This is part of my so-called "Scripted Review" series, in which I make a Youtube video based on an old blogpost. For more information on what this is and why I'm doing it, see HERE:
I first started watching this show because it was recommended by the magazine Asia Life, one of the expat magazines out here in Cambodia.
I was only a few episodes in before I started wondering what in the world the editors of Asia Life were thinking. The show was so cheesy, and so contrived, and just…well, ridiculous really.
And yet, despite all the problems with the show—despite the cheesy soap opera relationships, the contrived plot points, and the arrogant 20/20 hindsight smugly applied to every news event, I still found myself watching episode after episode.
Aaron Sorkin may mess up a lot of things, but he still understands the mechanics of screenwriting very well. Each episode may be terrible objectively if you focus on the plot, but Aaron Sorkin still knows how to keep the dialogue snappy and he knows how to keep the forward momentum of the story going. So the show may be terrible, but it never really gets boring. And, I have to confess that even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it.
Also, if you’re a political junky, then all the political diatribes mixed-in with the soap opera drama is another guilty pleasure. On several of the polemical speeches throughout the series, I think Sorkin did a very good job of sticking it to the Republican Party.
Of course when Sorkin bashes causes I’m sympathetic to, like Occupy Wall Street, then I enjoy it a lot less, but I guess that’s just my liberal bias double-standard showing through. (I think actually there’s actually good case to be made for the strength of a grass roots bottom up leaderless movement. But the straw-men Occupy Wall Street characters that Sorkin created were never able to give a good defense for this.)
I think it's fair to say my obsession with radical politics has somewhat faded with age (a fairly common trajectory, I think), but because of my youthful obsession, I still maintain at least somewhat of an interest in this trial still now.
I've also been anticipating this movie for years. Reports that Steven Spielberg and Aaron Sorkin were working on a movie about the Chicago trial have been around for years (this movie had famously been stuck in development hell since 2006) and over the years, whenever I was browsing the web or reading about this trial on Wikipedia, I would see reports that an all-star Hollywood version of this story was in development. "Wouldn't that be cool to see?" I often thought to myself. The names attached to this movie have changed several times over the years, and at a couple points, it looked like this movie would never come out. And to be quite honest, I forgot about the whole thing. But then a couple weeks ago, I started seeing reviews of this movie popping up on Youtube. It was on Netflix now, people were saying.
"This movie looks really cool," I said to my wife. "It's a pity I'm not going to be able to see it anytime soon. It's only on Netflix." "My friend has a Netflix account he's not using," my wife replied. Well, problem solved! Plus, the wife and baby were travelling this weekend, so I had the apartment to myself and for once had the peace and quiet to actually sit down and watch a movie. So here's the review.
The Review Man, I could go on for hours about all the stuff Aaron Sorkin gets right, and all the stuff he gets wrong. I mean it, there is so much to talk about here.
Instead, I'm going to try to talk about this movie in very general terms, and not nit-pick every little historical detail. (Even though I totally could!) [Short version: Basically none of the historical figures in this movie are portrayed accurately. Sorkin has distorted the original history in order to make an identifiable character-type out of each historical figure, that he can then use to create cheap drama. In reality, Rennie Davis was never so nerdy as Sorkin portrays him, Jerry Rubin was never so chill, Tom Hayden was never so uptight, David Dellinger was never so boring, Abbie Hoffman's quips were never so sharp, Richard Schultz was never so nice, et cetera.]
In general terms then... The thing about the Chicago 7 trial is we actually have the transcripts of the court proceedings. In most historical movies, the screenwriters have to imagine what the historical characters might have said, but in this case, you don't have to imagine anything. We have the actual transcripts of what they actually said. Therefore, most dramatizations of this trial just use the transcript. The movies Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 and Chicago 10 that I mentioned above were dramatizations made using the trial transcripts.
Aaron Sorkin has chosen to completely re-write the trial. In some cases, he has kept the essence of the dialogue the same, but has re-written it so that it flows differently. In other cases, he's completely changed the actual history. At first, this struck me as sacrilege. But then, I thought about it, and I thought, "Well... why not?" After all, we already have movies about the Chicago 7 that are based on the transcripts. If you want to see a movie based on the transcript, you can just go and watch: Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8. But there's no point in hiring Aaron Sorkin, the most talented screenwriter alive, and having him just re-use the transcript. Let Sorkin do his thing. Let him completely re-write it so that every character is now talking in the famous quippy Sorkin dialogue. Why not? It's not historical, but it's entertaining.
Now, the thing about Sorkin is that sometimes he can be brilliant, and sometimes he can be really cheesy and corny. Charlie Wilson's War and The Social Network are examples of Sorkin at his most brilliant. The Newsroomand Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip are examples of Sorkin being corny. But, even when Sorkin gets corny, he never gets boring. As I wrote in my review of The Newsroom:
Aaron Sorkin may mess up a lot of things, but he still understands the mechanics of screenwriting very well. Each episode may be terrible objectively if you focus on the plot, but Aaron Sorkin still knows how to keep the dialogue snappy and he knows how to keep the forward momentum of the story going. So the show may be terrible, but it never really gets boring. And, I have to confess that even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it.
