TV Reviews: The Event, Hawaii Five-0

Considering the quality and ratings of two of the fall season’s most extravagant new series

For whatever its flaws and shortcomings, or even its enduring commitment to garbage, the fall 2010 season has at least offered more variety among its new shows than probably any other in recent years. With the major networks rededicating themselves, somewhat, to scripted dramas and comedies while once-juggernaut reality fare like Survivor and American Idol continue to show their age, broadcast TV may finally be rising to the saber-rattling that cable networks including TNT and USA have threatened for years.

As a representative sample of the dozens of new shows, we watched the first two episodes of The Event and Hawaii Five-0, serial dramas with virtually nothing in common except that they air on Monday nights, albeit in different time slots and on different networks. The two series seemed to start and develop in opposite directions between their first and second episodes, one getting much better, the other showing signs of fatigue already.

NBC’s The Event, with its myriad of murky conspiracies and guess-what-this-means clues, is fairly naked in its ambition to capture the audiences previously entertained by Lost and 24. The pilot episode, “I Haven’t Told  You Everything,” was oddly paced and sometimes hard to follow, thanks to a tiered succession of flashback sequences that established some of the overarching narrative’s (apparently very well thought out) back story. Some of the multiple storylines introduced in the first hour include: a college student (Jason Ritter) attempting to stop a plane hijacking connected to the kidnapping of his girlfriend (Sarah Roemer); the President (Blair Underwood) wrestling with freeing 97 political prisoners despite the wishes of his CIA chief (Zeljko Ivanek); a government agent (Ian Anthony Dale) with ties to the prisoners working to stop the same hijacking.

Despite putting so many balls in the air, show creator/writer Nick Wauters managed to bring everything together, as far as he could for one episode of a multi-part episodic, with a climax that was both unsettling and audacious by virtue of its 9/11 overtones. The expansive cast of TV veterans (this must be Ivanek’s 4,000th role as a government creep) settled into their parts easily, and relative newcomer Jason Ritter was compelling and charismatic as the everyman getting in way over his head for no reason he deserved.

If the first episode was only good, the second (titled “To Keep Us Safe”) stomped on the gas pedal, answering many of the questions raised by the pilot but prodding many more (often simultaneously). Most importantly, the episode revealed the nature of the prisoner’s identities and why the government would take desperate measures to contain them. SPOILERS. It seems the United States has kept close to a hundred extraterrestrials prisoner in Alaska since World War II; the aliens are led, after a fashion, by a pacifist (Laura Innes, getting past ER‘s Kerry Weaver at long last) who’s kept them more or less cooperative. But now a second group of aliens, more militant and resentful of the imprisonment, has begun working to free them, starting with an attempt on the President’s life. Double agents and intrigue are already piling on top of one another, with plot twists that, for once, don’t feel numbingly familiar. The first two episodes should probably have aired together, either as a movie or double feature, in order to make the strongest impression on audiences; we can’t help but feel the combined punch would’ve created bigger shockwaves through the entertainment media.

If The Event is so far occasionally original, and bold but uneven, the heavily publicized remake of Hawaii Five-0 is just the opposite: though polished and confident, it’s too reminiscent by half of established CBS cop dramas – most notably CSI: Miami – and already indulging in some of the hoariest television drama clichés from, ironically, the 1970s and possibly before. The cumulative effect, by and large, is a sleek confection of sex, sunshine, and easily digestible storylines occupied by attractive, affable performers. It’s the definition of safe television, but for older audiences or those wishing for a diversion it’s likely just the thing for its Mondays at 10 timeslot.

Upgraded and tuned up for the 21st Century, the update remakes semi-iconic TV cop Steve McGarrett as a Navy Intelligence counterterrorism expert (played now by Australian heartthrob Alex O’Loughlin) recruited by Hawaii’s governor (Jean Smart) to head an anti-crime task force. McGarrett assembles his team from the fringes of local law enforcement, including New Jersey transplant Danny Williams (Scott Caan), ex-cop Chin Ho Kelley (Daniel Dae Kim) and surfer-police cadet Kona “Kono” Kalakaua (Grace Park). In the pilot they track down the terrorist (James Marsters) responsible for killing McGarrett’s father; in the second episode, “Ohana,” they fight Eastern European gangsters for control of a NSA programmer’s cyber-macguffin. In both cases, the plots are streamlined, simple, and largely free of the complicated moral entanglement that’s been the benchmark of non-CBS cop shows for years now.

