A Fact. Use It However You Wish

I find it interesting that all five of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture are narratives told about the past.

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button uses a journal kept by the main character as a way to examine his life through a series of flashbacks.
• Frost/Nixon is told from the perspective of various people involved in the historic interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, as they recall the events that led up to and followed those minutes on camera.
• Milk begins with the main character, Harvey Milk, dictating a message into a tape recorder, a message that covers a significant portion of his life over the past decade.
• The Reader is all about the recollections of Michael Berg and the affair that he conducted as a 15-year-old with an older woman who is later charged with war crimes for her part in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.
• Slumdog Millionaire focuses upon the recollections of a young man on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as he tries to explain how someone uneducated like himself could know all of the answers.

My dissertation for my doctorate was about the role that memory plays in the construction of narrative, but I'm not going to bore you with any analytical overview that tries to pull all of these films together into some neat package. It just seems that Hollywood, the film business, and the Academy Awards voters seem to be intrigued by the past and what it can tell us this year. I don't recall a time in recent years, at least, when all five of the films have had such a similar overarching structure.

Make of it what you will.

A Change of Heart

I've had the opportunity this weekend to see four movies: Frost/Nixon, Slumdog Millionaire (for a second time), Rachel Getting Married, and The Reader. If I had seen the last two before year's end, I would have chosen either Anne Hathaway or Kate Winslet for my favorite female performance of 2008. (Or I might have declared a tie.)

Hathaway is mind-bending in Rachel Getting Married. She plays Kym, who's out of rehab for the weekend to attend her sister's wedding. Kym is one of those people who just never seems to have a handle on life, one of those folks who always seems to get it wrong. The toast she gives at the rehearsal dinner is a perfect example. It's completely self-serving and egocentric and a real downer at an event that should be filled with joy. If you think Hathaway is only capable of doing frothy comedies like those Princess Diaries movies, you are in for a shock when you see this film. She's so completely fragile, and she captures perfectly the tenuous nature of people who are in rehab. It's an astonishing feat of acting.

Rachel Getting Married was Sunday's choice of movie. Today I saw The Reader, and I was totally blown away by Winslet's performance as Hanna, a German woman who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy before leaving to join the SS as a guard at a concentration camp. The boy, played brilliantly by David Kross, grows up to attend law school and is chosen to be in a seminar that includes visits to the war crimes trial of Hanna and five other guards. It's an emotionally wrenching film at times, but Winslet manages to keep you from completely dismissing Hanna as an evil person. Just when you're ready to condemn Hanna for her actions, Winslet allows you to see a flash of her humanity and you take back (at least temporarily) your harsh feelings about her. It's a remarkable feat, made no less impressive by the film's lack of desire to paint her in easy-to-decipher tones.

Both films have supporting casts that are just astonishingly good. Rachel Getting Married has Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, and she's just heartbreaking. The parents are played by Bill Irwin and Debra Winger (who has a scene with Hathaway that is not to be missed). Also along for solid support are Anna Deveare Smith and Anisa George, who reveals a level of bitterness to her character that you just know has been simmering for decades. The Reader has Ralph Fiennes as the boy, all grown up now and revisiting his past yet again, and Lena Olin as a concentration camp survivor and the great Bruno Ganz as the law professor. And I'd like to mention again just how stunned I was at how talented David Kross is.

Still, it's Hathaway and Winslet who are the focus of their respective films. Both will likely be nominated for Oscars this week, and the two of them would make for a difficult choice. Winslet is overdue at this point, but I'm not happy that her performance in The Reader is being touted as a supporting performance. She's the lead here, make no mistake. And Hathaway has, I think, just re-invented her career, Bride Wars be damned. Next weekend I'm hoping to see Revolutionary Road, and I have a feeling that's just going to make the choice even tougher. So 2008 turned out to have some great performances by women after all. I just had to catch up with them.

Welcome Back

Last night an old friend came back to visit. It was the season premiere of Friday Night Lights on NBC. I know it's been playing on DirecTV for a few months now, but I'm on cable and it was nice to be able to watch the show again. I love the way that this program captures small town life. It reminds me so much of home in Mississippi, a place where the Friday night high school football game is the subject for the entire town to discuss all week long. It's based upon the movie of the same name which was released in 2004, and I also loved the film's evocation of what it means to live in a place where there is so little to do and where so much depends upon the one thing that brings everyone together once a week. The TV series is perhaps even better than the film at presenting that sense of unity.