Much of that was true of The Trial of the Chicago 7. Sorkin manufactures a lot of cheesy plot points that were not historical--Jerry Rubin gets his heart broken by an undercover cop who pretends to be in love with him, Rennie Davis has a girlfriend who doesn't know he's a protest leader, Richard Schultz actually is secretly conflicted about his job, et cetera. None of this is historical, and all of this is really cheesy and corny but... but it kind of works as entertainment. The snappy Sorkin dialogue keeps the plot moving, and once again: "...even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it." And the Sorkin dialogue works. The one-liners work. (This movie got a chuckle out of me on more than one occasion). The dramatic moments are slightly corny, but they work.
All that being said, it's interesting to compare this film to a film based off of the actual transcripts. Compared on a scene for scene basis, the actual history is way more dramatic than Sorkin's re-writing of it. There are several examples, but the most obvious example is the Bobby Seale incident. The actual transcripts of Bobby Seale and Judge Julius Hoffman arguing over whether or not America's Founding Fathers were slaveholders is way more interesting than the dialogue Sorkin creates. And the story of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in court is way more dramatic in the actual real history. In Sorkin's version, Bobby Seale is only bound and gagged momentarily. In the actual history, Bobby Seale was struggling against his gag and restraints for 3 days in the court.
And yet... although on a scene by scene basis, the actual history is more compelling than fiction, when looking at the movie as a whole, Sorkin's version is far more entertaining and watchable than the more historically accurate versions of this story. This is because Sorkin understands the importance of pacing, momentum, character arcs, and dramatic climaxes. He has to sacrifice historical accuracy to get these things, but it works as drama. The scenes of Bobby Seale struggling against his gag--getting re-gagged and rebound by the bailiffs, and the many scuffles that broke out on the trial floor--would have made for very interesting drama. But it would also have slowed the movie down. In Sorkin's version, Seale is only bound and gagged for a minute, and then this instantly moves the story on to the next phase. And the whole movie is like this. The drama of the individual scene is under-played to keep the story moving. (There are so many examples where the actual trial was more chaotic and dramatic than what Sorkin showed on screen. But to show all that would have slowed the movie down.)
Final verdict: Enjoy it for the drama, don't rely on it for historical accuracy. For historical accuracy, check out Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8
Rating: 8 out of 10 Stars. That's me being slightly generous to this movie. It should probably lose another point for being overly cheesy in places, and possibly another star for all the history it gets wrong, and yet... and yet it's all good entertainment. 8 out of 10 it is.
Update: October 19, 2020
Okay, I can't resist. Let's get into some of the historical nitpicking a little bit:
* The real life story of Rennie Davis getting beaten unconscious by the Chicago police was actually way more dramatic in reality than it was in Aaron Sorkin's version. I'm genuinely puzzled as to why Sorkin re-wrote history to make that confrontation a lot more watered down than it actually was in real life. Why would he do that?
* Fred Hampton was not actually a part of the Chicago 8 trail in real life. So I'm a bit conflicted about how Sorkin shoe-horned his story into this movie. On the one hand, the assassination of Fred Hampton is the pre-eminent example of "Stuff that every American should know, but that no one ever teaches you in school" So on the one hand, I'm glad more people are learning about his story because of this movie. But on the other hand, this movie is over-stuffed already, and it doesn't really have time to tell Fred Hampton's story. (The movie doesn't have time to really emotionally process Fred Hampton's death, and it never even attempts to explain why he was assassinated.) Plus, dramatically, it interferes with Bobby Seale's story. In reality, Bobby Seale didn't have his outbursts because of Fred Hampton's death, he had his outbursts because he was so frustrated with Judge Hoffman. And by making the outburst be about an outside element, it undermines the drama of the conflict between Seale and Hoffman. Plus... for some reason, in Aaron Sorkin's movie, Bobby Seale makes a really big deal of saying that Fred Hampton was shot first in the shoulder before he was killed. But this was not by far the most outrageous thing about Fred Hampton's death. The most outrageous thing was that he was shot and killed in bed while he was sleeping. So why does Aaron Sorkin's script make a big deal out of the fact that he was shot in the shoulder, and not even mention that was killed sleeping in bed?
* John Froines, and Lee Weiner were obviously the odd-men-out in the Chicago 7, in that they were the only members of the 7 who were not actually leaders of the anti-war movement. It seems to be a bit of a mystery how they even ended up being indicted with the rest of them. Aaron Sorkin shines a spot-light on this oddity by putting it right in the dialogue of his script. In Sorkin's script, John Froines and Lee Weiner will occasionally ask each other how they ended up being in the same group as the others. (And I think Sorkin is right to highlight this--especially for younger viewers who are new to the history, it's a nice little way of conveying the information that these two weren't celebrities in their own right, but everyone else in the trial was.) In Sorkin's script, Abbie Hoffman later says that John Froines and Lee Weiner were only put on trial so that they could be "give backs" to the jury--that is, the jury is meant to acquit John Froines and Lee Weiner, so that they will feel less guilt about convicting the rest. This makes about as much sense as anything (I mean, why else would these two be part of the trial?) but the problem is that it doesn't seem to be borne out by the actual trial transcripts. The government prosecutors were not playing softball with John Froines and Lee Weiner--the government prosecutors (in real life) tried really hard to prove that John Froines and Lee Weiner were inciting violence at the protest.
