Praise of Folly

Ecce Homo

Erasmus, with apologies for his lengthy absence, strongly commends to your attention this review of Michael Mann's Miami Vice in the context of all his opera. Erasmus is an enormous fan of Mann's and is enthusiastic to read another's appreciation.

Erasmus will return frequently as soon as life allows.

Erasmian Oscars

Erasmus won't be watching Hollywood's festival this year. He found himself uncharacterisitcally bored by this year's prestige films, and didn't spend many of his precious spare moments watching them. If Erasmus got to pick a field of films, he'd have to go with several uncited by the Academy. In fact, he's rather worried to see that they appear mostly unreviewed by him. Well, Erasmus will try to remedy that.

Erasmus's best movies of 2005, those he believes will be rewatched in 2015 and 2025, were:

• King Kong, a classic fairy tale gorgeously realized
• The Great Raid, excellent history, better film, superlative story
• The 40-Year-Old Virgin, sweet, smart, subtly subversive comedy
• Layer Cake, the best, most intelligent crime movie in some time
• Wedding Crashers, another ostensibly trite comedy with a genuine core
• Sin City, an empty, nihilistic void at the core, but the artistry astonished

Erasmus will expound further, but the first two receive ave, the next three strongly placent, and the last is seriously problematic but æsthetically, if immorally compelling.

Overall, MMV non placuit.

Pull quote: Blade II

In alluding to Blade II below, Erasmus was reminded of a quote from a review by Erasmus's favorite film critic, Stephanus Prædator:

If you're going to make a movie about vampires fighting with automatic weapons in crowded Eastern European go-go joints, this is the way to do it.

Yeah, baby. Read the rest here, if you care to. Although, as he concludes, you're likely only to care to if you fall into a few, narrow groups.

Well, anyway: This movie is for a variety of segmented audiences: children whose souls have been leeched by MTV, folks with IQs under 100 and geniuses with IQs over 150. You normal people stay away: You won't get it, you won't like it, and you'll feel violated by it.

Film geeks will love his opening, though...

And buy Prædator's new book here.

Orcus: Mutatio

While Erasmus is waxing hemophagically, he should mention that he caught Underworld: Evolution the other week. This film is a sequel to Underworld, which introduced us to an undead protagonist played by Kate Beckinsale, she of the raven tresses, the intelligent eyes, the crispy enunciated posh accent, the alabaster caryatid figure...

Excuse Erasmus. He was caught in a bit of a reverie. Suffice it to say that Erasmus has enjoyed Miss Beckinsale (now Mrs. Len Wiseman) for many years. She’s a gifted actress and a lovely woman. So, when, three years ago, previews showed Miss B starring in Mr. W’s Underworld as a black-leather-clad vampire assassin, Erasmus allowed that she could chew on his jugular vein any time.

Alas, Underworld was a rather dull, talky vampire-politics film, with an underwhelming climax. The latter was obviously attributable to the meager special-effects budget, but the former was Erasmus’s real problem with the movie. In it, we are introduced to a world in which vampires and werewolves (too-cutely dubbed “Lycans” from “lycanthropes”) have been at war for some centuries. Events ensue, and Miss Beckinsale’s character, a werewolf-hunter (too-cutely dubbed “death-dealer”) finds herself caught amidst treachery from all sides, while trying to save an innocent caught at the center. It doesn’t hurt that said innocent is a hunky guy for whom she falls. Erasmus didn’t rate the movie, but the visuals aside, non placet.

Erasmus was more than a little surprised to see that a studio had backed a sequel, until he read that DVD sales had surpassed the theater grosses. Apparently, while not great, it was good enough to attract a solid audience. However, when Underworld: Evolution, said sequel, arrived in theaters without critics’ screenings, Erasmus assumed the worst. However, there’s not much out there in pop-culture land, and Mrs. E does like action flicks.

