"Night of the Coughing Superstars"
or
"Please Wash Your Hands Before Exiting the Theater"
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature. Or even to crowd The Bitch. Because, sooner or later, she's going to look at all that nice smooth asphalt we've laid across her, and send up some crab-grass to seek out the weak spots and crack it.
"How do you like them pot-holes, Ozymandias?"*
Steven Soderbergh's "pandepic" Contagion fits quite well in the movie medical chest that includes such plague-filled films as Panic in the Streets, The Satan Bug, and The Andromeda Strain (one could also mention "The Stand," I Am Legend and the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes—even, if we're talking Gaia's uprising, such natural disasters as The Happening (2008) and The Birds)—an organized, technologically advanced, scientifically-disciplined infrastructure is helpless against a simple organism that spreads through the sheer inevitability of exponentiality.** It also cross-germinates into the "Butterfly Effect" genre (see Babel, 21 Grams, Crash)—you know, where we're all so interconnected that if a butterfly sneezes in China, we'd better cover our mouths in the United States or else we'll keel over into the Stone Age.*** And with so many stars (all very good, actually), it also reminds of one of those Irwin Allen SAG-slaughter disaster movies of the 1970's, that featured tag-lines like: "Who Will Survive?"
Contagion comes a few years after the majority of us could dismiss SARS and H1N1 in the real world with a blithe "where's the pandemic?" (completely dismissing such very real threats as AIDS and the hair-trigger Ebola and Marburg viruses).**** But, it is chilling that with all our research capabilities, we'd still be running behind any new threat, simply because the little suckers can evolve faster in the gut than we can be creationists in the lab. And Scott Z. Burns (who wrote Soderbergh's The Informant! and is updating "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." for him) has taken an...er...clinical approach with his screenplay, starting moments after "first contact," following the progress of the disease from China, to the United states, its spread and detection by the Center for Disease Control and their efforts to isolate the cause, and, possibly, find a cure. However fast they go (and it's a process hampered by testing schedules and production runs...and which pharmaceutical companies will profit from it), it's not enough to prevent wide-spread death and a near-collapse of societal structures throughout the world. "It's figuring us out faster than we're figuring it out," says one of the techs (Jennifer Ehle) to her boss at CDC (Laurence Fishburne)...and it doesn't have a bureacracy to work through. The drama is situational, so don't go in expecting ambulance chases and LED countdowns to disaster, but situations where families are ripped apart, investigators become victims, and desperation becomes just another symptom. It's a procedural with a widely-flung spray pattern.
The cast is amazing...Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet...and just when you think they've run out of actors, up turns John Hawkes, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin, and Bryan Cranston...you half-expect the full cast of Ocean's 13 to show up and cough out cameos. No one dominates, everybody underplays, and the heroics are human and low-key.
Nicely done, and food for thought, just wash your hands before eating.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a 2:00pm appointment for a flu shot.
Contagion is a...*cough*...Matinee.
* "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
** We could also mention "The War of the Worlds," but there, the bugs are the good guys.
*** A better example would be: "If Greece doesn't raise its debt-ceiling, should I rollover my 401k into doubloons?"
**** And yesterday, I heard people are dying from Listeria-infected cantaloupes!
Friday, September 30, 2011
Contagion
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
The Help
"The Other Side of the Bridge Club (Insuring Domestic Tranquility)"
or
"You Ought Not to Joke About the Colored Situation"
You go into The Help with a certain amount of trepidation. Will it be so politically correct as to have no bite? Will it be a "TWGSTD" movie, where the true story of the oppresssed is supplanted by "the drama" of a privileged person's conscience to help?* Will it be a Neapolitan "Chick-Flick," all sugary ice cream of different flavors and colors? We've seen plenty of those, and one would hope that we've evolved out of our tribalism enough that film-makers—even commercial film-makers—hedge their story by surrounding the center with white-washing vanilla.**
Stanley Kramer, after all, has been dead for ten years.
