Category: Nocturnal Admissions

All good things eventually come to an end, as they say, and so did Alias, in a somewhat shorted fifth season, bid farewell to its fans, both legion and seasonally confused. The boxed set of Season 5 is now available (it hit the street on November 21, 2006, for $39.95), and it also comes as part of a complete series box set which features supplementary material not available elsewhere.

To answer the question of what went wrong with Alias you have to first affirm what was right about it. It’s initial season was exciting and sexy, with a slightly boggling but intriguing multi-layer premise (Sydney Bristol as a spy within a spy). The second season was more of the same, but resolved a number of situations, and destroyed the secret evil organization with the CIA, SD-6, only to do something surely unique in episodic television: create a season ender that leaps two whole years into the future ( Battlestar Galactica did something similar at the end of its previous season). This was a prelude to a third season in which creator J. J. Abrams was suppose to solve all the “problems” of the show, which were essentially issues of repetitiveness, water treading, the sluggishness of the Rambaldi stuff, and too much confusion: no one could just “drop in” on Alias, and in that regard it more resembled an HBO show than a regular prime time network program. Season three imposed more impediments between Sydney and her former control, Michael Vaughn, i.e., he got married to someone else, who proved to be an undercover agent (replicating a situation that happened to Sydney’s dad), while she becomes an agent for a conventional CIA, battling The Covenant.

Then, like many TV shows, Alias, after making many, many changes and introducing and then disposing of numerous characters while taking many new and different directions, ended up right where it began, with Sydney working for a covert division within the CIA led by the vile Arvin Sloan, who had killed someone close to practically everyone who now worked for him again. THough few people are actually killed in Alias; they usually manage to come back somehow, including Michael, who we see at the end of season four getting smashed by a truck.

Character-adding got out of control, and so in the middle of season five, while Sydney and the team were pursuing Project 5, ABC pulled the plug. The show took a hiatus in winter, and came back to wrap up all its story threads in a 19-episode season. This amounted to clearing up tangled messes caused by some of the new characters and finding a deeply satisfying “demise” for arch villain Sloan. In a coda, one reminiscent of Kill Bill, the show jumps into the future yet again, and catches up with a final quartet of characters.

You can actually track the rise and fall of the show through its credit sequence, one of the most popular in TV history. Alias has one of those theme tunes that make you want to leap up and dance to it (like the one at both the beginning and end of MST3K). The first credit sequence was a triumph of catchy yet ominous music and graphic design. Magically it embodied the sharpness of the show. But with the fourth season Alias offered up a truncated theme song and added images of Jennifer Garner in a succession of her trademark costume changes and disguises. It’s true that Garner is the heart of her show (it must be disconcerting for male actors to work across from someone who has better bone structure than they do), but this addition seemed both pandering and soulless. The final season had a credit sequence that tried to squeeze in images of all the cast with even more dubious results.

Still there are many pleasures to be hand in the final season, mostly to do with Sydney and her relationship with her father. And the Rambaldi material is finally wrapped up (which isn’t to say that it is cleared up).
Buena Vista Home Entertainment does its usual job with the season, offering up the shows in excellent transfers (in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen) that look better than the TV broadcasts and great sound.

Supplements are relatively modest, but for a reason we’ll get to in a second. There are four commentaries, over the episodes “Prophet Five” (with director Ken Olin, Producer Jeff Pinker and Sydney’s dad, Victor Garber), “Bob” (with writers Monica Breen and Alison Schnapker and cast members David Anders and newcomer Rachel Nichols), “The Horizon” (writers Josh Applebaum and Andre Nemec, along with the episode’s director Tucker Gates), and “There’s Only One Sydney Bristow” (in a novelty yak track featuring the Alias set’s production assistants).

The fourth disc has the bulk of the video supplements. They kick off with “Behind the Scenes at the 100th Episode, which shows making of bits plus footage at the cast and crew “birthday” party. This is followed by “The Legend of Rambaldi,” which starts out as a parody of a History Channel segment before devolving into video interviews with cast and crew about their favorite Rambaldi artifacts. “The New Recruit: On Set With Rachel Nichols” interviews the young actress, while “Heightening the Drama: The Music of Alias,” profiles composer Michael Giacchino. Finally, there is a bloopers reel. All of these segments last about seven to 10 minutes.Those Alias fanatics who made the mistake of buying the season sets as they came must be kicking themselves a the advent of the complete season box set. It’s notable for a single disc of extras called “Endgame.” Among its unique featurettes are “Case Closed: A Look Back at Five Years of Alias,” “Alias Time Capsule: The Pilot Interviews,” “Forty-Seven,” “Axis of Evil,” some deleted scenes, a cover gallery for Alias Magazine, and a small hardcover book about the show’s mythology. Naturally, this disc (which I haven’t seen, only read about) comes only with the boxed set.

