PLUCK THEM

RIP to Henry “Harry” Morgan, departed at 96. Famous for Dragnet & the later seasons of M*A*S*H—though his best work on M*A*S*H was a hilarious guest-shot, as an unhinged & racist general, in the earlier seasons—Morgan was one of those actors that are so familiar that it’s easy not to notice how genuinely good & skillful & quietly real they were. This shows up at times even in the many mostly dreary late-vintage M*A*S*H episodes, but abundantly among his many film roles—notably, as Henry Fonda’s partner in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). A friend also pointed out to me that he & Jack Webb were the bad guys in the 1951 noir Appointment With Danger.

RIP also to actor Bill McKinney, who despite a long & varied career is best remembered by far as one of the rapists...

...in Deliverance (1972)—a terrifying performance which immortalized the phrase “squeal like a pig”—departed at 80, to disco (& also porn) veteran Andrea True, departed at 68, & to Dobie Gray of “Drift Away” fame, who has drifted away at 71.

RIP, also, to my love affair with Chick-fil-A. I’m not proud of this, but I really, really loved those freakin’ sandwiches. They’re probably my all-time favorite fast food. Until this changes, however, they’ve sold me my last bird, & in the meantime they can kiss my ass.

So, in recognition of Chick-fil-A’s rottenness…

Monster-of-the-Week: …how about this Brobdingnagian broiler, this ponderous piece of poultry, from the cover of a 1961 Classics Illustrated adaptation of Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells:

MAID MAN

Playing through Thursday at the Harkins Shea 14 in Scottsdale is The Women on the 6th Floor (Les Femmes du 6eme Etage), Philippe le Guay’s mild social comedy about a persnickety stockbroker (Fabrice Luchini) who bonds with his ravishing, unflappable new maid (Natalia Verbeke), & through her with the other Spanish domestics in the servants quarters in his building in early ‘60s Paris.

It’s a sweet, sly spin on class relations, well worth seeing for the deeply funny performances of every member of the cast. Along with Luchini & the breathtaking Verbeke, I especially liked Lola Duenas as the Communist maid, smiling with unoffended incredulity at everyone’s naïvete. Lord knows what this character would have to say, however, about this sentimental tale, which seems to hinge on the same “enormous platitude” that Orwell ascribes to Dickens: “If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”

My brother made me aware of this story, about the chapel in the cemetery near Evans City, Pennsylvania that appears at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, & of a fundraising attempt to save it. You can donate here, & here is a New Times story I wrote about a peculiar experience I had at that cemetery.

RIP to the truly hilarious Alan Sues of Laugh-In, passed on at 85, & to the truly hilarious Patrice O’Neal, passed on at just 41.

SNAKE CHARMER

In memory of Ken Russell, departed this week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the honor goes to Lady Sylvia Marsh, the seductive but lethal snake-woman played by Amanda Donohoe in Lair of the White Worm, Russell’s 1988 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s fevered final novel of 1911 (based, in turn, on the legend of the Lambton Worm):

This lightweight but genuinely witty little film is maybe my favorite of Russell’s works, formidable though The Devils (1971) is. White Worm’s imagery is sexy in a marvelously adolescent way, Donohoe is unforgettable, & there’s a charming early performance by Hugh Grant, posh & self-deprecating as ever, as one of the young heroes.

By far the best thing in the movie, however, is this song.

COP ART

Much as I admire Sid and Nancy, & love Repo Man, my favorite movie from nervy Brit director Alex Cox—it topped my Top Ten list in Phoenix New Times the year it played here in Phoenix, as I recall—is his little-known Highway Patrolman, or El Patrullero. I think it’s one of the most neglected movies of the ‘90s, & one of the simplest & best of all cop movies.

A Mexican police drama almost entirely in Spanish, directed by a Brit, & written & produced by a Peruvian-Irish-American, Lorenzo O’Brien, is not the sort of thing you see every day. But what’s really unusual about Highway Patrolman, paradoxically, is how straightforward it is. Cox eschews the surreal flights & outré eccentricities of his other films in favor of a standard action-thriller structure, & lets the change of scenery drain off its banality.

The title character, played by Roberto Sosa, is named Pedro Rojas, but he might as well be named Pedro Verde—when we first meet him, fresh from the academy, he’s comically green. Even though his instructors make it clear that he’s a cog in a kleptocracy—they tell him flatly, in the opening scene, of anyone he chooses to pull over, that “they’ve always broken the law,” & it’s up to him only to figure out how—he initially tries, as he prowls the desolate Durango roads to which he’s been assigned, to behave honorably.

We soon see that not only does the system make it impossible for Pedro to stay pure, but that the mere attempt makes him ridiculous (though likably so). The episodes which follow dramatize the erosion of this idealism, as Pedro gets married, has a kid, gets wounded in a shooting, drinks too much, begins an affair with a soulful prostitute. Eventually, his insistence upon clinging to a few shreds of decency endangers his life.

