Things I said to The Fella to identify an actor whose name I never remember. Note: I had had two drinks.

“Little dude. With the eyes.”
“Elf guy! With the eyes and the teeth.”
“Little elf guy who’s not Tobey Maguire!”
“Sunshine of the Forever Thingee!“

He said “Elijah Wood?!” just as I said,”The little elf dude in the movies you always want me to watch. YOU KNOW.”

Arthur’s inner contradictions are crushing. He rejects tangible pleasure at every turn: he pushes away meals though he’s hungry; he brushes off his wife’s hand-won wooing; after his lyrical daydreams of wooing his true love, he presses for a hasty hump on the couch; when a lady of the evening asks if he’d like to “have a good time,” he growls “No, I like being miserable!” Moments later he coos dreamily, “But I want to live in a world where the songs come true.” This is the heart of his ambivalence: Arthur craves the flimsy joys of fantasy, not the modest but attainable pleasures of the real world. He doesn’t want plain ol’ happiness; he wants the glamour of a Happy Ending, Hollywood style.

Coming on the heels of Steve Martin’s The Jerk, Pennies from Heaven was woefully mis-marketed as a fond fantasy glancing back at the giddy musicals of the 1930s. That misreading must have made the actual film all the more jarring for contemporary audiences.

Pennies from Heaven is a fantasy, all right, but a deliberately jarring one; the main characters break into song and dance to express their inner desires and fears, but after these glimpses into the dazzling paradise of their musical fantasies, the clunking return to the all-too-real world of grim Depression-era desperation stings viciously. With its cruel interplay of luminous pipe dreams and dismal reality, Pennies from Heaven portrays the alienating effect of glitzy Hollywood fantasy as effectively as Sunset Boulevard or Mulholland Dr., raising us up along with the characters to grace the silver screen, then thumping us unceremoniously back to the dim, heavily shadowed rooms and streets of Arthur’s everyday.

In these tawdry studies in dark and light, director Herbert Ross deliberately evokes paintings from the ashcan school, a point that gets hammered home when we see Arthur and Eileen through the famous diner window from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Then the angle changes, placing us inside the famous painting. It’s a risky ploy that Ross carries off again and again with breathtaking ease, recreating several Ashcan landscapes that give depth to the film’s heart even as they blend seamlessly into Arthur’s garish gimcrack world.

Watching David Simon’s deservedly legendary HBO series “The Wire” for the first time is a bit like learning to swim: you’re thrown into the complicated worlds of Baltimore’s overtaxed Homicide division, a special unit developed to study drug kingpin Avon Barksdale’s syndicate, and the many members of the syndicate itself. It’s a sprawling cast of characters with dozens of interweaving story lines and realistically complicated relationships, spread out through several separate but intersecting subcultures. The closest we get to a traditional first-episode dramatis personae is a police photo board putting names to faces — but only of a handful of the gang’s street-level soldiers.

Rewatching the first episode last night, I suddenly looked at the DVD counter and thought “We’re more than eight minutes in and we’ve learned one person’s name — the corpse lying in the street” — who never comes up again in the entire series.

After the spoon-feeding that most dramas do to keep viewers up to speed, this reserve is a bit jolting, but “The Wire” demands your attention and then utterly, completely rewards you for it.

That’s the first time through. The second time through, you know the characters and the story arcs. The second viewing, like the second reading of a great novel, allows you to fully immerse yourself in the characters’ arcs. This time, you know who they are, where they came from, and — devastatingly, in many cases — where they’re going.

Now that you’re not struggling to follow the complex stories, the show’s greater theme of institutional decay becomes strikingly clear at every turn, even in the first few episodes. The D.A.’s office with its staggering stacks of paperwork on every desk, lining the walls, and precariously propped on office chairs: that’s not just set-dressing for an overworked office but a symbol of a legal system smothering under its own weight.

The parallels between cops and robbers become strikingly clear. When a hand-to-hand drug dealer commands a crowd of waiting junkies “You all know what this is! Up against the wall!,” it’s not hard to imagine why he chose those precise words. When a surveillance van drives off having given up on finding the dealers’ stash, the camera shifts to the van of the rival criminal crew (as yet unnamed, of course) who watched longer and smarter than the cops.