I think the characters on the show are all sharply drawn, particularly Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife Tami (the amazing Connie Britton). I think they are the most realistic married couple on television these days; they love each other, but they find each other quite puzzling at times too. The young actors who play the members of the football team are all excellent, particularly Zach Gilford as Matt Saracen and Taylor Kitsch (probably the hottest guy on television these days) as Tim Riggins. My favorites on the show, though, are Adrianne Palicki as Tyra Collette, the former bad girl who's trying to reform her ways so that she can get out of the small town she's in, and her admirer, Landry Clarke, played by Jesse Plemons. Their moments together are a highlight of every episode in which they appear, and I can certainly understand Tyra's desire to leave behind the small town mentality. The only other relationship that comes close to being as interesting is the one involving Coach Taylor and the number-one booster of the team, car dealer Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland). They are the funniest couple since Oscar and Felix shared time on the small screen, and last season they had some of the best moments in the show's brief history.

So few people are watching this show, and I don't really understand why. I don't really like football, but this isn't truly a show about sports. The games are just a topic. What it's really about is the way that people in small towns like this interact, how they manage to get along with (or, sometimes, not get along with) the other people. Having grown up in a town much like the fictional Dillon, I can assure you that the makers of the show get it right each time.

This could be the last season of the show. The ratings have never been good, and they're probably going to be miniscule now that the show is on Friday nights for just 13 weeks. So it seems like it's going to be another TV program that I and a few critics enjoy, but no one else in America seems to "get." (Sort of like Swingtown, which I loved, but which hardly anyone else managed to watch.) I expect I'll have to comfort myself someday soon with boxed sets of the complete seasons on DVD. In the meantime, I know where I'm spending my Friday nights for the next few months.

'Tis No Longer the Season

I've finally taken down the Christmas cards. I started taping the cards I receive each year to the back of the front door of my apartment. When I get home at the end of the day during the holiday season, it's always nice to have that visual reminder that there are people who care about me, at least enough to send a card with good wishes for the upcoming year.

Today, though, I took them down finally. It's been too long, I know, since Christmas ended. We've already started back to school. It's past the middle of January. I'm still seeing a few Christmas trees abandoned by the sides of the streets, and someone took out the tree from an apartment on this floor just this past week. (I know this because the hallway was littered with needles for two days until someone from the maintenance crew finally cleaned it up.) But the holiday season is definitely over by now. The Valentine's Day merchandise has been out for a couple of weeks, and Easter stuff can't be far behind.

I don't know why I've been holding on to the cards for this long. Taking them down is not time-consuming, and I'm not feeling particularly sad at the passing of another Christmas. I tend to treat is as just another day anyhow. Perhaps it's just knowing that there's another eleven months or so now before we start to have that sense that we should tell people that we care about them. I'm not the most overly sentimental guy, but I do feel that we should be more forthcoming about our emotions sometimes. Too many of our friends and family members never get to hear how much we care for them. Or, if they do, it's only at Christmastime.

I don't really make New Year's resolutions. I never have. But if I were to think about one way that I might change in 2009, it would be to let the people I care about know that more frequently. So if you're reading this, know that the next time I see you in person, you just might get a hug. You've been warned.

Returning to the 70s

Over this long holiday week, I've managed to catch up with some stuff that I had saved up in the DVR (on the DVR?). I watched the last four episodes of Mad Men (genius show) and saw the entire seasons of Life on Mars (interesting stuff so far) and The Starter Wife (so funny and with Hart Bochner as the love interest). I've also managed to watch a few old movies that are not at all related to the Oscar Project on the other blog. Two of them were TV movies from the 1970s: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.