* In Sorkin's version, life-long pacifist David Dellinger finally snaps and punches a deputy during a confrontation at the trial. Oh, the dramatic irony! And right in front of his wife and son too! It's a really cheesy unhistorical Sorkin moment, but it kind of works as cheesy drama, I guess. But if you look at the actual trial transcripts, in real life David Dellinger was accused of getting a bit physical with the court deputies during some of the confrontations with Bobby Seale. So if you want to have a dramatic irony moment with David Dellinger losing his cool, why not incorporate it into the Bobby Seale parts? It would be truer to the real history, and I think it might also work better in terms of drama.
* It's probably unfair to criticize this movie for everything it left out, right? Because any dramatization of the Chicago 7 trial has to leave out a lot. You can't possibly include everything. So all the counter-culture celebrities and singers who testified, the confrontation with Mayor Daley on the witness stand, Alan Ginsberg chanting "Om" in the witness stand, the Vietnam War Moratorium day, and the scuffle over the American flag and the Viet Cong Flag on the defense table.... all of that would have made great drama, but I guess all of that has to be left out. The movie's too long already. In real life, the increasingly vicious verbal sparing between William Kunstler and Tom Foran was much more dramatic than any of Sorkin's dialogue, but I guess you have to cut that out too.
Major describes a cocktail party as an example of how relationships between white radicals and Panthers deteriorated. Black Panther David Hillard was there, who had already “pointedly questioned [Stew] Albert’s and Hayden’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist principles” (112), and, Major implies, found them to be lacking. When Hayden was asked to speak, Hillard jumped up and asked: “Yeah, goddamnit, get up and explain why you’re out on the streets and Bobby is in jail” (114). Hayden sidestepped the question by attacking the racist nature of America’s courts. Major condemns him.
“The question actually was why Hayden was not in jail. Bobby had been indicted, tried, placed in chains, and was subsequently sentenced to four years in jail for contempt of court as the result of a casual speechmaking excursion into the scene of hippie-involved political mayhem. Hillard’s words implied that if Hayden and his fellow defendants were really the revolutionaries they claimed to be, they would have closed ranks and stood on their conspiratorial constitutional rights when Bobby Seale was denied the right to represent himself, and if necessary to force the court to chain them all. It didn’t happen” (114).
Hillard was unimpressed by Hayden’s answer, and began to question him angrily. Stew Albert, a revolutionary writer who Major also dislikes, tried to smooth things over, but Hillard answered, “Fuck you, Albert, you jive-ass revolutionary. We can do without you and your shitty writing” (115). The conference finally ended with Hillard and the rest of the Panthers storming out.
Major asserts that:
“Hillard--in fact the Panthers generally—were very unhappy about this indictment, as it was a direct result of the Panthers association with white radicals. The indictment was a confirmation for a number of black people of their belief that a black-white radical alliance could only bring trouble to the Panthers” (109).
This is the type of dramatic confrontation that Sorkin could have milked for a lot of mileage, no? And it would have added yet another dimension to Sorkin's portrayal of a fractured and squabbling defense. Part of me really wishes Sorkin could have included this scene in his movie. But the other part of me knows that the movie was too long already.
The other day, when I was desperate for material to fill up a lesson, a colleague gave me a lesson on pronunciation using Seinfeld.
The lesson itself was not originally his creation, but comes from a PDF pamphlet made by Janet Goodwin, Dept. of Applied Linguistics & TESL, UCLA. Although it's slightly unclear to me what the copyright is regarding the distribution of this pamphlet, I'm going to operate under the assumption that it was made to be freely distributed, and I'm posting it on Google Docs here (and embedded below.)
Seinfeld - Car
Rental Scene
Clerk: Well, I'm sorry, we have
no midsize available at the moment.
Customer: I don't understand. I
made a reservation. Do you have my reservation?
Clerk: Yes, we do. Unfortunately,
we ran out of cars.
Cust.: But the reservation keeps
the car here. That's why you have the reservation.
Clerk: I know why we have
reservations.
Cust.: I don't think you do. If
you did, I'd have a car. See you know how to take the reservation. You just
don't know how to hold the reservation. And that's really the most important
part of the reservation…the holding. Anybody can just take them.
Clerk: Let me, uh, speak with my supervisor.
The directions on Janet Goodwin's pamphlet are slightly different, but my colleague advised me to use the video clip and transcript in this way:
1). Prediction--Play the youtube clip for the students with the sound off, and get the students to predict what the situation is, what the conversation is about, and how the characters feel.
2). Gist Listening--Play with the sound on, and ask the students to answer the question: What is the man upset about?
3). Give out the listening script. Play the video clip again, and ask students which words get stressed. Do feedback as a class, and then have students practice reading the dialogue themselves in pairs.
4). Have students listen to the video again, and this time get them to mark the intonation patterns on their sheet. Where is the intonation going up, and where is it going down? Again do feedback as class, and then have students practice it in pairs.
I suppose the success or failure of this lesson probably depends a lot on the characteristics of the class, and their willingness to jump into it. But it went over great in my class. It was a lot of fun, the students really got into trying to say the dialogue with all the word stress and everything.
In fact, it was such a success, that I transcribed another Seinfeld scene, and did it with my students the next day.
Jerry: So you won't
believe what happened with Whatley today. It got back to him that I made this
little dentist joke and he got all offended. Those people, they can be so
touchy.
Kramer: Those people,
listen to yourself.