Regular readers of this diary may recall that the last time I reviewed Miami Vice I saw it on the big screen, in the theater, just me and 400 passholes, of which one, a violent cockeyed retard, created a scene.

Yet I still managed to like the movie.

It wasn’t because I was a fan of the show. The movie proves to have little to do with the source show. Instead it is a fantasia on themes originally enunciated in Miami Vice.

Nor was it just because I am a huge Michael Mann buff, though the film is all of a piece with what he has been doing in films as diverse as Heat, Collateral, and even Ali and The Insider, with a similar catalog of moral questions and stylistic choices.

No, it was the sheer physical near-silent beauty of the thing, with its actors like sleek panthers, all movement and style. I love the opening shots of the film, which showed Crockett and Tubbs (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx) standing off to the edge in a disco watching the crowd. Now, thanks to the DVD which hits the street on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 for $29.95 (available in either a widescreen edition of the release version and in a unrated director’s cut), I have the movie again to enjoy, ponder over, and revel in.

Have you ever seen a wolf in the wild? I did once, while driving along the coast road in my home state with a friend. It had just come up over the edge and was looking sharply at the traffic, seeing if there was a way across the two lanes. I only saw the animal for a second as our car sped by, but I still haven’t forgotten how alert it was. It’s whole affect was there, here, alive, looking, sensing, seemingly every hair buzzed with the reality of what was going on around him, above, behind, in front. It was the sharpest thing I saw on the road.

That’s what Crockett and Tubbs reminded me of at the start of Miami Vice. Now, most viewers complained that because the movie starts in media res like this, they didn’t know what was going on, and remained lost for the rest of the movie. And if you take a glance at the screenplay (not included on the DVD) you can see how much of the dialogue Mann threw out (was that one of the reasons Foxx was reportedly unhappy on the set? Or was he worrying about his performance in Dreamgirls, in which he is reportedly uncomfortable looking?). Mann has a way of shooting people in the middle of action that looks really realistic, and he is fond of a shot that contributes to that feeling, which is one that Tarantino uses at least once per movie too, a close tracking shot behind someone walking somewhere, but in which you can also see the whole field of battle he is walking onto. The film is shot by Dion Beebe, who also worked on Collateral, and it has some stupendous shots in it, which look great on the Universal DVD.

As I said, it is less an episode of Miami Vice, than Mann’s “Answer to Heat.” As I wrote about the original release, “This is the second time that Mann has gone to the well of TV work to fashion a movie. Heat is a masterly re-filming of his TV movie, the 1989 Crimewave (AKA L.A. Takedown). In essence, what Mann has done here is re-write the end of Heat. In that film, crook De Niro and cop Pacino have a face off on a busy airport runway in a sequence that left a lot of people unsatisfied. Here, in a similar situation, a character makes a wholly different decision, and it is indeed much more satisfying. Thus, both because of their roots and because of their contrasting resolutions, Heat and Miami Vice are paired films in Mann’s filmography. Mann tries to balance to entirely different moods, absolute quotidian realism on the one hand, and romanticism on the other. This time he may have got the ending right.”

There are about six new minutes in the unrated version, bringing the film up to 140 Minutes, most of which appear to be in the very beginning, in a sequent which also explains why the task force is in the disco. As far as I can tell, though, the film still doesn’t explain who the criminal mole is in the complex of agencies trying to catch the film’s big drug dealer. The answer may be in there; I just haven’t found it yet.

The widescreen anamorphic transfer (2.40:1) is excellent, and the audio comes in English, Spanish, French Dolby Digital 5.1. Supplements consist of a host of making ofs, including “Miami Vice Undercover,” “Miami & Beyond: Shooting on Location,” “Visualizing Miami Vice,” some so-called behind the scenes featurettes (“Gun Training,” “Haitian Hotel Camera BLocking,” and “Mojo Race”, with the biggest supplement being a commentary track from Mann. Mann’s been doing these a lot lately, and he comes prepared, remembers a lot, and likes to tell stories. As far as I can tell, though, he doesn’t go into any detail about Foxx’s supposed dissatisfaction on the set.

If you’ve got this far, let it be known that if you are the first person to email me at dkholmcontests@mac.com, you get a free DVD of the uncut Miami Vice, care of Universal Home Video [10:18 PM PST: We have a winner]. Obviously I can’t reply to everyone, so if you don’t hear from me within a few hours, odds are that you’re not the first.