A further surprise ensued. It did not stink. Indeed, Erasmus quite enjoyed the flick. It did not suffer from the glacial pacing of the first one, toned down the politics, upped the action quotient, and added a soupçon of sensuality. (Perhaps, lector, thou mayest argue that Erasmus’s mind was clouded by Mrs. W’s nude scene, carefully shot by Mr. W. And, lector, thou mayest be right.) One still requires a healthy ability to suspend disbelief, particularly with the backstory, but past that, it's good escapist fun.

In the second movie, Selene, the assassin, finds herself trying to protect Hunky Boyfriend (Scott Speedman, who’s really playing The Girl from most adventure movies: he’s not got a lot to do, except assist Selene in the final battle) from both the vampires and lycanthropes who have designs on him; particularly menacing is the specter of the two brothers who were apparently the Ur-vampire and Ur-werewolf. And, interestingly, a third force comes to play: a group of humans who appear to not only be aware of the shadow war between vampires and werewolves, but who have a ship-borne base from which they apparently try and marginalize it.

Erasmus liked a lot of things about the movie, particularly the setting in Hungary. Erasmus is a Hungarophile, and liked seeing the country and hearing the language again. Even better were the Hunnically-clad medieval vampire soldiers in the movie’s long set-up flashback.

In sum, Evolution is as big a step forward as Blade II was to its predecessor (though Wiseman lacks Guillermo del Toro’s genius for the Gothic and sheer mayhem—no criticism of Wiseman, this. Del Toro’s as good as it gets.)

Underworld: Evolution, surprisingly, placet.

Two notes: Selene is probably the best name for a distaff vampire Erasmus has ever heard. It also reminds him of the two very memorable literary characters, Selena Jardine in the late Sarah Caudwell’s brilliant and hilarious mysteries (start here), and Selena Keller in Claire Berlinski’s terrific Loose Lips.

Second, firearms aficionadi will be interested to note that Heckler & Koch is apparently the official armorer of the supernatural underworld. Vampires seem to prefer the elegance of the classic 9mm MP5A3 with retractable stock, while the humans prefer the next-generation UMP and G36. Werewolves decline to use firearms, it seems. Probably because their fur keeps getting caught in the action...

Another Layer

While flying about, Erasmus also picked up another novel on which a movie he liked was based.

J.J. Connolly’s Layer Cake is a great read. It’s not the most accessible crime novel, particularly for the American reader, as it’s buried under British criminal argot and East London dialect.

The story’s unnamed narrator is a 29-year-old drug dealer whose goal is to get out of the business by the time he’s thirty. This proves more difficult than anticipated. The characterizations in the book are far better than in the movie, which struggled to contain all the plot put into it.

Connolly’s adaptation for the screen is very good, incidentally: reading the book, one realizes just how complicated a plot he had to simplify. What the movie loses in depth over the book, it gains in clarity of plot. The book is even more tangled than the film.

Connolly’s protagonist escapes the underworld in the book, though not without paying a significant and harrowing price. Also, the book ends with a nice ironic twist akin to the Ocean’s Eleven scene Erasmus cited approvingly below.

If you liked the movie and are up for a challenging read, Layer Cake will repay. If you’re put off by the language, Erasmus might suggest watching the film first, as a sort of crib note, to get the plot right in your head before returning into the book.

Layer Cake, liber, placet.

The Ice Harvest: Redux

So, Erasmus finally got some time on airplanes to read a bit, and got through Scott Phillips’ Ice Harvest, the movie of which didn’t impress Erasmus much. The book, mirabile dictu, is much better. Phillips’ Charlie Arglist is a far less sympathetic fellow than John Cusack’s hang-dong criminal manqué. Most tellingly, he’s been dealing coke behind Bill Gerard’s back, the proceeds of which comprise the majority of the money he and Vic plan to abscond with. Moreover, his personal life is rather more sordid and squalid than the in the movie. Most tellingly, in the book, Arglist deliberately kills his partner in crime, rather than passively letting him die. One wonders if Cusack, like many actors, requested that his character be made more sympathetic (and idiosyncratic: the graffito motif in the film appears nowhere in the book). If so, indulging that whim was a signal failure on the part of the scenarist, as was removing Arglist’s meeting with Nemesis at the story’s end.