Jerry: What?
Kramer: You think
that dentists are so different from me and you? They came to this country just
like everybody else, in search of a dream.
Jerry: Whatley’s
from Jersey.
Kramer: Yes, and now,
he’s a full fledged American.
Jerry: Kramer, he's
just a dentist.
Kramer: Yeah, and
you're an anti-dentite.
Jerry: I am not an
anti-dentite!
Kramer: You're a
rabid anti-dentite! Oh, it starts with a few jokes and some slurs. "Hey,
denty!" Next thing you know you're saying they should have their own
schools.
Jerry: They do have
their own schools!
Kramer: Ayayayaya!
This scene selection violates a couple of Janet Goodwin's rules. It's not entirely self-contained. (It makes references to a 3rd character who is off-screen, and to events that happened earlier in the show.) And the humor is not entirely culturally universal. (I find it funny because I know the joke is that Kramer is equating Jerry's hostility to dentists as being equally as bad as antisemitism, but my Vietnamese students are unaware of the American history of antisemitism, and so don't get the joke.)
Nonetheless, it worked relatively well. I set it up briefly by explaining that Whatley was a dentist, and that Jerry had made dentist jokes, and that Whatley had got upset. And the students understood some of the humor based off the pure silliness of the situation.
Finally, there was the "You can't handle the truth scene" from A Few Good Men. Google (drive, docs, pub).
I’ll answer the question. You want answers?
I think I’m entitled.
You want answers?
I want the truth!
You can’t handle the truth! Son we live in a world that has walls and
those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater
responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you
curse the marines. You have that luxury
you have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago’s death, while
tragic, probably saved lives and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible
to you, saves lives. You don’t want the
truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me
on that wall you need me on that wall.
A Few Good Men screenplay,
Aaron Sorkin, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1992
This was another one given to me by my colleague, although I've modified it. As it was originally given to me by my colleague, it contained only the script for Jack Nicholson's monologue, and started out with "Son...". I added the brief exchange at the beginning, because I really wanted the "I want the truth! You can't handle the truth" lines. Also the version my colleague had did not have punctuation in it. But since I didn't understand the point of that, I went ahead and added in the punctuation. (Possibly there was supposed to be an activity for the students to add in their own punctuation? )
As I received this lesson from my colleague, it works like this:
The pre-listening and the gist listening are the same, but then after getting the students to listen for word stress, I tell them during the class feedback that it was a trick question, because every word was stressed. Then I explain that this is characteristic of how we talk in English when we're angry. (This is in contrast to some languages like Vietnamese or Chinese where every word is normally stressed as a matter of course.) Granted, some words in Jack Nicholson's speech do actually get extra stress, but I more or less brush over that. The point for this is that every word gets really emphasized. Then, in small groups, the class practices this dialogue. And then the students vote on who was able to deliver Jack Nicholson's dialogue the angriest in their groups.
This scene selection also violates a couple of Janet Goodwin's rules. It's not self-contained at all, and contains a lot of vocabulary that the students were confused about. And at one point, a student did tell me she had no idea what she was saying. (This time it's not my fault, though, because I got this from a colleague). But the students were able to really get into it regardless, and they had a blast yelling at each other. "I want the truth!" "You can't handle the truth!" It was over-all, a very successful lesson.
When I last wrote about my television addiction back in January, I had partly
written in the hope that by confessing my crimes, I could be purged of
them. Once I had confessed all, the hope
was my soul would be unburdened and I would be free to turn over a new leaf and
rid myself of my slothful habits.
Alas, it
was not to be. I didn’t magically lose
my addiction just by blogging about it.
And so,
since January, I regret to say that I’ve wasted many more hours of my life watching
TV.
Despite the
huge amount of TV I’ve been watching, it remains my ambition to give up TV, and
start fully living my life.
…Or that
failing, at the very least to redirect more of this time towards reading, which
may still be boring and solitary, but at least would improve my mind.
At the
moment, however, it remains only an ambition.
Instead, I keep turning on the television to fill my hours.
(In my
defense, I think most people watch a lot of TV when they live alone. When you live by yourself, in the evenings it
seems to quiet and eerie to just sit silently with a book, so I opt for the
sound and picture show of television.
And in the morning, the apartment also seems too quiet, and so there’s a
huge temptation to just turn on the TV some more. And of course in the afternoons…)
Well, my
philosophy is that if you watched it, you might as well admit it. So here is another post confessing all the
hours I wasted on TV, and giving my short capsule reviews on various shows.
(As with before, my viewing habits are limited entirely to what is available at the cheap DVD stores in Cambodia. There are shows that some
people have recommended to me that I haven’t been able to track down out here,
but this is what I did watch.)
Simon Schama: A
History of Britain
I’m a huge fan
of documentaries, and this one was very well done and well produced.
Also, added
to Monarchyand This Sceptred Isle, this show
helped to complete my education about Britain’s long history.
When I
first started watching the show, I expected it to be another This Sceptred Isle—a show that would
methodically go through all the centuries of British history.
I was
slightly disappointed then when I realized that the series was skipping over
large parts of history entirely. The
series would chose on event to examine in detail, and then jump ahead 100 years
or so to the next event.
The English Civil War, for example, was very well done, but other interesting
events like the War of the Roses got skipped over completely.