If The Wire were a book it would be the Great American Novel. The series, now coming to the end of its fourth season, has scope, depth, and breath. Like a Dickens novel, it mixes artistry and social protest, entertainment and essay. But because The Wire is an HBO show it’s not viewed as the great sweeping tale of America that it has turned out to be, and with luck will continue to be in its fifth and presumably final season.

But now, as The Wire comes to a close until sometime in 2007, there are those among us who hunger for more of the same: narrative complexity, multilayed, diverse characters, a general intelligence and respect for the audience’s ability to keep up.

If so there is no better place to turn than Homicide: Life on the Street, the NBC crime drama that ran from January 1993 to May 1999. Produced by Barry Levinson, the show was based on the book of the same title by then Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, who spent a year following the city’s homicide detectives. Though the credits tell us that Homicide was created by critic-turned-screenwriter Paul Attanasio, all accounts indicated that Tom Fontana was the real brains behind the show. Fontana also worked on St. Elsewhere and later HBO’s Oz. Fontana doesn’t have anything to do with The Wire, but after eventually beginning to write episodes of Homicide, Simon adapted first one of his other books, The Corner, into an HBO mini-series and then went on to create the complex multi-leveled universe of The Wire. Interested viewers or fans of the show can now dive into Homicide: Life on the Street, which has been re-released on DVD by A&E, all seven seasons plus the TV movie and numerous extras offered up together for $299, packaged as a homicide department file cabinet (this box hit the street on November 14).

Homicide begins with the arrival of Detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) to the homicide unit let by Lt. Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto, who has the opposite of a widow’s peak, i.e., hair to grows so low on his forehead it looks like a cap). Through his eyes we meet the other members of the division and their frustrations. In the course of seven seasons, various of these people commit suicide, die or are at least shot, retire, have heart attacks, or just stay the course. In the timeline of the seven seasons, Bayliss flubs his first case (the murder of a little girl), his partner flubs another (a female serial killer of Catholic women who is institutionalized instead of indicted), and three cops get shot when serving an arrest warrant. Surprisingly, all three survive, though one of them is later killed off, and this multi-episode sequence provides a great part for Steve Buscemi. The biggest story arc of the series is the one that most mirrors or anticipates The Wire. That’s the long-term pursuit of crime king Luther Mahoney (Erik Todd Dellums) and later his sister, Georgia Rae. These campaigns cover the end of season four through the end of season six, and the characters are based on the same real life criminals who inspired the Barksdale clan and some of their satellites in The Wire. A lot of the actors overlap, too.

Homicide fell into its stride in the third season and got better through the fourth to the sixth. Season one is only nine episodes long, and season two only four, so they are housed together in the set’s first box. The final season is widely viewed as the weakest of all, with by then numerous new cast members such as Michael Michele, and the introduction of Giardello’s estranged son, Mike (Giancarlo Esposito), an FBI agent who ends up working out of the unit. The show was a critics’ darling and continually underperformed in the ratings, despite several attempts to piggyback off of Law and Order. NBC held out as long as it could but eventually cancelled the show.

Part of the reason the critics liked the show had to do with its quirky aspects. Reservoir Dogs had come out the year before Homicide made its debut and you can see a tinge of its influence, intentional or not, in the show’s opening dialogues, in which trivial matters are belabored by the irritable cops, such as the fixation by Crosetti (Jon Polito) on Lincoln’s assassination. Homicide was unique at the time for enlisting the aid of movie stars (Ned Beatty, for example) and comics (Richard Belzer) to shake up the casting. The show used hand held 16mm cameras, utilized jump cuts, and on occasion repeated the same second or so of a shot for emphasis. The opening credit music was scary, more appropriate for a horror show that a cop drama. And the show was one of modern pioneers in the use of dynamic music or unexpected rock songs over montage sequences. The most famous episode of the whole series is episode six of season seven (though it should have been broadcast fourth), “The Subway,” the one with Vincent D’Onofrio as John Lange (one of the show’s many in-jokes: Lange is one of Michael Crichton’s many pseudonyms), a businessman crushed under a subway car, who is going to die as soon as the car is removed, but whose girlfriend the team is trying to locate before he dies (the premise was later used by Shyamalan in Signs). The set also includes the terrific PBS documentary about the making of the episode.

