounds like a dirty metaphor for forming "a more perfect Union" (nudge, nudge). Even without the consideration of the emotional and physical pain the real Mrs. Jefferson was enduring at the actual time, being confronted with such a display, I think Jefferson would have viewed it a salacious affront, tightened his jaw-muscles accordingly, and, lost for words for the first time in his life, merely handed over—at full arm's stretch, not having a ten-foot pole—a copy of his "Jefferson Bible,"* after being strongly tempted to thrash you with it.

I guess finally what I object to in the whole flummery is a musical phoniness that pervades the whole thing, right down to the clapboard sets and the processional set-pieces, to the peacock finery of the costumes and the strutting of the performers. And the music and lyrics tend to dumb them down to types—uni-dimensional men with one categorizable "opinion," that informs their entire purpose. It may have been the goal of the creators to not treat the Congress as cardboard figures, but they hardly expanded them to recognizable humans beings but merely to dramatic conveniences. There's nothing like a revolution now and then, but not everything needs to be choreographed, set to music, or photographed with falsley festive swooping cranes.

"1776" enjoys the distinction of being the first musical to benefit from a sitting president's line-item veto. Producer Jack L. Warner (whose last production this was) showed it to then-President Richard Nixon, who objected to one of the numbers and coerced Warner to have it cut. Here is that number (showing ample evidence of the clunkiness and smugness of this film); "Cool, Considerate Men."

* Jefferson's personal editing of the Bible, which he did as an exercise, takes out the stories, the improbable and the scientifically unprovable—leaving, basically, the teachings of Jesus Christ. No miracles. No flood. No rising from the dead. A practical, moral and irrefutable Bible.

Alamo Drafthouse...in the 21st Cen-tury!!

More of those non-traditional, graphics intensive movie posters created for The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. The theme, this week, is Science Fiction/Fantasy. Atomic Battery to "Power," Punch in the Navi-computer, Go to Warp, and Don't Forget to Open the Pod-Bay Doors, Gort.

And Watch the Skies. Make it So.

601

A Christmal Carol (2009)

"God Bless Us, Every Mega-Pixel"

Everyone has a favorite "Christmas Carol" (or I should say, "version" of "A Christmas Carol").* A novella, it is the perfect length for adaptation to movie (with some padding) or television special (with some commercials). And being as it's in the Public Domain, anybody can adapt it without paying any money to Mr. Dickens (who probably haunts the producers, every one!). Hence the title: "Disney's 'A Christmas Carol.'"tm **

Disney may own it, but it's Robert Zemeckis and Jim Carrey's "A Christmas Carol," and it stands up against even beloved ghosts of "Christmas Carols" past. Face it. There are so many, that presentation is the main criterion to base a judgement, like "Hamlet." And format has a lot to do with what drives Zemeckis' version. Skip the 3-D aspect for a moment. This motion capture-CG "take" does some very interesting things with the story (adapted within a farthing of Dickens' original by Zemeckis himself) that are only possible with animation—the ghosts being integral to the story.

"A Christmas Carol" is a ghost story. The ghosts and their tours of Scrooge's life past, present and future must be enough to slap Scrooge giddy, make him "scared straight," turn his perspective from "profit" to "a common good."

In other words, it must turn him from a "cool, conservative man" to a "bleeding heart liberal."***

You have to have really scary ghosts to do that. Really scary ghosts. Any half-steps and Scrooge would be a "champagne liberal," and what good are they?

In this version, Carrey not only plays "Scrooge" (through Zemeckis' ever-improving "motion-capture" technique) but also the three Ghosts: a cooing Irish flame for the past, a roaring Scottish present, and a funereally silent Future. Each has their own presentation of their visions, Past whisking Scrooge to his old haunts, Present turning Scrooge's sitting room into a camera obscura to spy the current Christmas, flinging Scrooge to a stage street to present Want and Ignorance, two feral spirits—the one growing up violent behind prison bars, the other morphing into a hooker and into a straight-jacketed mad-woman. And Future, in a neat touch, forms itself from Scrooge's own shadow.

There emerges during the sequence a chase as Scrooge is pursued by his own nightmarish funeral cortege pulled by two red-eyed horses, a bit that old Walt would have been proud of. It soon deteriorates into a demonstration of 3-D (which Zemeckis and Pixar are already masters of—the previews of James Cameron's "Avatar" shows a few problems) as bedlam as a mouse-sized Scrooge must scramble through the sewers to escape a terrible fate. One could live without it, as well as the "snuffing" episode of Christmas Past were the sequence not a vivid demonstration of just how well Zemeckis uses the technology to bring a life-like edge to the movie. And that's where this "Christmas Carol" truly makes its mark.

Where this version of "A Christmas Carol" is unique is that this marks the occasion when "motion capture" CG "got the faces right." Zemeckis' previous experiment in this realm, "Beowulf," had an odd, plasticene feel to it, mouths didn't crinkle correctly in speech, faces wobbled in perspective. Not here. Carrey is a broad actor, to be sure. But he's also an actor of simultaneous quicksilver subtleties, and this film captures it all. It's one thing to flit the camera perspective through snow-storms and sail through the chains of a scale, falling chestnuts, and the "eye" of a wreath (all done in the film's credits), but it's quite another artistic thing to capture the look of pleased instant love on young Ebeneezer's face when he first meets his beloved Belle (Robin Wright Penn), or to show the pleading terror and remorse when a ghostly Scrooge comes "face-to-face" with a mourning Bob Cratchit (a perfect Gary Oldman). Keep your dizzying flights of fancy 3-D. It's in those moments of intricate expression when "Disney's 'A Christmas Carol'" truly soars.

"Disney's 'A Christmas Carol'" is a Full-Price Ticket.****

* Well, since you asked, I have my own favorites—usually the ones that are a bit scarier in their psychic psychological warfare on Scrooge. I like the "Alastair Sim" version often sighted as a favorite, and love the "George C. Scott" version for television from 1984 (he's scarier at the end than at the beginning!), but my favorite—and this is probably a case of "Mom's Apple Pie Syndrome"—is "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol," which, even though it is a musical, even though it is a cartoon and even though Scrooge is Jim Backus, still manages to pack an emotional wallop, more than any "live" version I've seen, including this version.

** They've already done a version with Mickey Mouse: "Mickey's Christmas Carol" (1983). Scrooge McDuck played Scrooge. Natch.

*** I have to bring this up: a couple years ago one of the Zucker bros. directed a conservative version of "A Christmas Carol," but it took the Christmas out of it—I guess it's "An X-mas Carol," then,...talk about your "Wars on the Holidays"(sic)—called "An American Carol" in which a Michael Moore type (played by Chris Farley's brother—more popularly known as "Chris Farley's brother") is shown the Ghosts of America Past, Present, and Future in order to "scare" him into being more conservative—frankly the Bush II Administration had the opposite effect on me. Not to paint with too large a brush, but conservative political humor tends to be so ham-fisted and structurally unsound that it can't even see its own hypocritical ironies.

**** And a spendy one at that. Ticket prices are higher for 3-D presentations. I have some trepidations about saying it—this site being all about "value" and all—but I thought it was worth it. My opinion, merely.