Nonetheless,
it did a very good job with the stories that it did chose to focus on.
Oliver Stone’s Untold
History of the United States
Another history documentary.
This
documentary series is at times spectacular.
Oliver Stone is no stranger to cinematic storytelling, and, in the
earlier episodes especially, he brings all his storytelling abilities to this project. The archival footage, the dramatic music, and
the bold narration all contribute to the feel of watching something epic.
The first 5
or 6 episodes are examples of documentary history at its absolute finest.
The problem,
from an entertainment perspective at least, is in some of the later episodes
the editorializing gets in the way of the story telling. For example, the episode on the 1980s is less
a coherent narrative than it is just a list of all the reasons Reagan sucked. The episode on
George W. Bush is the same.
I don’t disagree with Oliver Stone’s politics, but the powerful
narrative thrust of the early episodes gets a bit muddled in the later
episodes.
Still,
inspite of the fact that the narrative quality of the series is not entirely
consistent over all 10 episodes, the high points of this series more than make
up for the low points. It’s well worth
checking out.
Sidenotes:
1). I’m not sure all this information has ever been in one
documentary series before. I remember having
to learn all my information about the untold history of the United States in piecemeal fashion. I learned one thing here, another thing
there, and just gradually accumulated knowledge.
Now it’s
possible to just watch this documentary, and in 10 short hours accumulate all
of this knowledge in one go. Which
brings me to my next point:
2) It’s really surprising they allowed this to be on
TV.
And 3). One last observation: Oliver Stone is famous for his
conspiracy theories in his movie JFK,
but fortunately he largely stays away from conspiracy theories in this
series. (He hints that relations between
Kennedy and the CIA were not good, but stops short of trying to explicitly
connect any dots.) In The Untold History of the United States,
Oliver Stone largely sticks to facts that, while they may not be largely
reported, are not contested. I think this series is credible.
(In my
youth I was on-board with some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy
theories, but over time I’ve come to agree with Chomsky that spending too much
time speculating on unknowns is a waste of time. For Chomsky’s thoughts on why we shouldn’t
waste time speculating about conspiracy theories SEE HERE.)
I, Claudius
I didn’t
expect to see this 1976 BBC miniseries in the Cambodian DVD shops,
but I was very happy to stumble upon it.
(Robert
Graves actually wrote two books about the life of Claudius: I, Claudius, and the sequel Claudius the God. I never went on to read Claudius the God because our school library didn’t have it, but I,Claudius made a big impression on me. The BBC miniseries covers both books.)
Considering
how old this series is, it holds up remarkably well, and in my opinion is every
bit as interesting to watch as more recent historical dramas.
It also
shows how great historical fiction about ancient Rome can be produced on a small budget.
And a final
bonus: I, Claudius has some great
famous actors in it: Brian Blessed, John Rhys-Davies, and for Star Trek fans, a young
(well…younger) Patrick Stewart playing Sejanus.
Roots: The Next
Generations
I was first introduced to Roots when my 5th grade school teacher
showed us the first couple episodes.
It wasn’t
until years later, when I was in Japan, that I finally got my hands
on the whole series. (The Japanese video
rental store near my town had the series in stock—in English with Japanese
subtitles.)
But I’ve
never had an opportunity to watch Roots:
The Next Generations until now when I stumbled upon it at a DVD store in Cambodia.
Before I
watched this series, I had always assumed that Roots: The Next Generations was just an attempt to milk more money
off of the original Roots. But I was mistaken. This is the ending of the story, and without
this sequel the series would not have been complete.
Roots:
The Next Generations came out in 1979 just 2 years after the original Roots, and it picks up right where the
original Roots left off. And it completes the goal of the TV series
which, like the book, is to follow Alex Haley’s family tree all the way from Africa to the present day.
I suspect
what happened is that the book got split into two different TV shows for
economic reasons—the TV company wasn’t willing to commit to the whole story
until it knew it had an audience, and only after the success of the original Roots did they agree to complete the
story.
But now
that the whole series has been produced, they should really just stop selling
it separately as Roots and Roots: The Next Generations and instead
put box up both DVDs together into one package and sell the whole thing as Roots, because it really is just one
continuous story.
The TV show
is from 1979, and has a lot of the hallmarks of television drama
from the late 1970s/early 1980s that strike us as cheesy today—over-acting,
overly dramatic music that swells up at the end of each episode just as a
character looks off into the distance and says some sort of dramatic line, a
complete lack of any subtlety, et cetera.
And yet,
inspite of all its flaws, it’s still incredibly addictive to watch. The cheesy 70s television drama still has a strong narrative appeal, and I found
myself getting sucked in episode after episode and unable to pull myself away
from my couch. (I guess it was not for
nothing that Roots was one of the the most
watched mini-series in American television history.)
All the
famous actors who participated in the series also make it fun to watch: Peter
Fonda, Marlon Brando, James Earl Jones, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis.
…And then
low behold, I’m walking around the DVD shop, and I see that
they actually have gone ahead and made a TV series based on the War of the
Roses. (All I had to do was ask for it
apparently.)
This series
only covers the tail end of the War of the Roses, so I guess I’m still waiting
for the epic series that would trace the entirety of the conflict from the
beginning to the end. But it was still
good history for what I got.