Given all this, why do I remain unconvinced? It is intentional but the show is a little harsh and ungiving, which is alienating, but at the same time all too frequently relies on clichés of the prime time crime show. In addition, the two main characters, Bayliss and his partner Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) are rather unpleasant. Bayliss is an idealist, naive do-gooder who intellectualizes his investigations (and is subtly ridiculed for doing so), and who as the show goes on becomes a Buddhist and a bisexual. His descendent is Dutch on The Shield. Pembleton is a vain, arrogant, egotistical character who views himself as the only good cop on the staff. It’s hard to get behind his various causes and battles. My resistance to theses characters may have something to do with the actors, who get better as the show goes along, but in the first three years give unconvincing line readings and bad yelling scenes.

The show is also occasionally inconsistent. Take the next-to-last episode of season three, the one in which Bayliss’s cousin (David Morse) shoots a Turkish youth trying to get into his house. Bayliss, naturally, takes a special interest in the progress of the case, but meets resistance from his unit members, even though different characters in different stories in the same season looked out for their peers. While interviewing the cousin, Pemberton says, “We’re not here to judge you,” which is simply not true, since in private conversations the cops are constantly judging suspects and criminals. But that is the fatal flaw of most cop shows. Both suspects and victims are usually viewed as somehow lacking or the cause of their own misfortune, while the cops are always privileged, with their problems and private lives highlighted and brooded over. It’s interesting to reflect back on shows such as Arrest and Trial and The FBI which had surprisingly sympathetic accounts of both victims and crooks. But these codicils aside, the show has some creative tales and many good supporting or guest cast turns. Across the 35 discs of the set the sound production is adequate, and the transfers improve as the shows become more recent.

If you have already been collecting the Homicide series as they were originally released, there may be little reason to buy this box for yourself, unless you really need the new extras, or the addition of the concluding Homicide TV movie. There are commentary tracks on the episodes “Gone For Goode,” “Gas Man,” “The Hat,” “The Documentary,” “The Subway,” and “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” along with video interviews with Levinson, Fontana, Simon, and writer James Yoshimura, among others and all related Homicide related shows, such as the “To Catch A Killer: Homicide Detectives” Episode of A&E’s American Justice, the Superbowl XXVII commercials for S1, song Listings, a text feature “The Board,” or the erasure board of solved and unsolved murders, “Inside Homicide” featuring David Somin and Yoshimura, the already mentioned “Anatomy of a Homicide,” plus video of various public events and speeches by show originators. On a final bonus disc are all the Law & Order crossover episodes (“Charm City,” “Baby It’s You,” “Sideshow”) and Homicide: The Movie.

If you got this far in the review you are one of the few to know that on Tuesday, I will be offering another DVD giveaway. Hint: it will be one of the bigger DVDs streeting that day.

Many people could have directed Deja Vu, the new sci fi romance action thriller with Denzel Washington as an ATF agent who time travels in order to squash a terrorist attack. It’s the sort of idea that would appeal to numerous directors. For example, if Terry Gilliam had directed the film, it would end tragically, with time ineluctable and resistant to revision (as in his film 12 Monkeys), the lovers dying and the explosion going off as planned. If Brian De Palma had directed it, Deja Vu would have devolved into Denzel Washington learning that his best friend had sold out and helped the terrorists, and evil would once again triumph. If Michael Mann had helmed the film, the focus would be on the wear and tear on the team of agents, their exhaustion and the lack of appreciation for their labors. If Tony Scott had directed it, the film would be a non-stop tapestry of visual effects, MTV editing, and even text and other advertising techniques across the screen.

In fact, Tony Scott did direct the film (from a script credited to newcomer Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, who wrote Small Soldiers, Shrek and numerous other kids films). But it is a different Tony Scott from the one you may be familiar with from recent films such as Domino and Man on Fire, where he tries to outdo Oliver Stone in visual pyrotechnics (but even Stone has calmed down of late). The downshift in gears may be due to the fact that the narrative is so complex, to augment it with visual tricks would be to further burden an already taxed viewer with even more impediments to clarity.

Denzel Washington plays Doug Carlin, a New Orleans ATF agent investigating the bombing of a ferry on Fat Tuesday. Soon enough he is approached by alleged FBI agent Pryzwarra (a puffy Val Kilmer), who tells Carlin about a new government technology that allows them to essentially videotape the recent past, but only exactly four days and X hours into the past. Through these technologies, Carlin is able to explore the case of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton, of Hitch), whose body was found the same day as the terrorist attack (we used to call it sabotage), yet whose corpse bore evidence suggesting a connection with the attack. As Carlin studies her life (and falls in love with her), he yearns to find a way to go back and save her. The rest of the movie plays on that possibility. Here’s a hint: call him Saint Elsewhere.

It’s a clever script that plays fair with the audience, once you get past the idea of time travel in the first place. It also links up with, and completes a trilogy of Scott’s recent forays into Stonian cinema of paranoia in films such as Enemy of the State and Spy Game, but it takes a softer stance. The massive intrusion that the so-called Snow White technology offers is only for the good, and maintained by essentially loyal hardworking Americans.

