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Monsieur Spade (2024)
Try a little open-mindedness
My background is in the culture of criticism in literary studies, and so I like to read reviews, having published a few. I sometimes wonder what people are doing when they review on IMDB--do they think that there is one correct way to do anything and anything else is . . . Incorrect?
Monsieur Spade is a great example of reviewers lacking open-mindedness. This is an imaginative extrapolation of a John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart. It shifts the setting in both time and place. It establishes its own standards, and goes about the work of telling a super-complicated story. (That, by the way, is an inheritance from film noir, where the plots were often so arcane the writers didn't even know what was going on--see The Big Sleep.) It's not supposed to be The Maltese Falcon II. But grumpy reviewers have piled on the negative judgments.
Me, I enjoyed it. I liked the way Clive Owen created a character of a post-Bogart Sam Spade and ran it out through the episodes. I liked the setting, because I like wine. I liked how the whole thing just played out the narrative according to its own rules. The writing was highly stylized and completely unrealistic, which is fine with me.
I loved the Agatha Christy tell-all ending. That was cool, unexpected, and apparently intolerable to the close-minded reviewers.
Spartacus Super Bowl says, hey, just enjoy the series.
The Dick Van Dyke Show: Pink Pills and Purple Parents (1964)
Writing for your stars: predicting the majesty of MTM!
At this point, the Dick Van Dyke Show knew what it had going for it. The writing could always come up with situations and concepts for comedy. The supporting cast was wide and deep and could sing and dance and make with the jokes. The leads were stellar, choreographing comedy in a way that created its own genre. Carl Reiner had taken the Show of Shows idea and evolved it into a new form of TV comedy, the half-hour sit-com with a variety show inside it. And Mary Tyler Moore was still ascendent, on her way to her own era of redefining TV comedy with the legendary Mary Tyler Moore Show. And man, oh, man did she have talent.
Here, you can see the set-up: find a new way to challenge MTM to embody comedy. Take a few pills, play off the challenge of the parents, get into some literally rolling-on-the-floor laugh-making. Good Lord but MTM was a robust comedian!
Spartacus Super Bowl says episodes like this are why so many people identify the Dick Van Dyke Show as a groundbreaker into a new era.
En dag och en halv (2023)
A day and a half trapped in a car in with the world's worst-suited parents
The movie only seems like it takes a day and a half--it's only an hour and a half but I couldn't make it to the end, anyway. What a horrible premise.
Take the two least-suited people to get married and bring a child into the world, and then add a gun and a car and a whole lot of stupidity, and you've got this . . . Thing.
The protagonist is so far from sympathetic that the story is blown from the first couple of days (by which I really mean minutes). He has the boneheaded stolidity of Lou Reed trying to go straight. He can't be talked to. He is basically a victim of toxic patriarchal masculinity, but he doesn't play that in a way to invite the audience into his predicament. Instead he makes stupid choice after stupid predictably stolid boneheaded choice, what he thinks a man should do. He and his wife holler at each other a lot. As my Mom would say, "she's no prize, either."
The cop driving the car is kind of good--looks like maybe a version of Triton with that beard! He suffers the trials of Job, and I can only hope (because I just couldn't make it to the end) that he survived to take on some other unbearable burden of an assignment. Maybe he'll guard the Ferry Cross the Mersey or Cross the Styx.
Spartacus Super Bowl says, "well, it's kind of an attractive trainwreck."
Mitt (2014)
Studying what's boring
I want to start by disclosing that I never voted for Mitt Romney for anything, but I respect him as a decent public servant and as a strong man of family and faith. None of that matters at all to this campaign documentary. Campaigns are full of boring moments, and Mitt Romney's family is pretty boring, too, and the director has consistently chosen the more boring to study in this documentary.
"Mitt" is almost (well, lacking the biting comic wit, which is the whole thing) like "Rosencrans and Guildenstern Are Dead," in which the high drama is elsewhere and what we watch are the tedious moments behind the scenes. I guess the Romney family think of themselves as precious and witty, but I'm here to argue that they are tedious (and probably narcissistic, which is probably why they don't realize it), and one wonders--is this the way to run a professional national campaign for the highest office in the land, with all these siblings "spit-balling" ideas? Based on results, apparently not.
UGGHH! There is so little campaigning in this campaign documentary--just the briefest of clips from the debates, almost no speeches or interviews. Just Mitt and his wholesome family yakking it up in hotel rooms. I guess they were the audience for the film (home movies!), and maybe they were the backers for it, too.
I don't think there's any danger of Mitt Romney being forgotten--he was Governor of Massachusetts, organized an Olympic Games, and more recently served as a US Senator--so that reason for this documentary fails to measure up. It's this film that deserves to be forgotten.
The Twilight Zone: The Jungle (1961)
A Great Director's Episode
"The Jungle" is a great Twilight Zone episode for which the major credit should go to its director, William F. Claxton. The Twilight Zone was most a writer's show, and most of the great episodes worked dramatically, character revealed through speech. "The Jungle," written by the prolific Charles Beaumont, based upon his story of several years before, works more cinematically--and cinema is a director's media.
"The Jungle" develops more and more through the viewer's experience of what happens to the character (not what he says or how he grows). On the usual low television budget, Claxton tells the story through images and sounds, most of which are actually misdirection--you don't really see almost anything (except that leaping lion at the end!), just experience lighting effects given meaning through the soundtrack. The craftspeople who put this together in three or four days should take pride in their work. It's a great episode that builds suspense to a powerful climax.
Wheelman (2017)
Right on point
I'm surprised by how much I liked and appreciated this little film. It's just right down to the essentials--images and sound. The story is actually ironically smart.
I loved the way the cinematography followed strict rules about a narrowed-down perspective. We're always in the car and can't see much beyond it. This style creates its own universe. The editing really amps up the action.
Now for the story: Wheelman provides a tight and on-point integrity in recognizing that like most criminals, the protagonist is achingly stupid, and emotionally overwrought. The thing that makes the narrative work is a level playing field: the antagonists are even more stupid, so Wheelman has a chance to win.
It's just an EXPERIENCE film, not a think-piece, and taken on those terms it really works.
The Twilight Zone: A Passage for Trumpet (1960)
John Anderson is so cool in this one
Jack Klugman gives a great lead performance in this highly-regarded Twilight Zone episode about Joey Crown, the trumpeter who gives a classic alcoholic's speech about how great his music sounds when he's drunk. This is what Klugman the actor was all about, all-in on his character, right down to some make-up effect that make him look a little more like a trumpeter. There's no question it's his show and he hits the high notes, all right.
But John Anderson turns the episode around as the angel Gabriel, who is also a cool horn man who can blow it sweet and mellow on that trumpet. He's so cool, from the hair and beard to the jazzy way he walks down the noir-lighted little alleyway they set up outside the jazz club. SPARTACUS SUPER BOWL thinks this is what "supporting player" is all about.