Police forces in America tend, even when they aren’t overtly corrupt or brutal, to favor the interests of economic or racial elites. Even when we understand this, American audiences accept cops as movie & TV heroes, yet we have no problem seeing cops in other countries, especially someplace like Mexico, depicted as uniformed gangsters. Without suggesting that foreign police are paragons, Highway Patrolman, through its guileless title character, can gently push us to reconsider the stereotypes of our fiction, & how they shape our view of the real world.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s a perfectly enjoyable picture—tightly scripted, evenly-paced, funny, exciting—all on the surface, with no subtextual cultural analysis. Yet by being entirely conventional in an unconventional context, Highway Patrolman manages to seem brilliantly original.

Kudos to Microcinema International for making this small gem available on DVD, for the first time in North America. The disc includes commentary by Cox & O’Brien, a couple of documentaries, & Cox’s early short Edge City, aka Sleep is for Sissies.

By the way, Microcinema International is running a holiday sale through the end of the year—you can get Highway Patrolman or any of the other interesting releases in their catalog at 40 to 50% off, details here.

RIP to another self-consciously provocative Brit filmmaker, Ken Russell, passed on Sunday at 84.

ARTHURIAN LEGEND

Literalism is the joke behind the new computer-animated feature Arthur Christmas. It’s right there in the poster: “Ever wonder how 2 Billion presents get delivered in 1 night?”

2 billion kids have wondered the same thing, & also how reindeer can fly, & how Santa gets down the chimney, etc. According to Arthur Christmas, nowadays it’s accomplished via a massive, technologically sophisticated process involving a city-sized, rocket-powered sleigh, & countless elves operating like commandos, rappelling down the sides of buildings & through windows SWAT-team-style to plant gifts & leave traces that simulate Santa’s visit.

The real Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent) is at the center of it all, as an ineffectual figurehead, hustled here & there by the elves. The real brains of the outfit, & his itching presumptive heir, is his son Steve (Hugh Laurie), who runs the show from a palatial mission control back at the North Pole & resents his father’s refusal to retire & pass him the reins. The retired senior Santa (Bill Nighy) watches & scoffs at the newfangled spectacle from his rooms.

The title character is Santa’s recessive younger son, who works answering letters, & truly cares about the kids. When Arthur (James McAvoy) learns of a glitch in Steve’s system—a little girl in a small town in Cornwall hasn’t been given her bicycle—he’s appalled that his father & Steve are prepared to just blow it off, as within the margin for error. With just a few hours left before sunrise in England, Arthur & his grandfather set out to make the delivery old-school, using a sled, reindeer, a gift-wrap-obsessed elf & a bit of magic dust. All does not go smoothly.

It does go hilariously, however. This blend of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” with Apollo 13 is one of the more inventive Christmas movies I’ve seen in a long time.

A product of Aardman Studios—the folks that brought us the Wallace and Grommit films—it’s dizzyingly imaginative on a visual level, & despite the sentimentality inherent in the storyline, it isn’t mawkish, probably because it’s so bracingly honest about creeping institutional impersonality. I also liked the shades of gray in the characters—Arthur is lovable but clueless; without his less warmhearted, more competent relations he’d be helpless. The crotchety Santa emeritus, also lovable, has his own selfish reasons for wanting to make the run, & Steve & father aren’t presented as soulless.

In reality, of course, the charming tradition of giving Christmas gifts has degenerated over the decades into an angst-ridden consumerist nightmare driven by a technological juggernaut far more pitiless than that depicted in the film, with Santa Claus, that fascinating composite of diverse cultural traditions, reduced to its mascot. Arthur Christmas carries, & is deepened by, a rueful awareness of this corruption under its merry, bright surface.

Happy Thanxgiving everybody, by the way. The holiday weekend box office will likely be dominated by Muppets, & that’s fine, but it would be a pity if, because of that, Arthur Christmas was overlooked by audiences.

Speaking of the Muppets…

Monster-of-the-Week: …in honor of their new movie, here’s a Halloween greeting I received, depicting the iconic Miss Piggy as another icon…

SOCKO BOX OFFICE

“The characterizations were amusing, but they always reminded me of bad carpeting.” Thus did a curmudgeonly friend of mine recently explain why he never liked the Muppets.

It is, to put it mildly, a minority opinion. The Muppets are one of those rare acts that operates squarely in the mainstream of wholesome, family-approved entertainment, yet has just the right edge of pure, irresistible silliness to make them hip—& maybe the faintest hint of kinkiness as well, as in Gonzo’s masochism & his seemingly polygamist interest in chickens. Almost everybody, Your Humble Narrator included, loves the Muppets. Indeed, their low-tech, old-school showbiz tactility is one of the keys to their charm—many of us love them because they remind us of bad carpeting.