On the zeitgeist level, the film ties in with recent cultural products such as the British crime series Life on Mars (to be remade for the American market) and Day Break, a kind of Groundhog Day policier for network television. Why the sudden interest in time travel and rectifying mistakes? Perhaps we are all suddenly taking life more seriously within the current climate of war and terror and wish we could make the right decisions as we stumble though the day, with the option of fixing things if we totally mess them up anyway. Of course it is impossible, and the tragedy of life is that we have but this one chance.

Anyway, it’s a terrific movie, perhaps a tad slow in its second quarter, revivified by a scene that is half gratuitous chase sequence and half deeply clever and mulit-layered. The love story is quite poignant, and the various deaths evoke memories of the darker elements of supposedly light fare on similar themes such as It’s a Wonderful Life. The cast is uniformally excellent and naturalistic, and it’s one of the best films of the already bloated holiday season so far.

“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.”

That’s the very first sentence of the very first James Bond novel. And it is all there, the glorious tone and setting and sense of worldliness. The decadence, the sophistication, the world weariness, the feeling of being on the brink of something dramatic or drastic, something of global importance. What’s been wrong with the Bond films, since about 1971 or so, with Diamonds are Forever, or perhaps earlier, is that they dropped whatever darkness the movies retained for comedy and wisecracks.
Casino Royale was published in 1953, and was quickly adapted into a TV show called Climax Mystery Theater in 1954 with Barry Nelson as an unlikely Bond, at least as we now know him. But after that, the annual Bond novel flourished only in England, not unlike the Patrick O’Brien seafaring novels, until someone reviewed them with such enthusiasm that suddenly 17 O’Brien books appeared in trade paperback virtually simultaneously. In the case of Bond, as is now famously known, JFK mentioned to a Life reporter that the Bond books were among his favorite reading matter, and if indeed he really read them and didn’t have a press secretary make something up on his behalf, it is clear to see why Kennedy might like the books. They mirrored his real life: saving the world, bedding the planet’s best looking chicks. Once the books started to become movies it was clear to see why they might appeal to the masses, especially a society that had grown easily airborne to exotic locations, and a reborn movie going public that was enjoying more freedom, fueled by the Pill, the Playboy philosophy, and the collapse of the movie Production Code.

The Bond world became so intoxicating that eventually directors from Spielberg to Tarantino expressed interest at one time or another, mostly out of sorrow than excitement, since the franchise preferred amiably competent hacks such as Guy Hamilton and Terence Young. Only recently have directors with more personality, such as Michael Apted, been ushered into the realm, but even then they still conformed to what ever still the decade demanded from them. In addition, eventually there was a lot of competition for the Bond market then there used to be. From Die Hard to Indiana Jones to Jason Stratham movies to Mission Impossible, to the Asian action films, diverse filmmakers smuggled a little of the glory of Bond into their films while exceeding them in excitement and gravitas. In fact, the new Casino Royale appears to be an awful lot like MI3, even down to the girlfriend-enacted defibrillation. It’s a sign that the Bond films have flipped places with other franchises such as Mission Impossible. Casino is an attempt to reconfigure the Bond films in the direction of the competitors. The typical Bond film will no longer be outlandish, wiseacre-filled comedies of world domination. They will harder, darker, character driven, with state of the art stunts.

Whenever there is a new Bond film key questions arise. One, is the theme song any good? Two, how are the credits? Three, how hot are the Bond girls? Four, what new toys does Q give Bond? Five, how is the villain? Six, when and how does he say, “Shaken, not stirred,” and “Bond. James Bond”? Creating anticipation for the answers to questions was a terrific marketing strategy, but so often without sufficient follow through, leading to post-cinemal disappointment.

And the big question comes whenever there is a new Bond, which has happened five times now since Connery. Does the new guy match up to Sean? (And yes, Virginia, someday, in 2046, there will be a female Bond.) Does he evince the blend of wit and sheer animal magnetism that we want out of a Bond? Connery is the template, sophisticated and lethal, and even resembling the book’s Bond, whom Fleming said he imagined looking like Hoagy Carmichael. Australian car salesman George Lazenby looked the part, but couldn’t deliver lines with conviction. Roger Moore was of the David Nivin school, vacuous and suave, the kind of British film figure who sniffs his nose at a poorly creased pant leg and is angered by improprieties toward women because they bespeak less then impeccable manners. Brosnan was in the Moore mode, and for three films Timothy Dalton was the last attempt to create a “darker” Bond. Unfortunately he had all the vices of Lazenby with few of the virtues of Connery.