Just as remaking Arglist into a nice-guy mob-lawyer thief undermines the narrative, so does its playing up Pete van Heuten in order to give Oliver Platt a more comedic, sympathetic rôle. The book’s van Heuten is Arglist’s brother-in-law, not the husband of Arglist’s cold ex-wife who begs him for deliverance from his wealthy domesticity.

Some of the movie’s more dramatic grotesqueries, like Vic’s wife kneeling dead before the Christmas tree, and the black-comic scene with the dying hitman Roy Gelles on the pier, prove to be pure inventions of the filmmakers, and ones which also undermine the reality of the narrative, perhaps reflecting the filmmakers’ desire to venture into Terra Cohen-ita. Unfortunately, their expedition founders and is ultimately lost in the very nihilism they’ve courted.

Phillips’ book, by contrast, is a lovely, dark, satisfying little work of crime fiction, in which a bunch of low-level low-lifes plot, scheme, betray, and murder each other, with only death and ruin left behind. Phillips, it turns out, knows the gods are not mocked.

The Ice Harvest, Liber, placet.

Messis Glaciei

Ok, Erasmus is still underwater, metaphrorically speaking (and under snow, literally so), but Puella Nostra Chicagoensis has lured him out with her post of last evening about The Ice Harvest, a movie Erasmus caught on Thanksgiving.

Erasmus's feelings are somewhat similar to those of L'OGIC, but he'll put it this way: Erasmus enjoyed the excellent direction (particularly Ramis's use of humor within the dark story), the superb cast, and the terrific visuals. Where the movie fell apart entirely was the ending. Read no further if you haven't seen The Ice Harvest or The Last Seduction, which OGIC rightly invokes in comparison. Erasmus says: this movie is no comedy, now hie thee to Strong Badia.

The problem with this film is that it fundamentally mischaracterizes the question at the heart of film noir, which is "what does the decent man do in an immoral milieu?" Look at Sam Spade, Orson Welles's Michael O'Hara in The Lady from Shanghai, or Glenn Ford's Johnny Farrell in Gilda. All these men are terribly flawed, but try and stick to some essential core of decency despite the crew of vultures, con men, maniacs, and femmes fatales who surround them. Spade ends up sending a woman he loves up the river, O'Hara staggers away from a pile of corpses, and Farrell (unconvincing happy ending aside) tries to keep his loyalties in order, often perversely so.

Modern screenwriters and directors seem to fundamentally miss this moral point, being beglamoured by the bad guys and missing the core drama of the good-ish guy trying to escape the maelstrom of connivance, malic, and murder. John Dahl, whom Erasmus loves, gets this. His Red Rock West is the perfect modern noir. Nick Cage's ex-Marine Mike Williams drifts into Red Rock, Wyoming, looking for a job. He tells a white lie, letting a bartender think he's "Lyle from Texas," for whom he's got a job. This fib plunges him into a web of murderous hatred from which he keeps trying to escape but keeps getting pulled back in because of his essential decency. It's a terrific film.

Dahl also made The Last Seduction in which he created Wendy Kroy, the most fatale of the femmes who've graced the silver screen. Dahl's brilliance in this film is exposing Kroy as the most evil of manipulative sociopaths—she literally has no use for people other than as a means to money or other objects of desire. She kills, steals, and frames others for her crimes. And then, in the end, in a gut-punch of an ending which leaves you gasping, she gets away with it. Dahl plays with the complicity of the viewer in the anti-heroine's misdeeds, then pulls the rug out from under you in that she, a real villain, doesn't get any comeuppance. Dahl doesn't do a wink and let you think, "Oh, that scamp!" He gives you a genuine look at the triumph of evil. The Last Seduction is another work of profound moral mediations in an utterly compelling dramatic form.