For the newest film version, however, the Muppets have been recast as underdogs, has-beens. The premise of The Muppets is that Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, Animal et al are forgotten relics of the ‘80s. When Kermit, lonely behind the gates of his faded Bel-Air mansion, learns that a rotten one-percenter named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) wants to tear down the old Muppet Studios to drill for oil, he gets together the old gang to put on a telethon to save them.

This formula Let’s-Put-On-Show plot is really secondary, however, to the story of Walter, a fanatical Muppets fan who is, manifestly, also a Muppet himself (voiced by Peter Linz). This is doubly odd because Walter’s brother Gary (Jason Segel, who also co-scripted, with Nicholas Stoller), is human, as is Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), as is everyone else we see in their smalltown home. So when the three of them travel to L.A. & get caught up in the Muppet’s adventures, Walter feels truly at home for the first time.

At one point Walter gushes to the Muppets that they give people the greatest gift, laughter, & the Muppets protest, pointing out at least two greater gifts. But the third-greatest gift is nothing to be sneezed at, & The Muppets delivers a generous dose of it. The screening audience with whom I saw the film received it rapturously; I enjoyed it greatly but I think it’s the third-greatest Muppet movie, after the sublime Muppet Christmas Carol of 1992 & the original 1979 effort, The Muppet Movie.

The script is laced with in-jokes & period references & parodies of dramatic clichés, genuinely witty but aimed more, perhaps, at nostalgic adults than at the kids in the audience, as are the many, many celebrity cameos. Also, the movie seems—and this isn’t a criticism I find myself handing down very often—a little talky.

Don’t get me wrong—the upsides of The Muppets far outweigh these minor reservations. They include: Cooper, who’s pretty droll in the obligatory bad guy part, & who delivers a sensational rap; the new songs, by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, working in the style, if not quite on the level, of Paul Williams, & the old songs, including “The Rainbow Connection” & Piero Umiliani’s unshakeable “Mahna Mahna.” This movie even found, at last, a redemptive good use for that horribly catchy ‘80s embarrassment “We Built This City.”

Finally, there’s Kermit, pained & sheepishly idealistic as ever. Steve Whitmire still reproduces Jim Henson’s voice characterization flawlessly, & whoever actually operates Kermit gets extraordinarily fine shades of feeling on his face. Many a highly-paid non-amphibian star doesn’t have nearly as expressive a pan.

HEROIC FEET

2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical & a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soul-mates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumble, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural talent for tap-dancing.

It starts off, in short, as a fable about nonconformity & finding your own individual path—a good joke right off the bat, in the black-&-white uniformity of the penguin rookery (in The Far Side, Gary Larson once depicted a single penguin amongst the multitudes belting out “I’ve Gotta Be Me”). But by the end, director George Miller had spun the film from a sweet, if deeply eccentric, underdog tale into a grandiose environmentalist vision for which the word epic is hardly sufficient—“cosmic” would be more like it.

I’d be tempted to say it’s a one-of-a-kind movie, but as of this weekend, it’s not. A major box-office hit & an Oscar-winner besides, Happy Feet could hardly fail to spawn a sequel, & here it is, some five years later. In Happy Feet Two, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) has the penguins mixing some fancy footwork in with their stirring oratorios—the tiny feet often splashing in ominous melt-water—but alas his own son Erik, ironically enough, isn’t much of a dancer. Poor Erik runs away from the shame of this, accompanied by two loyal pals, & Mumble heads off to find them.

While they’re gone, a huge chunk of Antarctic ice collides with the rookery, sealing thousands of penguins, including Erik’s Mom Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore, aka Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy), off from the ocean. So it’s up to Mumble, Erik & his friends to try to find a way to save them—from hunger, from marauding skuas, & from general despair. Their allies this time include the Latin-accented Adelie penguin Ramon (Robin Williams) & his colony, elephant seals, electric-guitar-playing human researchers &, albeit unwittingly, two nearly-microscopic krill (Brad Pitt & Matt Damon) who have broken away from their enormous swarm to strike out on their own existential search for identity.

There’s also, of all birds, a puffin—named Sven, & voiced complete with Nordic accent by Hank Azaria—who has somehow found his way to the other end of the world. He’s been mistaken for a penguin who can fly, which gives him the status of a sort of self-improvement spiritual leader.

In other words, like the first film, Happy Feet Two is another big helping of off-the-wall weirdness. But also like the first film, it’s funny & good-hearted, & the musical numbers—which, a la Bollywood, freely mix snatches of the Rawhide theme, grand opera & Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”—are thrilling, both in their relentless rhythms & in Miller’s dazzling, undulating visual perspectives.

Miller’s apparent purpose, this time, is to stave off the sense of despair that many of us feel over the seeming futility of individual action in the environmental struggle. The moral which the movie asserts—it’s also on the poster—is “Every Step Counts.” To this I can only say: I hope so.