First things first, Daniel Craig is a great Bond. He is handsome in a damaged boxer sort of way, can be suave when he needs to, but has lower class roots that give this Bond an edge of anger. He is a different Bond, a colder, harder Bond who is eventually shaken and stirred.

With Casino Royale, the hard drive has been erased. The series has begun again, as if the previous 20 films (or 22) (or 23) didn’t exist. The film has elements of an origin story without dwelling on it too much. There is little effort toward the Bondian witticism. There is an attempt at some repartee on the Chunnel train, but it is so far below the quality of Hitchcock’s NXNW that right now I can’t remember a single line of it. Craig isn’t built to banter. Rather, he is built to tear fire hydrants off curbs. He’s got the shoulders of a Transformer, with a tiny mashed potato of a head. He’s not so much Bond as the Terminator. He runs like Robert Patrick in Term 2, like a speeding bullet. At one point, when Bond is standing bruised and cut in front of a mirror, you half expect him to peel back his eye, like Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator.

And speaking of eyes, the villain this time is someone named Mads Mikkelsen, who played Tristan in King Arthur in a film with another Bond candidate, Clive Owen. His Le Chiffre has an eye that weeps blood, an unexplained physical phenomenon. He’s good looking enough to play Bond himself, so he makes a good match for Craig’s more battered Bond. He is a fine villain who has higher constraints on himself that give him plausible, anguished motivation. His blood seeping eye evokes the classic opening of each Bond film up until now, perhaps another symbol of “rebirth.”.

The Bond girls this time around are gorgeous model types, if slightly more serious and fully fleshed out (without showing much flesh). Eva Green provides a tad bit of eye candy with her Herculean cleavage,

Frankly, the plot is a tad hard to follow, but that is the lot of most action movies, since the important plot stuff is muttered as people are walking hurriedly from one spot to another in the boring scenes between fights and explosions. And there are some terrific stunts. The first 15 minutes or so is one long, exhausting chase scene through an Ugandan work site. And how do you make a Texas Hold-’em game interesting? Interrupt it occasionally with more exciting things, such as a a poisoning or a terrific staircase fight, with Bond and foes virtually chasing Green down the steps.

Casino Royale has a great beginning and a great punchline of an end, but parts of the middle are so-so. Giancarlo Giannini pops up as a aide to Bond in Montenegro, where the casino has been relocated. He begins by being the Bondian equivalent of John Madden, offering color commentary on the poker game that is supposed to be the center of the movie, as it was in the book (where the game was the more exotic baccarat), saying such exciting things as, “My god, James was right.”

And what would a contemporary film be without a torture scene? Fortunately, Fleming’s source book provides a nifty one, which Bond seems to endure with Stallonian resilience. This part of the film follows the novel closely, and it is well to do so, given the layers of motivation and morality it compresses.

For the rest, there is no Q and thus not much in the way of gadgets, excellent credits, an unmemorable but not annoying song by Chris Cornell, a clever way of introducing the bloody eyeball opening. And Craig does say, “Bond. James Bond,” and orders a martini, but you’ll be surprised at the results.

I was reading the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly the other day and came to the week’s marriages, deals, and obits page called Monitor. Nicole Ritchie was dubbed “diminutive socialite”; affixed to the name of Snoop Dog was the prefix “serial airport nuisance.” This was straight, strict Spy magazine, circa 1988.

Spy is arguably the most influential magazine published in the second half of the 20th century. It’s 112 issues from 1986 to 1990, with only the first 81 considered to be part of the funny years were at the cutting edge of national magazine writing style, visual design, and aggressive editorial positions that made all other papers seem pallid by comparison and which made a mockery of unhip journalists at other publications who were prone to using fakely hip phrases such as “cutting edge.” It was a sad day in January of 1998 when the then new owners of Spy announced that the magazine was shutting down.

