Cinemonkey

Character Flaws

 

 

 

With so many programs in the blossoming 2011-2012 season already based on outside sources, it comes as no surprise that a 10 PM Thursday slot on NBC is home yet to another one. Prime Suspect joins the ranks of Homeland (Israeli TV), Revenge (The Count of Monte Cristo), Boss (King Lear), and Free Agents (British TV), among others that we probably don't even know about yet, in being based on a precursor, in this case the beloved British procedural staring Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison, facing sexist fellow officers, guarded and undermining politicians, and impatient lovers as she tries to solve crimes and rise in the organization. The brainchild of actress-turned-writer Lynda La Plante, the original Prime Suspect began in 1991 and went for seven seasons in the form of peroidic mini-series. The point of the title is that above all else the series was about Tennison trying to penetrate the smokescreens sent up by the number one target of her investigations. The series was much like the Martin Beck book series by Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and equally realistic about the effect of criminal hunting on the practitioners of that increasingly technologized art.

Though sponsored by Ms La Plante, according to the credits, the focus on a prime suspect is one of the many things that the American version has dropped, at least on the basis of one episode, aired on Thursday, September 22, 2011. Prime Suspect is not a remake but a re-think, as developed by Alexandra Cunningham, formerly of Desperate Housewives. Instead the show has picked up a few bits of other programs. Jane Timoney, as she is here known, is trying to quit smoking, and chooses to do so via addiction unburdening chewing gum, like Sofie Gråbøl's Sarah Lund in the (superior) Danish version of The Killing. And a fourth act chase sequence looks cribbed from The French Connection. Fortunately, this chase scene is fully integrated into the narrative and says something about Timoney's character and advances the plot, rather than being mere filler as in most commercial break cliffhangers. Unfortunately, Prime Suspect goes in for those overhead shots of Manhattan looking straight down as if from the underbelly of a chopper. What do the networks do? Cull these from some fund of three or four dozen shot three decades ago? They all look the same.

Prime Suspect starts out strong – but then, most crime show pilots tend to do so, as the producers put everything they have in them in order to gain a foothold on the schedule. Southland commenced equally strongly way back when but within a few weeks after the pilot the show began to tread water (though I hear that the recently completed season was good). Treading water is the biggest sin of network television, which is an outrage because given only some 40 minutes a week to tell a tale, for the writers to process filler into the mix is a betrayal of the viewer. The plot of the opening episode very vaguely quotes from the original mini-series showing Timoney trying to get onto a high profile case from which she has been passed over unfairly, and progresses in its character delineation with no fat to speak of.

Anyway, Prime Suspect started out pretty good the other night, and the show is worth watching to see how well it develops in the various directions it has established. Much of its success so far goes to lead Maria Bello, taking a break from movies (The Cooler) to try her hand at episodic television. As a recently promoted New York City homicide detective, she is cranky, harsh, and highly selective on whom she chooses to bestow her compassion. She absorbs the arrows of her colleagues openly sexist or competitive scorn without reaction and only allows herself to show her real emotions in private, like Tennison, or with her boyfriend (The Shield's Kenny Johnson, AKA "Lemonhead"). In fact, the tone of Ms Bello's Timoney is more like Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack) on USA's In Plain Sight, but without the hilarious wisecracks. Like her, Timoney is acerbic, impatient, and unlikely to couch her disdain in politic purrings. She only matches Tennison in her sometimes crude misread of when and how to advance herself. So far, she is a fun character to watch, but the show around her is weak and predictable.

Dexterity

 

Dexter is about to start up again and with it come the usual anxieties that precede the return of our favorite programs. 

 TV watching comes in four tiers. In the lowest tier reside those programs we would in no way ever watch. For me it is "reality" competitions. The second tier consists of shows we are slightly curious about and may view once and never again (Playboy Club, Pan Am). The third level are those programs that we more or less like, and we follow just to keep up with them, but only capture, say,  60% of our loyalty. They are more of a habit, and if we drop them we don't miss them until a character on Psych makes a jokey reference to them. Then there is the top tier, those three or five or six shows, depending on the time of year, that we cannot do without, the shows around which we arrange our schedule, those shows that we discuss endlessly with our friends the next day or anonymously on talkbacks if we have no friends.¹

With the shows we really love, which tend to be the premium channel short-series such as The Wire or The Sopranos, we bring a level of scrutiny unheard of in the history of the medium, and with the advent of the internet, a means to publicize the fruits of that micro gaze. For example, Breaking Bad has a certain almost indescribable affect, a blend of anxiety and frustration, as if it were a Jane Austen novel, in addition to that essential "one step ahead of the viewer" quality that all good shows need. The 13-week format means that some series don't make sense until the whole sequence has aired. Season four of BB started out slow and revisited old settings and seemed to relegate Walter White to supporting character status. Still, the creators of the show have up until now earned the viewers' trusts, and now as the season steams through its final few episodes, everything is starting to make sense and the earlier longeurs now only add to the tension.