Again, like a great novel, the third time through, even greater resonances and symbols emerge. To pick just one example, let’s look at Detective Thomas “Herc” Hauk. At first, Herc seems as dumb and as dangerous as an untrained and neglected dog, but as the series develops, he is the very embodiment of the institutional decay and socio-political resentment that obstructs true and meaningful changes. Lazy, abusive, shiftless, untrustworthy, and almost hopelessly naive, Herc nonetheless believes his initial stagnation in the ranks is the consequence of affirmative action or favoritism, not of his own woefully poor police work. Herc routinely and off-handedly refers to his whiteness as a mark of some obscure authority: with his (black) partner in a pointless argument about which of them is Batman and which is Robin; with a citizen while phonebanking for a (black) mayoral candidate; when griping about intructions given to him by more adept and experienced (black) fellow detective Kima Greggs. His simmering racial resentment only fuels his apathy for police work; Herc cuts more and more corners as the show proceeds.

But, dumb and destructive as he is, Herc is a constant unwitting catalyst, both for his colleagues and for those outside the police force. [SPOILERS] It’s astounding how many major events in the universe of “The Wire” are precipitated by some fool thing Herc says or does*. To list just a few: Prez beating a teenager, the identification of the elusive Avon Barksdale, linking the dock workers to the drug trade, Carver’s life-altering introduction to Major Colvin, the dissolution of Hamsterdam (and the end of Bunny Colvin’s largely productive police career), the release of Marlo Stansfield, and — most heartbreakingly — innocent Randy Wagstaff loosing his stable home and enduring daily beatings as a snitch. Herc is like a force of nature, a tornado, moving heedlessly through the landscape with destruction trailing behind him, blissfully unaware of the miseries he visits upon those in his wake.

Perhaps the answer to the riddle of both Herc’s destructive nature and his personal success lies in his utter lack of integrity. Most of the characters on the series, cops and criminals both, struggle to align their personal morality with the strictures of their institutions. As Omar points out so poignantly, “A man got to have a code.” All the players recognize that their wins and losses occur within those strictures, that they are, in some greater sense, a consequence of the system. “The game is the game.” Even when Bodie concedes that “the game is rigged, man” that he’ll do “what I have to,” he adds a principled caveat: “just don’t ask me to live on my knees.”

*For more one Herc’s centrality to the events of the series, read The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop.

Haynes made a virtue of necessity, rewriting and reframing the narrative. What could have been a mere bio-pic became instead a wider statement about the consuming nature of fame and power. Fittingly, the rewritten story follows the structure of Orson Welles’ notoriously not-a-bio-pic Citizen Kane: reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is tapped to investigate the disappearing act of former rock idol Brian Slade, the glammest of the glam, whose most outrageous stage act drove him into obscurity.

As in Kane, the reporter tries to divine the icon’s history at second-hand, struggling to assemble the glib or sorrowful gossip of Slade’s scattered coterie into a coherent history. Unlike Kane, Velvet Goldmine ties the reporter’s personal narrative to the subject’s, expressing the slippery way we can incorporate a celebrity’s persona into our own histories, consuming the energy of those we admire or emulate, eroding their identities in favor of our own projections.

It could have been dreary or didactic, but instead the film is a giddy tissue of visual tales, richly laced with a soundtrack of glam-rock’s greatest hits, original and reworked (and notably minus any David Bowie). Velvet Goldmine shows us the grime under a layer of glitter, the sordid soul-drain that fame can become.

When Rudolph is born with his festive red nose, there’s not a hint of acceptance or excitement, but a heavy blanket of stubborn repression. Within moments of Rudolph’s birth, Mrs. Donner embraces denial: “Well, we’ll simply have to overlook it.” Deeply entrenched in this draconian regime of conformity, Donner quickly works up a plan to hide his son’s distinctive attribute. (In a subtle remark on the distancing effect of familial rejection, Mrs. Donner cuddles Rudolph to her bosom for just a moment before his fake nose pops off, suggesting that future affections in the Donner family will be wary and hesitant moments at best.)

Donner’s makeshift solution (which, the narration tells us, Rudolph suffers for years) not only disguises Rudolph’s natural appearance but also smothers his natural voice, a metaphor too powerful to overlook. Donner privileges his own reputation over Rudolph’s identity and dignity. As he reapplies the mud to Rudolph’s nose, he desperately growls, “Santa can’t object to you now!”