This brings us to The Ice Harvest which shares the central problem of most "neo-noir" films. It's all bad guys, without any moral quandry, and hence no real drama or plot, only incident in the game of last-man-standing among a bunch of low-lifes. The audience is apparently supposed to have some dramatic sympathy for Charlie Arglist because... well, principally because he's played by John Cusack, whose winning hang-dog manner is likeable. As La Demanska notes, however, the character is an empty vessel. There's no there there. He's simply the least vile of the individuals on offer.

The second major problem is the ending, in which Charlie's the last man standing, ending up with 2.147 million dollars, if I remember correctly, with which he basically heads out of Wichita, "rescuing" his drunken friend Pete (entertainingly played by Oliver Platt) from his horrible marriage to Charlie's ex-wife. This is not an act of virtue, not least because their leaving town leaves Charlie's two children (already scarred by his no longer living with them) without either their father or their stand-in father. The larger problem is that Charlie is rewarded for his coming out on top of the deadly game of Who's Got the Duffel Bag?

As movie curmudgeon James Bowman put it in his 2001 review of Ocean's Eleven

As the movie came out over 40 years ago, I hope readers will forgive me if I reveal the ending of the original Ocean’s Eleven (1960), directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop and others who made up the famous Rat Pack. Having successfully robbed five Las Vegas casinos on New Year’s eve by putting their commando training to use, Sinatra’s Danny Ocean and his gang of eleven army buddies, all former paratroopers, conspire to smuggle the money out of town by hiding it in the coffin of one of their number who died (of natural causes) during the operation. But when his widow arrives in Vegas to arrange for shipment of the body back to San Francisco, she is persuaded by a compassionate local official to save the cost of transport by arranging for a funeral, with full military honors, on the spot. As his buddies listen to a eulogy based on the 23rd Psalm, one of them whispers to a neighbor, “What’s that noise?”

“Don’t you know? The deceased is being cremated.”

The surviving ten look at each other in horror and then settle down to listen to the rest of the sermon. The final scene shows them walking out into the bright sunshine of the Las Vegas strip.

I doubt if anyone would nowadays consider Ocean’s Eleven a great movie. It was an early harbinger of the Rat Pack’s self-indulgence that would eventually wreck the careers and lives of every one of its members save Sinatra. But at least they knew how a movie ought to end. It is true there was still at the time (just about) the Hays Code, whose first principle was that “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”

Of course this commandment was routinely broken by the best of the films noirs of the 40s and 50s, but even they did not have the temerity to show criminals profiting from their crime. Not because, I believe, their producers feared prosecution but because this was merely a codification of what everybody knew anyway, which is that it is not the lot of man on earth to get away, by sheer cleverness, with the fame and the girl and the money. We can all be successful for a while, but in the end no one gets out alive. To remind us of this essential fact of the human condition is what art was created for.

So, in the end, The Ice Harvest fails to glean anything from its characters' experience. Still, the movie is very, very well made, well-acted by a talented cast, and set in an environment that rarely sees on the big screen: winter on the Great Plains. It intrigued Erasmus enough that he went out and bought the novel from which it's adopted. Erasmus suspects (or perhaps merely hopes) that the novelist has a better sense of what's really at stake in great crime novels—not money, but souls. Erasmus apologizes that he hasn't read it yet, but as said, sub nivo sum.

The Ice Harvest non placet, though it's very well-done.

Wedding Crashers

Erasmus finally caught a movie the other day, and it was the silly comedy Wedding Crashers. Erasmus enjoyed it and was pleased to see that, in so far as it had a message, it reflected upon the desirability and seriousness of marriage.