But those mournful readers weren’t going to miss Spy. It proceeded to pop up, as a tone, as a visual style, everywhere, in the New York Observer, then EW, then Vanity Fair, not to mention the Internet itself, from Gawker to The Smoking Gun, but which at its worst excesses has adopted the crudity of Spy‘s snark without its elegance.
I will admit to being obsessed with Spy during its lifetime. At the “alternative” newsweekly I worked at for a time I attempted to introduce Spy like elements (but so did others, which usually constituted embarrassing public record filings, a speciality of Spy). Though I loved stories such as the underground excursion into Bohemian Grove, and the media columns on Hollywood and the New York Times, my main focus was on The Spy List, its monthly blind item gossip column in the form of a puzzle. Often they were rather easy to figure, usually thanks to a fictional character whose well-known feature or action who provided the clue that defined the group into which all of the names were corralled, but not being in Manhattan some of them were at first baffling. Then when you finally pieced it together, the palpable, physical sense of satori was exquisite, orgasmic. Indeed, I became so obsessed with the Spy list that I first collected them into collated photocopied pages that I carried around with me to ponder over with friends in bars, and then second, even went so far as to try and write some of my own and submit them to the magazine. I reached the apotheosis of this obsession when, after mailing in my submissions, I actually got a call from someone at Spy. I don’t remember his name, and I am guessing that he was an intern, but on behalf of Spy he actually showed an interest in a couple of my Lists. I should have packed up and instantly moved to New York, but it is a good thing I didn’t, for shortly thereafter Spy was sold, and soon the Spy List was no longer a feature under the new regime. Still, I was about to ferret out a crucial bit of information from the caller. There was one lone Spy list that I was never able to figure out. I said, “Say, while I’ve got you on the telephone, let me ask you this. There is one list I’ve never been able to crack.” I read the first few items on the list. Spy‘s owners will be proud to know that the man did not really crack. He wouldn’t say explicitly what the list was about (and indeed the new book also maintains that the Spy list was an utterly random collection of names), but since I had gone to a lot of trouble on the magazine’s behalf, he must have taken pity on me and said, “Huh, well, it sounds like it’s probably a bunch of stuff in somebody’s office.” I put down the ‘phone and hauled out my list anthology. The intern-editor’s statement was all I need; the solution to the puzzle screamed in my face. I shall leave it to the reader to suss out what list I may have been talking about.
Though I could easily pull down and flip through my near complete collection of the magazine, it is still a delight to relive those days thanks to the publication of Spy: The Funny Years (Miramax Books, 304 pages, $39.95, ISBN 1 401 35239 1), a history of the magazine by its early insiders.

As one of my fellow Spy lovers complained, the only thing missing from the book is a disc or two with all 112 issues on it, akin to the complete run of The New Yorker you can buy for a hundred-plus dollars, but otherwise it takes you behind the scenes at what must have been the most exciting place to work in New York in the 1980s. I could have used a more organized approach to the anthology components of the book but I was grateful for the history tour. In fact, I may be the perfect reader for this book, as I could annotated it as I read along by pulling out of my files media mentioned in passing that measured Spy‘s impact. When primary author George Kalogerakis mentions that New York magazine launched an attack article, I was able to re-read it quickly. When he mentions that the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article bemoaning the cruelty of the magazine, I could pull it out of the same folder and enhance my reading pleasure.

Kalogerakis, with the help of co-founders Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter through the agency of occasional footnotes, walks us through the history of the magazine as seen up close and personal. He paints the times that Spy was about to change, he tracks the influences Time-ese, Mencken, Private Eye), and in the most interesting chapter, to me anyway, describes the editorial process. What distinguished Spy was the fact that from its cover to its occasional index it came at you like a collective force. It had a house style, and was probably the most edited paper on the news rack. Though Kalogerakis reports some writers being at first angry at the editorial interference, they also ended up being embarrassed that they hadn’t written the story that good in the first place.

The greatest thing that Kalogerakis did in his youthful exuberance was keep a diary of his time at Spy, and it is a pity that he does not quote from it more extensively, though it is probably not publishable in the way that, say, a Saturday Night Live diary couldn’t be. His snapshots of the behind the scenes interplay, hijinks, and in general congenial atmosphere of creativity and risk-taking. I await eagerly a true successor to that most marvelous magazine.

I was surprised the other day to receive a copy of A Good Year: A Portrait of the Film (Newmarket Press, 304 pages, $13.95, ISBN 0.307.27775.5), not because it is unusual to receive books in the mail, but because I didn’t know that there was a movie called A Good Year coming out.

The film turns out to be Ridley Scott’s adaptation of a novel by Provencal specialist Peter Mayle. The book doesn’t contain the script, but rather what is advertised as excerpts from the script, which in fact turn out to be really no more than pull quotes from the movie.

Though I haven’t seen A Good Year I decided to review the book anyway. There is a simple reason for that. I wanted to see if a seemingly lighthearted Scott film would pull my heart strings.

I admit it. I’m a sap. There is something about love stories that can really get to me. There are several occasions where I have actually gotten weepy eyed over romantic comedies, and not even the movie version, but just the script. One was Nothing Hill, which I read in paperback book form before seeing the film. Another was the first version of what became The Wedding Planer, but was called Mary Me Jane when I read it. I actually got tears in my eyes as I read the thing. Unfortunately, that version was utterly changed, though the resultant film was a huge hit. Nevertheless, consequently I have determined that I am the perfect market research tool for romances. If even the written version can unleash the waterworks, there must be something in it.