But Donner is wrong. Santa’s ability to object is overwhelming: he rails against a song of devotion composed by his elves, he complains about the weather (AT THE NORTH POLE, Y’ALL), and after acknowledging that the newborn Rudolph is clever and handsome, he undermines all his compliments by rebuking him for his ambition to serve as Santa’s pack mule. “Every year I shine up my slavebells sleighbells for eight lucky reindeer.” Here are your shackles, slave: how lucky you are to wear them. That’s right: Santa’s self-centeredness is so complete that he believes the lithe, lissome creatures who drag his massive sleigh, the incalculable weight of a world’s worth of toys, and Santa’s own not-inconsiderable bulk are lucky.

Let’s examine Santa’s role in the Rankin-Bass universe. [Note: Let's be clear, here. The supposed Santa of the Rankin-Bass specials is NOT, I repeat, NOT an accurate portrayal of Santa Claus. The real Santa is a jolly old elf, a kindly and venerable fellow who brings great joy to children and adults alike. Please direct your complaints the the estates of Mr. Rankin and Mr. Bass. Frankly, I think Santa should sue for character defamation.] Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer quickly establishes Santa as the overlord of this isolated state: in the very first scene, we learn that the North Pole is a vast wasteland ruled over by its “Number One Citizens,” Mr. and Mrs. Claus. They live in palatial grandeur in the “first castle on the left — matter of fact, the only castle on the left.” Ahahahaha, unbalanced distribution of wealth is hilarious!

And of course Santa is wealthy; all year long, he exploits the labor of a racial underclass. Like the reindeer, the elves are apparently born into slavery. They work frenetically to produce an endless stream of toys, which Santa whisks away with no thanks or acknowledgement. And who gets the glory, the eons of fame, and the adoration of children? Santa, of course!

When one brave elf has the self-respect to stand up for his own dreams and desires, he is soundly ridiculed by his superior and peers alike and consigned to the workbench while the other elves frolic in their brief respite from the assembly line. Hermey only wants to better himself, gain and education, and learn a professional trade to escape the ranks of servitude to which his heritage has confined him. But in this restrictive regime, he must throw off not only the comforts of community but even the safety of his home. Our snowman guide’s only comment on this brutally enforced serfdom to Santa? “Oh, well, such is the life of an elf!”

At the same moment, Rudolph is facing the shame of uncloaking his hidden identity to his peer group. Just as the derision reaches its peak, with even Rudolph’s father joining in, Santa steps in. “Donner, you should be ashamed of yourself!” For a moment, the nonconformist’s heart leaps; surely Santa is about to deliver a speech of understanding and individuality! But no. Santa dresses down Donner for his chicanery, and in an aside he utterly rejects Rudolph. “What a pity. He had a nice take-off, too.” Santa lets his bigoted worldview deprive him of a worker of obvious skill and prowess.

Is it any surprise that our unorthodox protagonists prefer to take their chances on the snowy wilds rather than suffering a lifetime of their homeland’s continual shaming? As they sing at their first meeting, “Why am I such a misfit?/ I am not just a nit-wit!*/ They can’t fire me; I quit!/ Since I don’t fit in.” (*Note that even Hermey and Rudolph, who are so bitterly rejected for their deviance from the rigid and demanding norm, gleefully deride those whom they view as lesser-than or other-than, just because they can.)

When Rudolph, now grown to buckhood, returns to Christmastown, Santa tells him that his parents and his sweetheart Clarice have been wandering the icy wastes for months. “And I’m very worried!” Santa adds. Worried for their welfare? Worried because the ice-bound badlands of the arctic pose many dangers? No, worried because “Christmas Eve is only two days off and without your father, I’ll never be able to get my sleigh off the ground.” Santa’s concern is for his own enterprise, not for the endangered lives of his slaves.

And here we learn the answer to the musical question posed by Hermey and Rudolph: “We may be different from the rest/ Who decides the test/ Of what is really best?” Despite its token message of acceptance and tolerance, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer clearly demonstrates “who decides the test”: it’s Santa, of course — Santa who lives in the only castle, Santa who dictates not only the careers but the entire lives of those under his reign, Santa whom we all acknowledge as the arbiter of who is naughty and who is nice. This adherence to the absolute authority pervades the entire text of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Even on the Island of Misfit Toys, the final authority rests with King Moonraiser, the leonine king who flies around the world each night seeking out misfits to spirit away to the island. His flight and his authority both suggest that King Moonraiser is the dark doppelganger of Santa, a stark authoritarian whose whims have the power of law in his despotic kingdom. This tale that seems on its surface to celebrate the individual ultimately caves in to the hegemonic power of authority, which predicates its acceptance of the unique or odd on their usefulness. Rudolph and Hermey are welcomed only after their idiosyncrasies serve the needs of the larger orthodox society — and even then, they are only accepted under the imprimatur of the autocratic leader whose interests they serve.