Some of you may need a reminder that ABC, CBS, and NBC used to be in the business of producing movies. This was, after all, B.C. (before cable) when you probably had only three channels to watch (two if you lived in the hill country of Mississippi), and if the president came on to address the nation, you were pretty much screwed for the night. Nowadays, TV movies seem to be almost exclusively the domain of HBO and Showtime and Lifetime and a few other cable channels. However, in the 1970s, there were some spectacular films being made just for television viewers.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman stars Cicely Tyson as a 110-year-old woman who has lived from the pre-Civil War era to the heyday of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She's basically telling her life story to a magazine reporter (played by a very young Michael Murphy). She recounts life on the plantations before and during the Civil War, she discusses the Reconstruction era and the Ku Klux Klan, she even mentions the "Back to Africa" movement: hardly any event involving African Americans has passed her notice in a long, full life. Tyson is a remarkable actress, and I don't think she was ever finer than she is in the TV movie (and that's saying a lot considering the staggering number of good performances she has given over the years).

The best scene of the film is at the end. After a younger black woman has been arrested for trying to drink from the "whites only" water fountain in town, Jane decides that she will be the next person to take a chance. The walk from the truck to the fountain is slow and measured, just the way a 110-year-old woman would walk. The look on her face defying the redneck sheriff and his deputies to stop her is priceless. She takes her drink and walks slowly back to the truck to leave town and return home. I hadn't seen this film in at least thirty years, but I remembered that moment clearly, and it holds up on repeated viewing.

I also remembered strong details about Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, particularly the blue chiffon dress Maureen Stapleton wears on the night of the competition to name the queen. Stapleton plays a widow who starts attending the ballroom upon the advice of a friend and begins a romance with a mailman played by Charles Durning. She seems to come alive for the first time after she begins seeing him. She has her hair dyed a bright red and starts wearing make-up and colorful clothes, much to the dismay of her daughter. In fact, most members of her family seem to disapprove of the way she has begun living her life. When they find out that Durning's character is already married, that just cements their fears that Stapleton's Bea has started to go crazy.

I did forget one thing about this film in the thirty years since I last saw it. It's a musical. I know I should have remembered that, but go figure. Stapleton sings most of the songs, and while she's not a great singer, the songs remain a highlight. They are most frequently comments upon Bea's state of mind. Durning gets a song as well, "Suddenly, There's You," to reveal his growing affection for Bea. My favorite song in the movie is "Who Gave You Permission?" It's a feminist song for women who might have been considered too old to be feminists in the early 1970s. I can see just how easily this movie could be adapted into the Broadway musical Ballroom with the addition of just a few more songs.

Both of these movies were on the movie channel Flix last year. I'm hoping that someone there will dig up more of the TV movies from that era to show in the future. I love revisiting my childhood like this. I, of course, didn't appreciate all of the complex subject matter when I first watched them; I was only 11 or 12, after all, and not as precocious as you might imagine. It's good to become reacquainted with "old friends" once you're old enough to appreciate them more fully.

Taking Stock: 2008

During 2008, I got to see only 24 movies in the theater, primarly because of my surgery for skin cancer which kept me mostly housebound for more than four months (March to July), and I saw another 29 on DVD. I'm watching a lot of movies still, but most of them are ones that I have saved on the DVR nowadays. I managed to read 43 books, still fewer than I'd like to have finished, but reading student essays takes a lot of time and energy away from "pleasure reading." I also only saw ten plays or musicals in theaters this year, again a result of being stuck at home for all of those months. Still, there were delights to be found even in such a year of relatively low activity on my part.

Favorite Movie: Wall-E. I still maintain that this is not a movie for kids. It's almost a modern-day silent film, and its subject matter--the devastation of our planet and its aftermath--is just too sophisticated for children. (The kids at the screening I attended kept asking their parents, "What is Wall-E doing now?"). Yet, as serious as the subject may be, there was no more joyous experience at the theater for me this past year. I loved the insertion of songs and clips from Hello, Dolly (a genius move on someone's part) and the commentary on our consumerist culture. Who knew that a film about the romance between two robots could be so magical?

Runner-Up: Milk. For me, there was no more satisfying political statement than the one made by this film. I only wish it could have arrived a month or two earlier so that the LGBT community and its allies could have been inspired by the efforts of Harvey Milk. Sean Penn gives a wonderful performance as the gay civil rights pioneer, and he is ably supported by a stunningly good supporting cast. This movie uses the life of one man to show us how much of a difference each of us can make--an important lesson in these post-Prop. 8 days.