Show creators Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Fringe, Alias) keep the emphasis on bright colors, splashy stunts, and expensive-looking action sequences that are fun as long as you’re actually watching them. The cast is still feeling their way around one another, but O’Loughlin and Caan already have a Butch-Sundance chemistry that makes for some of the show’s most entertaining moments. Caan is doing the heavy-lifting in building that chemsitry, however. O’Loughlin is effortlessly charismatic but so far his McGarrett lacks the intensity that Jack Lord brought to the role in 1968, and at times he seems outshined by Caan’s blustering blue-collar charm. Kim and Park, as the junior partners in the team, haven’t had enough non-action screen time to flesh out their roles past stock types. It’s also a little strange that the 36-year old Park plays the rookie on the squad, her character written with plenty of earnest neophyte resolve.

Which indicates, in turn, the problems of the past the show seems interested in repeating. Too many clichés lurk in the corners of the scripts: in two weeks the team has saved the islands from two separate Dastardly Threats: terrorists one week and a European crime syndicate the next, effectively saving the entire archiepelago once per week. Kelly and Kalakaua, the team’s two ethnic characters, remain largely in supportive, backup roles for the investigations and in action sequences. Maybe smaller, less ornate cases might allow all the actors room to work if they’re to match the action’s bombast; otherwise the big villains-small character depth model recalls the superficiality of 70s and 80s ensemble shows including the The A-Team and T.J. Hooker, and not in a good way.

Finally, for better and for worse the show looks like a CSI: franchise, with swirling images of the Honolulu cityscape used after commercial breaks and interiors filled with blue and orange color palettes and giant plasma screens. As the CSI: franchise enters its second decade, the network is likely thinking of life and tentpole attractions past that trio of show’s eventual sunset. If Hawaii Five-0 is the first of that new generation,it’s only fair that it have its own look. The promo below implies as much, even while celebrating the CSI: visual formula.

According to ratings tracker website TV By The Numbers, the show lost 10% of its pilot audience during its second week to draw an audience of 12.7 million viewers. The Event‘s second episode drew approximately 9 million people, an almost 20% attrition from its pilot.

- Michael Kabel and Jennifer Vasil

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DVD Review: Iron Man 2

Overstuffed, top-heavy sequel arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray September 28.

If sequels to successful films rarely live up to their fan bases’ expectations, then sequels to films that surprised audiences have twice as much work cut out for them. The surprise of discovery and the thrill of infatuation clear away, and the hard work of earning an audience’s respect – while justifying their initial enthusiasm – settles over the sequel like a heavy cloth from which the story has to emerge.

The first Iron Man surprised almost everyone a couple of years ago by presenting better entertainment than even fans of the Marvel Comics superhero likely anticipated. Its sequel, arriving barely two years later into theatres but atop a crest of eager audience expectation, feels rushed and over-reaching for much of its wall-to-wall, action-packed proceedings. Luckily an enviable ensemble of actors, including most especially Robert Downey, Jr., work to keep the whole project from dissolving into noise and chaos. But it takes their combined efforts, and they succeed just barely.

Following Tony Stark’s (Downey, Jr.) revelation to the world that he is in fact the armored hero, his use of the suit has rankled his competitors and lawmakers alike, especially his bumbling rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a pompous senator (Garry Shandling) who would like the armor’s secrets for, respectively, themselves and for the government. But the maverick Stark ain’t having it, insisting he has “successfully privatized world peace” and that he serves the people at his own pleasure. “You can always count on me to pleasure myself,” he quips.

But pride goeth before a fall, and when Russian physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) attacks Stark during the Monaco Grand Prix, it sets off a domino chain of events that crash Stark’s world down around him. “All I have to do is sit here and watch,” Vankdo taunts from a jail cell, “as the world will consume you.” Hammer later recruits him to perfect his own flawed armor technology, while the U.S. military exerts increasing pressure through Stark’s buddy Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) to cooperate with their own agendas. Making matters worse, the palladium that powers the reactor in Stark’s chest is slowly poisoning his blood, provoking increasingly erratic and self-indulgent behavior that alienates him from Rhodes as well as secretary/love interest Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Relief and assistance come from directions both expected but welcome and unexpected and disappointing. The spies of SHIELD, led by the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have the means to treat the blood poisoning but want Stark’s cooperation in their own efforts; to that end, they’ve had a sexy agent (Scarlett Johansson) posing as a legal assistant within his company for weeks. Stark also learns his father Howard (John Slattery) was a founding member of the organization, and that an old filmstrip contains the aloof elder Stark’s vision for his son’s greatness and salvation. At this point the film comes closest to coming completely off the rails: to see the individualist Stark reduced to daddy issues, and to have a solution handed to him, is probably the film’s greatest and cheapest fault.