Lest you spare any pity for the brutally critical Santa we meet in the movie’s first moments, the cranky old guy who refuses to eat and can’t think straight because the sung praises of his underlings ring too loudly in his ears, remember the words of our narrator: “Mrs. Claus will have him plenty fattened up by Christmas. It’s always the same story.” Fatcat gets fatter; news at 11. It’s always the same story. Indeed it is, creepy inching-toward-us snowman. Indeed it is.

Big doings are afoot (and afeather) at the Tweedy chicken farm. Ginger, a flighty hen who’s escaped and been recaptured several times, hopes to persuade the other chickens to fly the coop en masse. Meanwhile, the sinister Mrs. Tweedy has hatched a scheme to shift their production from eggs to — duh duh DUH — chicken pies.

Mind you, I’m not intentionally recommending Chicken Run as a secret plot to turn your kids abruptly vegetarian just in time for a big poultry-consuming (and big-poultry consuming) holiday — but, uh, there is that possibility. The characters and story of Chicken Run are as compelling as the classic films it alludes to so fluently (including such greats as Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and Raiders of the Lost Ark). As Roger Ebert remarks, “This movie about chickens is more human than many formula comedies.”

[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]

Predictably, I’m kicking off my list with The Shining, arguably the king* of haunted-house movies. Stephen King complained that Stanley Kubrick’s adaption stripped away most of the motivation and plot, but I contend that the film (co-written by Diane Johnson and Kubrick) necessarily pares away distractions from a baroquely overplotted novel. While that elaborate web of motifs may work in a page-turning book, onscreen they would meld into a sloppy, tension-smothering stew of images. (And if you don’t believe that, check out the King-endorsed miniseries: it preserves as much of the text as possible, which makes it a flabby, slogging mess.) Kubrick’s film creates terror from nothing by winding up the three main players, emptying out that enormous labyrinthian space, and letting them blunder around in there. Kubrick’s The Shining is like a drum: it resonates because it is empty.

For once, I’m going to make a case for an American-language remake. In
The Ring, Naomi Watts brings a somber, unnerving note to her role as Rachel, a reporter following up doggedly on a story about an urban legend and a string of teenager’s deaths. The blankness that sometimes overtakes Rachel’s face makes the dubious plot turns all too convincing. The Ring not only fills the standard criterion of a haunted-house tale (by identifying one place as the site of a terrible deed and the locus for a ghost’s manifestation); it transcends the genre by removing all boundaries. No longer can we rest easy, knowing that the punishing spirit is safely stashed away in its house; this ghost can — and will — follow us anywhere. Even more chilling, The Ring devastatingly throws off the rules of resolution so familiar from campfire tales and old-timey short stories; we think we know how to quiet the dead, but we are oh so wrong.

It’s a well-chewed nugget of story: a motley group is called together to stay in — and to study — a notorious and putatively haunted house. But Robert Wise’s The Haunting (based on Shirley Jackson’s justly renowned novel The Haunting of Hill House) sets the standard for this trope. Instead of cheap jumps and scare chords, this film allows the pressure to simmer away slowly, letting us absorb not only the drab grimness of Hill House’s foreboding rooms but also the mounting tensions between the characters, especially between timid Nell and her roommate, the entrancing bohemian Theo. (note: Be sure you get the 1963 original starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, not the flabby 1999 remake.)

Stir of Echoes. This gritty little chiller defies a trope common to the haunted-house genre. Instead of a blandly comfortable upper-middle-class family stumbling upon a vacant ramshackle mansion and snapping it up for a song (without ever wondering about its dark history), Stir of Echoes starts off in a working-class Chicago neighborhood where telephone lineman Tom (Kevin Bacon) lives with his wife and kid. Tom is a forthright, no-nonsense guy who has little time for the mystical puffery spouted by his sister-in-law (Ileana Douglas), which makes his upcoming experiences all the more jolting. It’s a rough, plucky story about trying to carve out a life in rough times, even though death lurks in the corners.