P.S. I was tempted to make Atonement my favorite runner-up since I didn't see it until January, but I'll try not to "cheat" this year the same way that I did a couple of times last year. Still, it was one of my favorite moviegoing experiences of this past year; I saw it twice on the big screen because I liked it so well. I think it will grow in stature as the years progress. It certainly stands as an example of the value of having a good script (with good source material for it) and a sharp editor.

Favorite Performance (Female): Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! Heresy, I know, but I didn't see that many great female performances this past year. I know I could have gone for a more serious choice, but the category is "favorite," not "best." And, yes, I know it's not a very good movie overall. However, was there anyone who seemed to have more fun on the screen than Streep did this past year singing the songs of ABBA? Her performance of "The Winner Takes It All" is still my personal favorite, but she and the rest of the cast seemed to be having a ball in the musical number at the end of the movie. For sheer joy alone, I'd pick this performance (and not her performance in Doubt, which doesn't plumb the comic moments as much as I remember Cherry Jones doing in the production at the Ahmanson last year).

Favorite Performance (Male): Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. This just made it in under the wire; I only saw the film yesterday. Eastwood plays a retired auto worker whose racist attitudes almost keep him from developing a friendship with a Hmong family next door, particularly the son who needs a male influence in his life to keep him from becoming involved in a gang. Again, the movie is not that great overall--it takes too many easy turns, I think--but Eastwood plays the role as if it's an amalgam of all of his best roles. There's a lot of Dirty Harry in there, naturally, but you wouldn't be wrong to suspect a bit of Bronco Billy or some of his other "fun" roles as well. If you're familiar with Eastwood's career, this performance is a marvel. Try, though, to keep from laughing at his singing at the end of the film; Jamie Cullum will be along in a moment to sing the theme song the way it should be done.

Runners-Up: Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in Role Models. I really loved this movie. It seemed to have its heart in the right place. As two screw-ups who have to serve as mentors for young boys, Rudd and Scott are near-perfect. Rudd is the guy who realizes that he may be getting too old to achieve all of his dreams, but he finds a way to maintain a sense of hope by movie's end. Scott plays the wild guy who always seems to be up for a party, but he reveals a sensitivity that is deep and touching. I know some of the plot points are familiar, but watch this one again to enjoy the interplay between these two actors. And the rest of the cast is all pretty great too, particularly Jane Lynch (if only she had a whole movie built around her one of these days...).

Favorite Play: Fuddy Meers. This was a student production at my college, and the cast members (including one of my fellow teachers) made it into an exciting evening at the theater. I didn't see any dramas at so-called "legitimate" theaters this year, which is surprising to me, but no matter when you have local talent like this. To try to describe the plot of this farce would be impossible, but despite all of the twists and turns (or, perhaps, because of them), I had a great time.

Favorite Musical: Xanadu. I went with my dear friend J (he's responsible for getting me out to see theater more often than I would on my own, certainly) to San Diego to see the touring production of this show at the La Jolla Playhouse. It's the most fun I've had all year. The only complaint I'd have is that it only lasts about 90 minutes. I could have watched for hours and still have had a great time. Yes, it's a take-off on the movie. Yes, it uses old ELO and Olivia Newton-John songs. Yes, you'll sing along just like everyone else does. The cast seems to have as much fun as the audience does, and the self-referential nature of the show makes it even more of a clever joy. I would have loved to have seen this on Broadway with the original cast too. I bet it was a hoot (as we say in the South).

Runner-Up: Spring Awakening. I know there were complaints about the acting abilities of the young cast of this touring company that stopped at the Ahmanson this fall. Yet their talent for singing and dancing is above complaint. They're staggeringly good in those respects. And it's an energetic show, fueled by some great songs. You might not expect a musical about teen rebellion in early 20th Century Germany to be a lot of fun, but it is. I've already downloaded "The Bitch of Living" and several other songs into my iPod, just so I can remember that night again and again.

Favorite Book (Fiction): Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. How does a book that's more than 70 years old become my favorite of 2008? By surpassing all of the contemporary stuff that I read, that's how. I picked up this Faulkner novel after reading for who-knows-how-many-times As I Lay Dying for my American literature class. This is no quick read, certainly, but the depth of characterization and the scope of the themes he's working with here make this book worth the amount of time it takes to figure out. I hadn't read this book in at least twenty years, but I find it even more impressive now than I did when I was in graduate school. On the surface, it's the telling of what happened to the Sutphen family, but of course, this being Faulkner, it's actually about the South and race relations and gender roles and class distinctions and the aftermath of the Civil War and the interaction between Northerners and Southerners and...well, you get the idea. Tackle it again (or for the first time). You deserve it.