All of this and more is compressed into a two-hour runtime, with the result that the script often bulges at its seams. The first hour is a flurry of exposition and explanation that sometimes loses its coherence, and for audiences not already well-steeped in the comic mythology the confusion is likely to be compounded. The translation from comic book to screen is almost never without a few bumps, but here a persistent sense of something going unsaid, something taken for granted, permeates the characters’ dialogue and interaction. Little is done with the new characters to establish their connections to one another, save for some brief explanation by way of tossed-off speech. Typically, that speech is Stark making a wise crack about them.

The hurried sense of chaos unfortunately takes its toll on the performers. Rourke’s casting was heavily publicized, but his role remains opaque and largely devoid of nuance. He’s a bad guy, evil and driven by revenge, with little else complicating him. For as entertaining as Cheadle and Johansson are in their parts, there’s no compelling reason for their participation except that their characters are mainstays of the source comic; in a telling sign, none of the new characters are ever called by their comic code names: Stark dubs Cheadle “War Machine” out of context, Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is never referred to as “The Black Widow,” Vanko is never called “Whiplash.” To be fair, Johansson’s fight sequences have an exciting fluidity in contrast to the high-tech armor everywhere else while Cheadle, the consummate actor’s actor, manages to seem completely at home in what’s essentially a fighter jet worn as a suit.

Rockwell does his best with an underwritten part, but Hammer is too self-sabotaguing to ever seem a credible threat to Stark’s genius; if ever a villain performance actually needed more mustache twirling, this may be the case. John Slattery plays Howard Stark as an unmistakable riff on Walt Disney in the 1960′s, when the animator had turned his energies towards a utopian futurism that likely seemed naive even then. (It’s a weird counterpoint to his normal role as the cynical Roger Sterling of Mad Men.) Of the returning characters, Downey Jr. is excellent yet again, building on Stark’s less endearing qualities while undercutting them with vulnerabilities and needs he has no idea how to express. Paltrow is exactly the same as she was last time, no more and no less; Jackson is fine but looks somewhat less than convincing marching around in a leather trench coat and riding boots in broad daylight.

The Marvel Universe is nothing if not interconnected, and all the superfluous characters and story threads piled over one another are all leading to 2012′s The Avengers. Like last time, fans will want to stick around after the credits for a brief scene that teases the ongoing build-up to that film. In the meantime, this flm feels too rushed, too ambitious, and preoccupied to match the giddy revelation of its predecessor. But it’s still entertaining thanks primarily to what was right with the first film, even while introducing some new elements that stand on their own. It’s an above average sequel to a superior action film, not great but pretty good, moving the ongoing story forward while only sacrificing some momentum.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The American

George Clooney vehicle has too many cliches camouflaged (somewhat) by its handsome European setting.

Just when The Girl Who Played With Fire seemed like a lock for this year’s worst thriller, the Anton Corbijn-directed The American arrives to give it a run for its shopworn money. Though also a mishmash of genre clichés hampered by bleak, blank performances and sluggish direction concealed beneath a sleek European veneer, The American at least offers a couple of upgrades over its Swedish counterpart: the beauty of the Italian countryside and a competent, if not exactly winning, performance by George Clooney, the once and future last of the great American leading men.

To make a point perfectly clear: Clooney can’t save the film from its threadbare story and formulaic plot twists – probably no one could – but he does his best. Corbijn, in the director’s chair for the second time following the similarly flawed Control, sometimes creates beautiful pictures but forgets to include any substance to make them more than two-dimensional. The story was adapted by Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later) from the novel A Very Private Gentleman by respected British author and poet Martin Booth. Having not read Booth’s work I can’t comment on what was gained or lost in the adaptation, but there is a sense throughout of some greater complexity sacrificed in translation, a subtext or mood that failed to come across. What’s left is surface material and impossible-to-miss “deeper” meanings, writ even larger so as to become inescapable.