So I placed A Good Year: Portrait of the Film, with an introduction by Scott and Mayle, on the desk before me and studied it. The cover shows an image of star Russell Crowe, his face covered in dappled golden light, out of focus foliage behind him. Crowe is smiling, and looking down, and his white shirt suggests casualness. So we have something new, or at least newish, here – a happy Crowe rather than the brooding, brutal, brutish Crowe of tabloid stories and previous movies. The close up appears to emphasize the change, wagging its hands and jumping up and down to say, “New Crowe, new Crowe!”

I open the cover of the slightly oversized book, and see – another image of Crowe, one that looks almost exactly like the cover image, but looking left to right. It’s clear that the publicity for the film is built this sea change in Crowe’s persona.

The subsequent book is divided into three parts. The first section is the product of interviews with both Scott and Mayle, who, it turns out, were old friends, back when both were in advertising, and before Scott became a world famous movie director and Mayle bailed from that world and began writing novels and memoirs of his life in souther France. Although the book no where makes this clear, A Good Year turns out to be a remake of A Year in Provence, already adapted to the screen, as a TV mini-series, in 1993.

The bulk of the book tells the story of the film, copiously illustrated with color stills. The final section contains “making of” stuff that essentially reads like press kit material.

The middle section is the book has an interesting affect. It comes across like a kids’ storybook, amply illustrated, surrounded by a nice big typeface and lots of white around the text. Here the tale of the film is laid out. It concerns a London trader named Max Skinner, played by Crowe, who inherits a winery from his uncle (played by Albert Finney). Traveling to Provence to liquidate the estate, he ends up staying for several weeks, meeting an attractive local woman who runs a restaurant, and dealing with both the surviving land manager and the young American woman who turns out to be the uncle’s rightful heir.

The thrust of the film is that Skinner must change. He must drop the high pressure world of finance and investment gambling for the more lackadaisical but soul replenishing pace of country life. This change must come about, in classic screwball manner, though his ritual humiliation. The movie’s charge is to alert us to be patient, that Skinner will change, and grow to accept this new way of living.

The storybook got to me at two points. One was when Skinner, in an attempt to woo the restauranteur, says he will work one night when she happens to be short handed if she will have dinner with him. Later, when he comes back from London, he surprises her and says something that on the page sounded very romantic but could be laughable out loud if Crowe doesn’t manage to say it right. I expect that he will. But don’t try it at home. Both moments started the waterworks, and I thought that, despite what might be its flaws of low comedy and sentimentality, the film might just work. At least it did on paper.

As I was reading the storybook part, it occurred to me that this might be the best way to present scripts to actors (especially if the story about Jessica Simpson is true). It reads fast, hits all the high points, manages not to leave anything out (I assume), and is amply illustrated (there would surely be a way to PhotoShop a prospective actor into the director and production designer’s vision). Reading it takes about half as long to do as the film itself would last, and weaves its magic quickly, without all the impedimenta of classic screenplay formating.

By this point, I was curious: Who wrote this thing? No author is credited on the cover or the title page. But buried on the last page of the book where its credits are listed, the book’s editing is credited to Diana Landau, who is a movie book project manager at Newmarket Press. I assume than that she wrote the text. If so, she might like to consider a career in treatment writing for recalcitrant readers. Her work could effectively change the way movies are made.

I’ve probably said all I must say about The Departed, and should move on to Marie Antoinette, The Prestige, or Running with Scissors, but I happened to see the film again, at a terrific theater in Vancouver, Washington, called Cinetopia, and it inspired some further thoughts about the film. And also it’s a Martin Scorsese movie, AKA, one by “our “greatest living director,” which merits as much comment as possible. But I’ve been surprised at how cool my enthusiasm for the film has turned, and I’ve been intrigued by anti-Scorsese backlash articles, such as Tom Scocca’s in the New York Observer (not on line for free, but page 8 of the October 9 issue), in which he asserts that Scorsese is not really the grand old man of movies but rather more a master of scenes rather than the whole, and at David Bordwell’s blog and the response at Jim Emerson’s site. Bordwell maintains that The Departed is sloppily edited – and bear in mind that Scorsese started out as an editor. But all this commentary and a second viewing got me to thinking about it again, and that led to a series of unrelated observations. [By the way, the “errors” of continuity that Bordwell points out – a dancing desert, an appearing and disappearing can of beer – are on second viewing not errors at all. ]