With The Help, it's a hesitant answer of "Yes" and "No." "Yes," the story has elements of "White Guilt" saves the day, but only in the short term, and said Guilty Party, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (known as "Long-Haul" to her high school friends for actually attending and graduating college and pursuing a journalism "job," rather than settling for domestic tranquility) may have a sense of accomplishment, but it costs her. And the issue of "You think you're gonna help us?" is very pointedly brought up by the character of Minny Jackson (played by her real-life inspiration, Octavia Spencer, in an excellent performance). Say it, sister. Nice touch of dignity, that.
Young Miss "Skeeter" (Emma Stone), is ambitious, as are all the white women in the segregated community of Jackson, Mississippi; her ambitions don't center around who throws the nicest bridge club setting (or has it thrown for them), or making a name for herself preserving the traditions of The South. She wants to be a journalist, which, given the times, relegates her to ghosting a "best-bleach-for-the-sheets" column for the local newspaper. But, gnawing at her no. 2 pencil is what happened to the woman who raised her as a child. No, not mother Charlotte (Allison Janney, who tends to periodically rise above her material), but the house-servant, Constantine Jefferson (the always wonderful Cicely Tyson—I've missed her), who accepted and applauded her graceless duckling ways in a city of debu-taunting swans, and who disappeared while she was away at college, never to return. The vacancy of Constantine and her story inspires her to talk to the "help" about their stories, and how they maintain during their domestic servitude. Fearing a backlash from amongst the womens' society, she initially only gets to talk to a reluctant Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis, whose movie this is**), who tells her of her early days and of her family's molasses-like progress from house-"slaves" to house-"servants."
It involves the telling of tales on the pastel and flower-printed white woman she works for, a friend of "Skeeter's" (Anna Camp) and of the Red Queen of the Bridge set, Miss Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard, a subtle, ethereal actress, allowed to go "broadly comic," which, as when Meryl Streep does it, is not pretty).*** Set about the time of the Medgar Evers murder, where any sort of racial consciousness-raising was cracked down upon by Jackson police and strict curfews enforced, The Help has a tendency to overlook the more serious event in the timeline of its narrative, veering more towards comedy in Tate Taylor's adaptation (Taylor is a lifelong friend of novelist Kathryn Stockett's and acquired the rights to her novel before publication), but there is enough genuine tension in scenes of servants trying to get home by curfew, that the plight of the women in the serving class, and the genuine danger they faced in up-braiding their employers, and the structure imposed on them, simmers under the surface. Even in the face of somewhat trivially humiliating comeuppance, any sense of triumphant table-turning seems negligible against the long road to some sense of justice, however piddling (though entertainingly apt to provide a shit-eating grin) those small victories might be.
As such, The Help, like those small victories, is a measured success.
(And I appreciated the handy list of uses for Crisco).
The Help is a Matinee.
* "The White Guy Saves The Day," ala "Robinson Crusoe," Dances with Wolves, Glory, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Mississippi Burning, The Last Samurai, Avatar, heck, even "Transformers"...
** The closest it comes to teetering over the edge is in a sub-plot of an ostracized Southern belle from the other side of the tracks (played by Jessica Chastain), who embodies a white version of Southern social stigma, and, in a reverse of the normal Hollywood strategy of "white moves first," is shown "the ropes" by one of "the help," an act that becomes mutually beneficial.
*** Octavia Spencer is a real "find" here and a shoo-in to get a Best Supporting Actress nomination come Oscar season, but I hope that Academy voters will also give a Best Actress nod to Davis, whose tremulous fire in her role would make it her second nomination in three years—her first being Doubt, in which her one-speech scene managed to outshine Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
**** As if this embarrassment of acting riches wasn't enough, Miss Hilly's mother is played by Sissy Spacek, who continues to play ordinary roles in a most extraordinary way.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Don't Make a Scene: Star Trek
The Story: This isn't your Daddy's Star Trek. The conceit of the J.J. Abrams directed franchise-saver is that History has been unalterably changed—so all that Starfleet history you knew...pfft...all gone. It happened in syndication over and over, alright, like being stuck in a gravity-anomaly time-loop, but with the events of this movie and the planned intervention of a time-travelling Romulan mining processor, everything is different, and many continuity wrongs can be righted (like that 1990's Eugenics War that supposedly birthed Khan—but didn't happen, at least I didn't read about it—or the episode titled "Spock's Brain").