Now, I know
this series got pretty terrible reviews [See Wikipedia. Also the avclub article]. And yes, a lot of the acting could have been better.
And yes, the pacing also should have
been better. (Some events that really
should have received more dramatic importance—like the death of King Henry VI—just
got muddled through very quickly).
But, for
all its flaws, I still found this series fascinating to watch.
If you don’t
like history, you should probably stay away from this series. But if you’re a history geek like I am, then
you’ll be willing to forgive a lot of bad acting for a good historical story,
and inspite of everything I found the underlying story fascinating.
It’s a
complicated part of British history, and they did a very good job of trying to
provide some sort of narrative to it. It
is also interesting to compare their portrayal of Richard III with Shakespeare’s play. Roughly the same events
happen, but they put a very different interpretation on the motivations of the
characters.
Michael Moore’s The
Awful Truth
This wasn’t my
first encounter with The Awful Truth. I’ve seen it before back in the day. But when I saw the DVDs in the store, I
decided to buy them and work through the series again anyway.
Parts of The Awful Truth I remembered very
well. Parts of it I didn’t remember at
all. (I’m not sure if that’s because I
never saw the whole thing, or if it’s just because my memory is so lousy). But anyway, I’ve now
worked my way through the entire series.
Like most
liberals, I have a lot of ambivalence towards Michael Moore (something - I’ve- expressed in this blog before). I sympathize with his politics, but I believe
that anything that misinforms or misleads does a disservice to the political
discourse.
(The extent
to which Michael Moore’s movies are misleading is always a source of
controversy. Part of the problem is that
most of the right-wing hatchet men who attack Moore’s
movies are seldom any more honest than Moore
is, and this leads to a lot of claims and counterclaims that just make my head
spin.)
However,
the great thing about The Awful Truth
is that it isn’t a documentary—it’s just pure political theater, so you don’t
need to worry about fact checking it, you just enjoy the theater. Michael Moore does some great political
stunts like getting throat cancer victims to sing Christmas carols at Philip
Morris, for instance. Or driving around
a Sodom mobile to
every state where sodomy is still illegal.
In the
course of the show, Michael Moore of course manages to really piss off a lot of
rich and powerful people—making me a little bit suspicious about the fact that
the show was mysteriously cancelled after two seasons despite getting good
ratings.
And yet, much
of the format of The Awful Truth—sending
correspondents out to conduct satirical interviews with people who don’t
realize they’re being satirized until it’s too late—is what The Daily Show is still
doing.
And in
fact, considering The DailyShow manages to produce 4 episodes a
week (compared to The Awful Truth’s
12 episodes a season) The Daily Show
is arguably doing Michael Moore’s job a lot more efficiently than Michael Moore
ever did.
And, at
least in terms of just creating an atmosphere, Carnivale does a great job of mixing in a magical fantasy element
with the real events of the 1930s.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening credits:
'
Furthermore,
I think it was an interesting idea to try and re-imagine the life of Father
Coughlin (W) and the pro-fascist forces as part of a
wider spiritual battle between good and evil.
But the
pacing of this show just killed me.
I can
handle a mystery getting teased out for an episode or two before it’s
resolution, but when a mystery is just endlessly teased out and never resolved,
then I start to get impatient. And when
the writers seem intent on adding just more mysteries and questions while
appearing to forget about the ones they’ve already introduced, then I just get
frustrated.
This may
just be a personality preference. I like
nice neat logical stories where everything ties up neatly at the end. Furthermore, if I’m forced to choose between
the two, I generally prefer story to atmosphere. People who have different personalities than
mine will probably enjoy Carnivale
more than I did.
I had high hopes for this
series. I love political dramas, and I’m
a big fan of Kevin Spacey.
Alas, I
regret to say that the series was awful.
So awful, in fact, that I didn’t even bother finishing the last few
episodes. (What was the point? None of the characters seemed at all like
real people, and I the plot was obviously manufactured and contrived.)
I first
started watching this show because it was recommended by the magazine Asia Life, one of the
expat magazines out here in Cambodia.
I was only
a few episodes in before I started wondering what in the world the editors of Asia Life were thinking. The show was so cheesy, and so contrived, and
just…well, ridiculous really.
And yet,
despite all the problems with the show—despite the cheesy soap opera
relationships, the contrived plot points, and the arrogant 20/20 hindsight
smugly applied to every news event, I still found myself watching episode after
episode.
Aaron
Sorkin may mess up a lot of things, but he still understands the
mechanics of screenwriting very well.
Each episode may be terrible objectively if you focus on the plot, but
Aaron Sorkin still knows how to keep the dialogue snappy and he
knows how to keep the forward momentum of the story going. So the show may be terrible, but it never
really gets boring. And, I have to
confess that even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I
still kept watching it.
Also, if
you’re a political junky, then all the political diatribes mixed-in with the
soap opera drama is another guilty pleasure.
On several of the polemical speeches throughout the series, I think
Sorkin did a very good job of sticking it to the Republican Party.
Of course
when Sorkin bashes causes I’m sympathetic to, like Occupy Wall Street, then I
enjoy it a lot less, but I guess that’s just my liberal bias double-standard
showing through. (I think actually there’s actually good case to be made for
the strength of a grass roots bottom up leaderless movement. But the straw-men Occupy Wall Street
characters that Sorkin created were never able to give a good defense for
this.)