Dexter has managed to maintain its tone and consistency through numerous personal changes, beginning way back in the first episode of the first season, when James Manos, the show's creator, quit after the first episode over creative differences. Season five also began with a personal change, and the first few hours of the season found Dexter (Michael C. Hall) a passive and confused serial-killer-for-good. But that was simply the lead up to Dexter finding someone he could mentor (Julia Stiles).

After the first hour, season six of Dexter seems to be adopting the same pace, though slightly faster. It is now a year after the last season's events. Dexter is somehow living next door to Sgt. (soon to be Lt.) Angel Batista (David Zayas), whose sister now babysits baby Harrison. Dexter is also trying to place Harrison in a Catholic pre-school recommended by Angel. Meanwhile, Angel has divorced Lt. (now Captain) Maria LaGuerta  (Lauren Velez) who has been promoted thanks to a little ruthless blackmail, and Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter) and Joey (Desmond Harrington) are fighting, but really because he wants to ask her to marry him, in a restaurant scene reminiscent of a similar scene in the opening of Parks and Recreation season three. A teaser opening shows that Dexter is back in business, and his first "case"  for the episode is a reunion where he targets a rival who may have murdered the only person nice to Dexter in high school. This season's twisty serial killer theme is the mentorship of Professor Gellar  (Edward James Olmos, back in Florida) over Travis Marshall  (Colin Hanks, son of). They seem to be religious fanatics, based on the evidence of the first episode, and this leads into what appears to be one of the season's two themes. Here the topic is religion and faith. Angel urges Dexter to send Harrison to a Catholic institution because, well, God exists. Dexter has no conception of such a conception. Meanwhile, the professor and his charge seem to be driven by a religious mania to exterminate random people in preparation for end times. There first victim is a road side fruit vendor whose guts they leave in a weighing scale (intestines fare no better in other first episodes of the season.²

The second theme is anonymity. The premise is brilliantly weaved into the narrative, credited to Louis Cioffi.³ Dexter makes it known to the viewer that he likes people not knowing who he is – but then he turns out to be something of a celebrity at the high school reunion because of recent events, such as the death of his wife and the high profile nature of his job. This momentarily puts him in the same league as his ex-quarterback nemesis.⁴ Meanwhile, his sister Debra looks as if she is going to go "viral." During a shoot-out in a restaurant, innocent bystanders are shown photographing her heroism on their cell phones.

Private faith and public standing. The serial killer this season looks to be a public man with a private passion for slaying unbelievers, while Dexter is a person whose anonymity is crucial for the success of his enterprise. Meanwhile, the killer's faith (whatever that turns out to be) and Dexter's lack of it look as if they are going to form the high flown eschatology of this phase of Dexter's  career.

The sixth season of Dexter premieres on Sunday, 2 October 2011, on Showtime, and runs through January.

1. There is probably a fifth tier: those programs that we watch because everyone else in the world is watching them, such as Mad Men.

2.  Except now I can't remember if the show was Castle, The Mentalist, CSI, or what.

3. The episode was directed by indie thriller specialist John Dahl.

4. For which he is rewarded with a blowjob

5. For more in depth analysis of the whose series, a good place to run is Dexter: Understanding Cutting Edge Television, edited by Douglas L. Howard (I. B. Tauris, 228 pages, $16, ISBN-13: 978-1848852655). Being published in 2011, it is slightly out of date, with its episode guide only to the first three seasons, but it features opening interviews with source novel author Jeff Lindsay and with Manos, as well as critical essays on themes that include the vigilante hero, psychoanalysis, politics, the unexpected German "obsession" with Dexter, the construction of the opening credits sequence, among other topics.

Matrix Unloaded

 

Viewers thinking that they have stumbled into a very rough draft of The Matrix while watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV knock-off World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) should feel your sympathy. This lengthy 205-minute mini-series is science fiction in sound effects only, and really serves Fassbinder the chance to play with imagery he liked from American melodramas.

This despite the fact that the film is clearly influenced by Godard's 1965 faux sci-fi excursion Alphaville, event to the extent of casting that film's star Eddie Constantine in its second half.¹ Yet the influences are really melodramatist Douglas Sirk and Andy Warhol, with a little Antonioni thrown in and with hommages made to Warhol's supposedly favorite movie, the excruciatingly boring yet still significant Creation of the Humanoids. Warhol liked that film because it was boring. If you are familiar with this incredibly talky movie, you will know where World on a Wire is going with that film's premise.

