talktooloose

Last night, we watched the 2004 movie, "A Home at the End of the World," based on the Michael Cunningham novel.

The first half hour is so luminous and magical that it makes the rest of the incomprehensible exercise in wrongheadedness maddening in the extreme. In fact, the only things that kept me going during that last annoying hour were Colin Farrell's eyes (which I could stare at all night) and wondering if Robin Wright Penn was ever able to exact revenge on the hair and makeup department.

***SPOILERS FOR ROME SEASON 2 AND SOPRANOS SEASON 6***

We just finished watching our way through Rome Season 2 which ended the series rather abruptly. What a fucking mess.

The show was beautifully designed and acted and much of the direction was good, but the writing was often fucked up. The writers didn't really understand Roman society or that the values were far different than Anglo-Saxon values.

The basic gimmick of the show was to follow both the famous historical figures (and their less famous friends and relatives) while simultaneously showing us scenes from the "lower orders". The historical stuff ultimately worked much better. This divide became wider and wider in Season 2 as the historical stuff rose a notch (even without the brilliant presence of Ciarán Hinds as Julius Caesar) while the plebian stories descended into historically inaccurate claptrap and melodrama.

The creators, as I understand it, were told about the show's imminent cancellation quite late in production. The last two episodes, in which they attempted to cram a lot of shit in too quickly, were ridiculous and often hilarious.

Lucius Vorenus has run away from Alexandria with Cleopatra and Anthony's son Cesarion because Octavian wants him dead. Octavian sends Titus Pullo out to find him, not knowing that Pullo is actually Cesarion's father and will attempt to aid the escape.

First night in the desert, Vorenus and Cesarion are bonding around a campfire when suddenly Pullo shows up and there's a big "Hey, friend, how you doing?" Pullo goes on to say that 10 legions are looking for the boy. Wow, and yet Pullo found them in like 12 hours in the middle of the desert. Impressive. Even more astonishing that Vorenus wasn't, like, hiding at all and allowed a man on horseback to get within 10 meters of them before he noticed. Let's not even talk about the open campfire.

The other big problem in the season was the casting of Cleopatra. The actress had no chemistry at all with James Purefoy who played Anthony in the season's best performance. This lack of chemistry sunk the whole ending.

In the long run, this show needed a sense of otherness that was mostly absent. To really be drawn in as viewers, we needed to see how differently Romans thought and felt about issues than we in the 21st Century do. It is by doing the work of seeing through this otherness that the viewer becomes involved and empathizes at a deeper and more disturbing level.

As I watched the utterly predictable death of Gaia, I found myself comparing it to the death of Christopher on the Sopranos. The latter death was horrifying. It was unexpected and yet inevitable. It threw a wall between us and Tony and, disturbingly, made us culpable as we wondered if he'd get away with it. It was impulsive, brutal and so, so simple and underplayed.

It was "otherness" personified. Our time in the Sopranos' New Jersey gave us a sense of travelling farther from our centre than Rome's world ever did. Rome was a tragic waste of talent and resources.

Two quotes (plus the above) from 24 Hour Party People:

"Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does."

"And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They're applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester. "

I don't know when the North American release date for the Sunshine DVD is, but our video store got in an Asian release and we watched it Friday night.

This is, hands down, the best science fiction movie of the last 20 years, unless I've forgotten something. No, not Space Truckers.

The movie takes place in the not-too-distant future. The sun has suddenly decided to ramp down and the Earth is cooling towards extinction. A last-hope mission is sent off in a portentously named ship, the Icarus, with a big nuclear device to restart the star.

Not only was the movie beautiful and superbly acted, but it worked on "real" and metaphoric levels with equal vigour and never lost track of its themes. What especially excited me was the way that the journey from the Earth to the Sun became a de facto journey into abstraction. The crew left Earth amid hoopla, carrying the hopes of billions on their (uniformly attractive) shoulders but soon entered a realm of isolation and individual doubt which mirrored the physical space they were travelling through.

The movie starts as they enter the zone where solar interference will cut them off from communication with home. That is the first level of isolation in the movie. The process will continue as the number of the crew dwindles and as symbolic and metaphoric concerns take on a larger and larger part of their world.

The creators of the movie recognize that this movement into metaphor is inevitable. As the sun looms closer and closer, protean and deadly, the crew can't help but see divinity and fate in its fires.

Furthermore, an early visualization in the movie lets us know that eventually the A.I. that runs the ship will be useless as relativistic forces close to the sun make known physics less and less applicable. In the end, we are signalled, it will be up to human will, human intuition, the realm of the soul whether mankind survives or not.

In fact, the greatest danger the mission faces is in the form of a human who has become twisted under the philosophical/religious/metaphoric pressures of the situation.

The fact that Danny Boyle and company can make a film which works this way and stays coherent is nothing short of remarkable.

Would I have done things differently in the last act? Probably, but I'm not sure anyone could have done it better.

It's a hot smoggy day and I'm hiding in the basement post-spamming!

Two recently viewed movies and why they work and don't:

• Pan's Labrynth: The secret to the success of this film is that both the "real" and "fantasy" sides of the story make use of archetypal characters. If del Toro had made the Spanish Civil War sections more nuanced and ambiguous, it would have rendered the fantasy sections just an escape for the girl. In fact, the movie invited us to see the hard lessons of fairy tales in the world around us and to view the world as a place where real moral decisions can be made.
  
• Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus: I enjoyed aspects of this movie, especially the performances but it ultimately fails. It is reductive and kind of insulting to imagine that Arbus' whole aesthetic moved into the rooms above her. It reduces the painful process of artistic discovery to a simple key-and-lock exercise. Very disappointing considering how good the writer/director's (Steven Shainberg) first movie, Secretary, was. He made Nicole Kidman do exactly the same investigative moves as Maggie Gyllenhaal did. In fact, Fur was the same movie as an artist biopic.
  

Also, Nicole Kidman is making a habit of playing revolutionary female artists who later commit suicide. Too bad Sylvia Plath's just been done. Also, also, I have the hots for the guy who played her husband, Ty Burrell (despite his stupid name). It amused me to learn that the character he played, Allan Arbus, later went on to be an actor, most notably as the recurring psychiatrist character, Sydney, on M*A*S*H.

Speaking of fairy-tale movies, François Ozon's Les amants criminels, is a trip and a half. Hansel and Gretl as alienated French killer teens and the witch as a horny, gay woodsman who teaches Hans about love. The Disney/Tarantino ending is just.... wow, dude.