Right about the time this movie was first starting to make waves, a friend of mine summed up her attitude to it over drinks at the bar. “At first I thought it was just way too soon to be making a facebook movie,” she said. “But then I started noticing all the absolute rave reviews this movie was getting, and I got interested.”
That pretty much sums up my attitude as well. That probably sums it up for a lot of us I would guess.
Well, once my attention was drawn to this by all the rave reviews, and after about the 10th person told me it was the best movie they had ever seen, I decided to check it out for myself.
It didn’t quite live up to its hype. (Nothing ever does.) It wasn’t the best movie I had ever seen. But it was good.
The actual plot of this movie is a bit thin. That’s its central flaw as well as its genius.
It’s a genius little bit of screenwriting that they took what was essentially two minor lawsuits, and stretched it into a 2 hour movie, and made it entertaining. And not only entertaining, but gave it lots of great dialogue so that every scene is really packing a lot of punches.
That they did so well with the source material is a credit to the writers. It doesn’t completely hide the fact that the source material is a bit skimpy to begin with, but it at least keeps you from noticing until the movie is over.
Other than that, I’m not sure what else to say about this movie that hasn’t already been said a million times. (Almost) all the characters are fully developed and interesting. The filmmakers do a really good job of not choosing sides in this story, but rather trying to show each character's point of view, and really make the movie almost a list of various character studies. The acting is top notch. The movie is paced perfectly so that nothing ever seems to drag.
You’ve probably already seen this movie by now, but if you haven’t seen it yet, definitely worth your time.
************************************************
Addendum #1:
Some people on the internet have been complaining about this film’s portrayal of Asians. This little piece here seems to be making the rounds.
You know, as a side note, I never really liked the term “Asian Fetish.” It makes it sound like there’s something inherently perverted about dating an Asian. Given what a significant portion of the world’s population Asians represent, it’s not statistically surprising that some people would end up dating them. It’s probably more statistically weird that white people on average usually end up dating other white people. How come we don’t have a derogatory term for that?
But, poor choice of words aside I take their general point about how Asian women are represented in this movie. Are they being too sensitive, or do they have a point?
I'm somewhat undecided on the matter myself. In and of itself, I'm not sure it’s such a big deal. (You could make the argument that the Asian girls, one of whom is a non-entity and the other who was portrayed as mentally unstable, were just what the story line required, and that they just happened to be Asian.) But taken as part of a larger problem in Hollywood casting, in which Asians are usually cast in either negative or - overly - stereo-typical - roles, then it becomes a little more telling.
And particularly telling when it turns out that in the real life story there was an Asian person in a significant role, and she got cut from the storyline completely.
I’ve noticed it’s hard for most people to review this movie without commenting on the phenomenon of facebook itself. And in a way that’s not surprising. I mean, most of us already waste more time on facebook than we’d like to admit, and now it’s even invading our time at the movies.
As for me, I share the concern that more and more of my life is spent staring at a screen, and that virtual life is beginning to replace real world experiences. Blogging has always been my poison of choice but when I’m looking to procrastinate on something, I can spend hours cruising friend’s profiles on facebook.
On the other hand, say what you want to about facebook, at the very least it is interactive material. And it lets you interact with real people that you actually know. In the days of the good old “old media,” you just sat back and watched passively. And you obsessed over movie stars you never meant, and TV characters who had no relationship to reality.
In fact maybe we should be less worried about talking about the internet in movies, and more worried about talking about movies on the internet. I mean, here I am, with a blog that let’s me talk to the world about any subject I could possibly choose. And what do I use it for? Blogging about all the movies I’ve seen. Now that’s pathetic.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure we would all benefit from turning off our screens and going outside for a while. All I’m saying is time spent on facebook may be better than time spent watching TV or movies.
A student recommended this movie to me. I told her I'd put it on my list of movies to see. (Despite my best efforts, I've been wasting a lot of time watching movies recently--and then wasting more time blogging about them--so I figured I would take a break for a while).
The next week she gave me a copy of the DVD, which meant I pretty much had to watch it.
And you know what? I'm glad I did actually. This was a great movie.
To start with, it's really well written. The dialogue is pointed, snappy, and funny. Watching the characters trade well crafted barbs back and forth with each other was good entertainment.
The exposition as well is really good. I'm not an expert or anything, but if I ever had to put together a course on screenwriting, I'd use this movie as an example of everything to do right.
There are a lot of complex cold war politics in this movie (such as the necessity of supplying the Afghanistan fighters covertly with Soviet made weapons from Egypt and Israel) but it's all explained clearly and succinctly for the audience.
However the screenwriter doesn't beat you over the head with it either. The information is put out there only once, and then the story moves on. The effect it that you are able to follow what is happening, but you feel that someone who wasn't quite as aware as yourself, or who wasn't paying close enough attention, might just miss it.
This is one of those rare Hollywood movies that after you finish watching it you feel smarter rather than dumber.
The screenwriter also does a good job of following the old rule of making each scene perform double. The story of Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan is woven in flawlessly with the story about his ethics investigation by having many of the scenes carry a double plot. It's textbook screenwriting at it's best.
And the acting is excellent. Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman do just a superb job with all the material. Tom Hanks plays the hard drinking congressman to a tea, and Hoffman does the same with the cynical CIA agent.