Aired originally on West German television in 1973, and based on a novel called Simulacron 3 by Daniel F. Galouye, Wire leisurely tells the tale of one Fred Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch). He comes to the aid of a corporation with a government contract after his mentor, inventor Vollmer, dies suddenly and mysteriously, of "headaches." Vollmer's invention is a simulated world in a computer designed to guide futurologists about the shape of things to come. Stiller is followed, questioned, flirted with, intimidated by the corp.'s CEO, and even makes a trip of two into the simulated world, all while ostensibly trying to meet the boss's deadline and secretly trying to solve the mystery of … well, of something.

 In a story about scientists that have created a simulated environment and whose predictions of what the future will be like in 20 years rely heavily on feedback from Einstein (Gottfried John), an artificial construct aware that it is only a computer program, the answer should seem fairly obvious (hint: Reality is, like, relative, man). And yet, it takes Stiller 100 minutes to come to the same conclusion you should be thinking about right now.

Aside from Fassbinder's film anticipating such successors as The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, it's not really for sci-fi fans. Rather, it is for worshippers of the director and students of existential genre variations on the order of westerns such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller or crime melodramas like The Long Goodbye (both by Altman, in this case). Wire was made at the height of that time in the 1970s when directors young and old were questioning if not undermining the genre materials handed to them. Wire came in the middle of Fassbinder's 80-film, 13-year career, after The Merchant of Four Seasons, which brought him attention in New York City as part of the German New Wave, and before The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Effi Briest – that is, Fassbinder's foray into the structures of melodrama and the passions of female performers, of which Wire is in some small part a precursor.

Like Godard, Fassbinder utilizes existing places and settings to create his "futuristic" world. It's a world in which glass buildings and Mannix-like computer mainframes are made strange by recontextualization and weird outer space music and effects. Wire is a world of fragmentation paintings on walls, glass surfaces through which Fassbinder continually shoots his subjects (a habit Todd Haynes picked up), and long takes that follow people talking. The plot is easy to follow; Fassbinder simply wanted it to be a bore, maybe because he resented having to make the thing, or because that's how he viewed the future. The essential normality of what is said and done is undermined by Warhol-esque, Antonioni-staged parties where people don't circulate but pose, staring off at nothing. It's a world where people exist to be looked at. It may be that the only aspect of the film that really interested Fassbinder was the tension between the questing Stiller and his boss, Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgereau), a smooth domineering industrialist, always in control. Fassbinder was fascinated by such power relationships and it is not always to his credit that he often "took the side" of the figure with the upper hand.

World on a Wire has been difficult to see since its initial airing, but the R. W. Fassbinder Foundation has prepared the film for release this year, and it will be released by the Criterion Collection.

World on a Wire plays at the Northwest Film Center Friday through Monday, September 23 - 26, 2001.



1. Also in the film is Ulli Lommel, who went on to make a Fassbinder-sized string of direct-to-video horror films.

Houston, They Have a Problem

Apparently people are tired of the horror mockumentary. Apollo 18 was greeted last weekend with yawns from the critics. Yet on viewing for at least one member of the audience the film proved to be both entertaining and suspenseful.


Students of NASA and space exploration may note the title and think, "Hey, the moon flights stopped at Apollo 17!" True. The premise of Apollo 18 is that there was indeed another even numbered space flight but was cloaked in secrecy and … ended badly. In the spirit of Blair Witch, the excellent The Last Exorcism, and Paranormal Activity, the film is a collection of edited found footage that sorts out the narrative and leaves various implications unresolved.

Apollo 18 begins with home movie footage of three astronauts at a home BBQ on the eve of their mission. They have classic American names, such as Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) and Nate Walker (Lloyd Owen). They are in Liberty, the LEM that lands, while John (Ryan Robbins) orbits in Freedom. On the moon, the duo discover first a Soviet LEM, and then something else.


Yes, the other reviewers are correct, the premise of Apollo 18 is conventional and maybe even predictable. But to these eyes, the found footage approach worked quite well, was a convincing blend of actual NASA footage and recreations, and the jump cut style endemic to the horror mockumentary leaves out a lot of boring stuff that normal narrative needs to include.


The cast is especially good and undervalued by other reviewers. They look convincing, mimic the "style" of old time astronaut posing, and read the lines credited to writers Brian Miller Cory Goodman with authenticity and conviction. Director Gonzalo López-Gallego and his team also create a convincing moon world of heavy white dust and blinding sun and harsh artificial light.


Though it is a replay of Alien and Planet of the Vampires and other such horror films, Apollo 18 is presented with winning earnestness. As the summer recedes, in calendar if not in weather, and the "mature" and "adult" Oscar whoring films begin to appear, it's nice to have a good, solid, competent Saturday afternoon movie with which to bid farewell to the break.