Favorite Book (Non-Fiction): Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. No one seems to dissect aspects of our culture better than Gladwell, and he can find the most obscure examples to make difficult concepts easy to understand (e.g., why hockey players born in January, February, and March tend to do better--who would have thought of that? Gladwell, of course.). I was a fan of The Tipping Point from the moment I first read it, and now I'm trying to figure out how to use Outliers in the same ways in the classroom that I've used that earlier work. Gladwell is ostensibly writing about success and how we achieve it, but what he really does is dismantle our preconceived ideas and forces us to rethink what we believe we already know about a topic. I read this book while my students were writing their finals, and I almost wanted to give a couple of classes more time so that I could finish it faster. I have to pick up Blink now and see what Gladwell has to say about decision-making.

Runner-Up: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. This book was loaned to me by my friend J after I suggested that he should check it out. I hadn't read it before--I had just read all of the glowing reviews--but his love of graphic novels could surely only be enhanced by reading Bechdel's book, right? To be honest, my respect for them grew with this text as well. It's Bechdel's story of her coming to terms with her own lesbianism as well as her father's homosexuality, and it's brilliantly drawn, masterfully written, and engrossing to read.

P.S. Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris and My Trip Down the Pink Carpet by Leslie Jordan were two other favorite non-fiction books this year. I actually read more non-fiction than anything else in 2008, and the quality of them overall was outstanding. Oddly enough, three of these four were actually published in 2008 as well. I know I claim that I don't read books that are current, but sometimes the subject matter is just too enticing. Harris takes the five nominees for Best Picture of 1967 and delves into their history and impact; it's one of the most entertaining and informative books on film I've read in recent years. Jordan's book is bascially the story of aspects of his life that have been turned into his most recent one-man show. His humor is so refreshing, and there's such a delightful aspect to his storytelling that I couldn't wait to read this book from him.

Favorite Book (Poetry): Why God Permits Evil by Miller Williams. I hope more people start to read Williams' poetry and stop just thinking of him as the father of the talented Lucinda Williams. This is a collection of poems that I was assigned to read while still in college in Mississippi, and I've always treasured them. I came back to them this year because I wanted to get in touch with my love for poetry, something I don't get to "indulge" very often these days when I'm not teaching a literature course. Williams has a sense of humor about many subjects, including the one that serves as the focus of the title poem, but he also writes with a clarity about what would seem to be depressing topics in such a way that you can empathize and appreciate their importance. I may have to look up some of his more recent work.

Runner-Up: Under a Soprano Sky by Sonia Sanchez. I met Sanchez many years ago at the Southern Literary Festival (early or mid-1980s) and was spellbound by her reading of her poetry. I bought a couple of her books and read them then, but returning to them now was a rare treat. Hers is a welcoming, open poetic voice. She seems to know how to take anger and frustration (over racism and death and mistreatment of all people) and make it seem like we are headed in the right direction overall anyway. That's a rare gift indeed.

Highlight of the Year: Would it be wrong of me to say that, for the second year in a row, it was getting to see Rufus Wainwright play live? I got to see him twice last year, the first time at the beautiful Wiltern Theater with his band and the second time at my alma mater, the University of Southern California, by himself. The second time was actually the week before I went in for my surgery (too fully chronicled on this blog already), and it was a lovely way to say goodbye temporarily to going out in public. Here's hoping he comes back to Los Angeles this year.

Runner-Up: Jamie Cullum at the Hollywood Bowl. I've already blogged about this night, so I won't go into the details again. This might have been the highlight of the year had it not been for having to sit through two opening acts, one of which was an improvisational jazz group. Cullum himself, though, was worth the wait. An energetic performer, he has the style and voice to be a major player for years to come. And what a surprise it was for me to hear him sing the theme song from Gran Torino (which he and Clint Eastwood and a couple of others collaborated on) on the last day of the year. A lovely way to end 2008, in my opinion.