Owen Wilson & Vince Vaughn are the eponymous crashers, who happily exploit the romance and anxiety among unmarried young ladies at weddings in order to bed them. Then love catches up with them, and they outgrow their superannuated callowness. Wilson & Vaughn do their usual shticks—and well: Vaughn in particular hasn't seemed this animated since Swingers. But the movie ultimately works because of the female leads, Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher. McAdams invests her character with a depth and reality that makes it clear that what hangs in the balance in the world of love, romance, marriage, is ultimately of profound consequence, investing the comedy with a real rooting interest. Fisher is the comic gem of the movie, executing one hilarious turn after another with a mad, adorable gleam in her eyes.

Some criticisms can be leveled: When Vaughn's terror of Fisher turns to attraction, it's merely stipulated in exposition, not shown (a single scene before showing them sharing a glance would have sufficed). The comedy in the movie is sharpest at the beginning, tapering off towards the end. Jayne Seymour's character (the young ladies' mother) isn't coherently motivated and disappears halfway through the film.

Nitpicking notwithstanding, Wedding Crashers was a couple of the more pleasant hours Erasmus has spent in a theater of late.

Placet.

Ингэн нулимсны түүх

Erasmus has been disconnected from anything called culture, high or low, lately, so he apologizes for the lack of posts. He did TiVo The Story of the Weeping Camel because of a long-standing interest in Mongolia. (Yes, Erasmus is weird.)

He took it to be a charming documentary about a camel-nomad family in the Southern Gobi, until he noticed the "written and directed by..." credit at the end. Quoi? thought Erasmus. A bit of research turns up the fact that it's a "narrative documentary," which is to say, fiction. As such, it's much less interesting to Erasmus, although that fact illuminated the curious fact that a lama's sermon sounded like it'd been scripted by apocalyptic Western environmentalists. Moreover, it explained why so much of the dialogue remains untranslated. Erasmus's Mongolian isn't near good enough to follow what's being said, but a Mongolian speaker commenting on the IMDb says that it's comments that don't relate to the plot and that aren't "cute" enough.

Erasmus finds this type of noble-savage condescension reprehensible, whether it's appropriating American Indians, Kalahari Bushmen, or Mongolian camel herders. Still, the visuals are spectacular, the Mongols charming (though one-dimensional thanks to the dialogue edits), and the Bactrian camels strangely affecting animals.

Take The Story of the Weeping Camel cum grano salis, and it's an enjoyable experience. Do not take it as cinéma verité or you're at risk of succumbing to the filmmakers' familiar platitudes.

Ave, Tartari.

The Story of the Weeping Camel non placet sed pulchra est.

Sin, Sin, Whiskey & Gin

"...I suffer for my art," to slightly paraphrase Lloyd Cole. An essay worth reading by Andrew Klavan on Sin City and its beautful, sadistic, artful nihilism.

Academic doctrine and Sin City may seem oppositional, but they are actually mother and child. More to the point, they are Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill.

Erasmus points interested readers to his own meditation on the subject, which proceeded along vaguely similar lines:

So, instead of Nazi doctors sadistically torturing women, we have antiheroes sadistically avenging them. Progress of a sort, perhaps, and a visceral, pagan sort of honor-killing satisfaction, but ultimately one that civilization has to reject. The reader may protest that Basin City is intentionally constructed as uncivilized: all power is corrupt, only one policeman stands as decent, etc. And, indeed, this is a convention of many modern neo-noir films. But the true, fascinating dilemma of classic noir is: what does the good man do in an evil millieu? Only one of the stories approaches this dilemma, and it concludes with a hero's self-sacrifice, and the one (depressing) glimpse of decency in the entire film. The other two protagonists are killers who, do good, sort of, by killing men worse than they. But this is not heroism, but vendetta.

Erasmus doesn't know what it says about modern culture, if anything, that gifted artists like Miller and Rodriguez consider these themes worthy of prolonged meditation and æstheticization, but he doubts it's anything good.