Oh...and all those Vulcans.
The changing of the Vulcan race into a Space diaspora is at once an interesting and oddly upsetting choice. Those "pointy-eared," "green-blooded" "hobglobins" dominated so much of "Trek" history, being so calm, so collected, so...damned logical, that they served more of a purpose as intergalactic kill-joys (what's the opposite of a "drama-queen?") and Voices of Reason (plus, they were everywhere), which scotched the Captain Horatio Hornblower-styled space adventures (and "cowboy-diplomacy") of the The Original Series* (that, and the minuscule budgets of the first series, precluded the exotic, as those Styrofoam boulders and tulip chairs could get expensive).
So, "culling" the Vulcans took away "Star Trek's" safety-net.
Also, it created drama-ripples in The Enterprise Trifecta**—that being Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy. One wonders why they ever needed a conference-room on The U.S.S. Enterprise, as things were usually discussed, options debated, arguments broached and decisions made between these three HOD's:*** Kirk was the romantic crown of power with Final Authority and responsibility; "First/Science Officer" Spock was the logical one, using odds and formulas and The Scientific Method to calculate the optimum course; Chief Medical Officer McCoy was a humanist, whose POV included ethics, morality and 30cc's of the Hippocratic Oath. The typical scene would be Kirk poses problem/Spock offers solution/McCoy brings up implications/Spock dismisses them airily/McCoy raises an eyebrow and his voice, then makes it personal/Kirk says: "Gentlemen, gentlemen...," mollifies them...then does what he wants.
Here, the three men encounter each other for the first time, with unusual results—Kirk and Spock are at odds, and McCoy (played by Karl Urban) is taking Spock's side. Raised eyebrows ensue.
And Spock—Spock's a jerk. In control, condescending, and gratingly pointed in his observations and accusations, he uses his intellect and unflappable veneer to use Kirk's emotions and history against him, and—in a way that Leonard Nimoy's mandarin aloofness never allowed—does it with a superior, one might say "cruel," smile on his face. Sure, Kirk is too cocky by half and needs to be taken down a deck or two, but does the half-human Spock have to enjoy it so much? Before long, everyone is going to suffer and learn lessons of humility...in fact, it has already begun.
Oh, by the way, if the dialogue is a little hard to follow, as it's broken up by its appearance under screen-captures, blame the director, who wanted to "keep it moving." The energy he instilled in this "reboot," extended to camera movement, as well (Still—which the camera never is—some of those moves are pretty clever).
The Set-Up: Starfleet Cadet James Kirk (Chris Pine) has just "beaten" the "no-win scenario" in an Academy simulator—the Kobayashi Maru.**** But, he did it in a way "that had the virtue of never having been tried"—he "changed the conditions of the test," by re-programming the simulator. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, he got a commendation, but, here, he's about to be drummed out of Starfleet by Admiral Bennett (yes, that is Tyler Perry), his chief accuser being someone he's never met in this version of events, Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto).
Action! Full thrusters!
KIRK: Sir?
SPOCK: Cadet Kirk...
SPOCK: Your argument precludes the possibility of a no-win scenario.
SPOCK: You, of all people should know, Cadet Kirk...
KIRK: Enlighten me...
Star Trek
Words by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
Pictures by Daniel Mindel and J.J. Abrams
Star Trek is available on DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.
*** And Freudian stand-in's: McCoy is the Id, Spock the Super-ego, and Kirk the Ego.
**** The "Kobayashi Maru" test was first mentioned in Nicholas Meyer's film of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.