A Tale of Two Sisters. Based on the Korean folktale Rose Flower & Red Lotus, this modern psychological thriller/haunted-house tale retains some of that folk-story pedigree in its balance and grace. The essence of the tale is as familiar as any fairy tale: two troubled girls cling to each other in the face of family strife, a most-unwelcome stepmother, and their belief that some evil force is manifesting itself in their rooms at night. It’s stylish and suspenseful without ever being dismissively slick, at times genuinely terrifying, and in equal parts devastating and heartening in its glimpse inside a family’s private moments.

In The Devil’s Backbone, director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos) manages to deliver a genuinely harrowing ghost story wrapped in a surprising blanket of genuine warmth and heart. While his father is off fighting in the Spanish Civil War, young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is consigned to an orphanage, and we join him as he explores the landscape, learning its mysteries and trying to carve out a place for himself. Del Toro is a master of atmosphere and darkness, but more than that, he knows how to allow character and time to shape a story until each moment is a dark little poem weaving together personal and political history.

In The Orphanage, director J.A. Bayona (funded in part and advised by del Toro) brings a similarly sorrowful tale to light; Laura (Belén Rueda) brings her husband and newly adopted son Simon to the long-abandoned orphanage where she herself grew up; Laura plans to refurbish the building and start a center for disabled children. Though The Orphanage delivers some chilling moments (including at least one that made us two seasoned horror-movie fans jump and holler), it also creates a curious and potent blend of sorrow and sweetness, an elegiac note in an often debased genre.

Okay, it’s not a house, strictly speaking, but director Brad Andersen’s low-budget high-tension psychological thriller Session 9 captures the essence of haunted-house stories. A small team works long hours at on the lonely grounds of an abandoned mental hospital; each member of the four-man team brings his own personal pressures to the job with them, but their tension is compounded by the rush job and by the oppressive atmosphere of the site. The hulking architecture of the actual long-derelict Danvers State Hospital lends its uniquely sinister air to the film, casting dread and a literal shadow over the landscape.

*See what I did there?

These reviews are cross-posted to The VideoReport.

Because the weekly print version of The VideoReport has limited column inches, I left out some fantastic haunted-house films, including: The Innocents (which makes a great double-feature with The Others); Beetlejuice; Ghostbusters; The Changeling; Poltergeist.

I want to give special attention to a little-known film that The Fella brought home for me this week: The Eclipse is an unexpected morsel of a ghost story, thoughtful and tender and punctuated with a few simple, terrifying moments. The craggy, cliff-like face of Ciarán Hinds (Persuasion, Rome, Margot at the Wedding) is captivating, and he brings great presence and heart to his very quiet character. Michael (Hinds) is a widower, but wait — it’s not the story you expect.

Indeed, The Eclipse is not at all what we expect from a movie haunting. Rather than a ghost story fleshed out with characters, this is a character study in which one character may be seeing a ghost. Even the direction is unexpected. The scenes are framed intelligently, attentively, but not flashily; the moments of ghostly appearance don’t hit the usual beats and jumps, but let us see the images presented simply — a surprisingly affecting (and just occasionally terrifying) method.

But not to last

I’m surprised you didn’t come here sooner.

It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.

And what can he do for you?

Can the maker repair what he makes?

Would you like to be modified?

Stay here.

I had in mind something a little more radical.

What

What seems to be the problem?

Death.

Death.

Well, I’m afraid that’s a little out of my jurisdiction, you —

I want more life, fucker.

I call this one:

I could tell you stories

You might say I sell peace of mind.

Insurance is my game.

Door-to-door.

Human contact’s the only way

to move merchandise.

In spite of what you might think,

I’m pretty good at it.

It doesn’t surprise me.

I believe in it.

Fire, theft, and casualty aren’t things

that only happen to other people.

Writing doesn’t work out,

you may want to look into it.

Providing basic needs

you could do worse.

I’ll keep that in mind.

Meditations in a Celebrity Emergency

It’s your choice.
What’s it gonna be?

I’m thinking.

All the long-distance lines are down?

What about the satellite?
Is it snowing in space?

Don’t you have a line you keep open for emergencies
or for celebrities?

I’m both.
I’m a celebrity in an emergency.

Can you patch me through on that line, please?

Can I have one more with booze in it?

I like it here.

update: In the excitement of stumbling across such a lovely little piece of prose poetry, I didn’t notice that the WPM is probably operating a classic publishing scam. I fully expect to get a letter next month notifying me that I’m a semi-finalist and offering me a super-special author’s rate on the book.
Which is too bad, ’cause the accidental poem is a gem.