I know Philip Seymour Hoffman got a lot of praise for "Capote", but "Capote" sucked. If you want to see a real example of why Hoffman is one of the best under-rated actors around, check out this movie instead.
Seriously, after I saw this movie I had an urge to run to the video store and rent everything Tom Hanks or Philip Seymour Hoffman were ever in.
OK, having praised the cinematic value of this movie lavishly, we now get to ... The Politics
As much as I loved this movie from an entertainment perspective, I had a number of problems with it politically.
This movie is usually mentioned as one of the anti-war movies Hollywood has been making lately, in the same breath as "Lions for Lambs".
But this film didn't come off as particularly anti-war to me. At the tail end of the movie it was somewhat critical of the US failure to get involved in rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviets left, but it never seemed to portray the covert war the U.S. was fighting as a bad thing. For the most part, it portrayed the US government as good natured bumblers. They have high ideals, but sometimes they just forget to follow through.
But there's a much darker side to the story of US involvement in Afghanistan.
(In the Spring of 2001 I helped put together a teach-in on Afghanistan with the Calvin Social Justice Coalition, so I'm drawing a bit on that experience now).
For starters, if you read any Chomsky at all, you are probably already familiar with the story about Zbigniew Brzezinski. (This is one of those little tid-bits no one else ever talks about, but Chomsky brings it up repeatedly). Breziniski was Carter's National Security Advisor when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in 1979. Years later, in the late 90s, Brzezinski actually took credit for the Afghanistan War. He claims the US government created a trap for the Soviets , by helping to create conditions in Afghanistan that they knew the Soviets would not be able to resist intervening in. Thus giving the Soviet Union their own Vietnam War. Brezeziniski revealed this in an interview with a French magazine in the 1990s, and it was widely reported in Europe at the time, but completely ignored by the US media. (See here, for one of many cases in which Chomsky cites this story. See here for the actual Brezesiniski article.)
Chomsky cautions that Brezeziniski may simply have been shooting off his mouth, but if it is true, it means that the entire Afghanistan War, with all the death and suffering it caused on both sides, was a result of the US state department playing war games with other people's lives.
None of this, of course, is in the Hollywood version of the story. (To be fair, they do mention that part of the CIA, represented in the movie by Harold Holt, simply want to use the Afghanistan War to bleed the Soviet Union, and were not concerned about actual victory for the Afghan people. But the story is much deeper than they let on.)
Also, although the movie criticizes the US failure to stay involved with Afghanistan, it never really questions the wisdom of equipping radical Muslims with state of the art weaponry in the first place. The CIA to this day can not account for all of the stinger missiles they supplied the Islamic fundamentalists with; and these things are capable of shooting down passenger airplanes from the ground. And according to some reports, that's what they've been trying to do with their CIA funded missiles ever since the war ended.
(Although again, to be fair, perhaps the writers of the movie felt recent events could speak for themselves without hitting the audience over the head with it. They deliberately end the movie at the point of the Soviet withdrawal, without writing any sort of afterward. Obviously they're trusting that the audience can connect the dots by themselves.
Still, I think that this was a point worth making, and the movie could have emphasized it a bit more.)
And finally, it's worth remembering the context of the Soviet Union - Afghanistan War. The movie doesn't provide any background for the conflict, but contrary to popular belief the Soviets didn't just wake up one day and decide to invade Afghanistan just for for the sake of evil. The Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan to help protect it's ally, the existing Afghanistan government at the time, from an insurrection by it's own people.
This doesn't excuse the Soviet government but, for what it's worth, it is exactly the same rational the US used to get involved in the Vietnam War. (And on a smaller scale, hundreds of other US interventions, but we won't get into all that here).
Yet when we do it, we're misguided idealists. When they do it, they're war-mongering communists.
The characters in this movie share that double standard. At one point in the movie Congressman Doc Long makes a speech to the Afghans in which he says his son was wounded fighting in Vietnam, so he knows all about fighting the Soviet oppressors. (In both wars, apparently, the Soviets were the aggressors.)
This view is not contradicted anywhere else in the film.
At the tail end of the film, it does do a good job of depicting what is common knowledge now, that the US neglect of Afghanistan allowed the country to disintegrate into a breeding ground for terrorists and resentment against the West.
To what extent history is being repeated now is rather frightening to consider.
When the build up to the US invasion of Afghanistan began 7 years ago, you will recall the US government tried to convince us that, in addition to security concerns, we were doing it for the good of the Afghans. Issues like the conditions of women in Afghanistan (which had previously just been the concern of whiny liberal groups like the Calvin Social Justice Committee) were suddenly being talked about by Bush and Cheney.
I remember debating the invasion with a family member on the phone. I tried to convince her that the US wasn't really concerned about human rights in Afghanistan, and that after we toppled their government we would soon forget about rebuilding their country.
"I really wish you were back in the US so you could hear President Bush's speeches," she told me. "He seems genuinely concerned about the Afghan people, and our government has made a solid commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan this time."
Of course, that lasted about a year and a half, until the invasion of Iraq and the Iraq War became the U.S. top priority.
And recently, reports like this one coming out of Afghanistan indicate the current US effort to rebuild Afghanistan isn't going so hot. Also see here.
OK, now that I've done my liberal ranting and raving, time for some fair play: Here's a review of the same movie from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Just for the sake of balance.