Clooney plays Jack, a mercenary on vacation at a lakeside cabin in Sweden. Dour and ostensibly rueful, he’s ambushed by gunmen as he and his female companion (girlfriend? conquest? prostitute? Her role in his life is the first of the film’s many unanswered questions) make their way across a frozen lake. Jack shoots the girl (Irina Bjorklund) in the back while dispatching the attackers,  maybe to complete an assignment, maybe to protect his identity.

Fleeing to Rome, he’s exiled by his business manager Pavel (Johan Leysen) to the remote and mountainous Abruzzo region of central Italy. Pavel is weary of Jack’s mistakes, but Jack is smart enough to realize Pavel is less than forthcoming, and decamps one village over from his assigned waiting point.

Sitting tight proves easier said than done, and in short order Jack’s keeping wildly different company: a priest (Paolo Bonacelli) who harbors a guilty secret located just outside town; and a prostitute (Violante Placido) with whom Jack feels an instant bond and mutual lust. (It’s a sign of the script’s Freshman Literature level of complexity that one character is drawn to Jack’s body, the other to his soul.) Rather than flesh out the stock characters – the guilty priest, the hooker with a heart of gold - the script has them all mutter stock or supercilious phrases. “You don’t have to pretend with me,” Jack tells the prostitute Clara. “You cannot deny the existence of hell,” Father Benedetto explains. “You live in it. It is a place without love.” Though he’s apparently lived a life of violence and ruthlessness, what Jack needs more than anything to find redemption is love. Sure.

Meanwhile Pavel commissions Jack to build a sniper rifle for another assassin (Thekla Reuten) ready to carry out an assignment of her own. While too derivative by half of The Day of the Jackal, the scenes in which Jack and Mathilde test the rifle in a clump of riverside reeds provide the plot with some of its most intense moments. Reuten is icy calm in a well-modulated turn as the killer for hire, appearing behind multiple hairstyles and with just enough seductive allure to tweak Jack’s already dissipating self-discipline. If she’s never quite believable as an assassin, she’s at least a genuinely mysterious presence amid all the ensuing predictability.

Jack builds the rifle with the same eyes-front, poker-faced resolve he apparently applies, or used to apply, to every other part of his life. Of course the rifle has a purpose, but you’ll have figured it out long before Jack does, even while his response to the situation is somewhat inventive, if not entirely satisfying. Overcoming Mathilde and her employer (it’s who you suspect it is all along) proves harder than it seems, leading to a bittersweet ending similarly demonstrated by, among others before it, The Asphalt Jungle, Midnight Cowboy, Leon, Homeboy, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

Performances can sometimes lift a film above its genre limitations, but that’s sadly not the case here. Clooney imbues Jack with reserve built upon reserve, recalling in his best moments the same ambiguous intensity of Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin in their 60s and 70s heydays. A natural temptation, especially given the legacy of those screen legends, is to equate that placidity with hidden depth, and by extension to mistake this film’s lack of action for a more refined attention to characterization. Except there’s not enough of either to steer the film one way or the other, with the plot collapsing barely into its third act as a direct result. Clooney can carry a movie, but he can’t build something out of thin air, try as he might. The rest of the performances are flat and uninspired, but given the listless movement of the narrative maybe that’s to be expected. Bonacelli and Placido are respectively soulful and sensual, but not any more than they ever have to be.

Corbijn sometimes seems strained to assemble a coherent, suspense-building narrative out of his lovely pictures. He does best in capturing the handsome quaintness of the Abruzzo region; less well with conveying the loneliness of cities and villages. Much of the second act is composed of scenes that could be shuffled into a different order with little narrative confusion as a result, and the prologue in Sweden feels rushed and unfocused. The ending, which should serve as the culmination of Jack’s life of mistakes, instead plays out straightforward, even romantic, with a groan-inducing visual metaphor that recalls Grahame Greene at his least subtle. (as a point of interest, Joffe has written and directed a new adaptation of Greene’s novel Brighton Rock.) The metaphor is so obvious, so telegraphed throughout the film, that you believe until its last second resolution that its use must constitute a red herring. No such luck; it really is that graceless.

The American is, finally and disappointingly, two kinds of bad films at once. Not the action movie promised by its previews and with too little weight to qualify as a character study or meditation on human emotion, it’s a disappointing entry into Clooney’s varied body of work and another miss for Corbijn as director. It’s a box office hit, however, with industry commentators celebrating the return of adult fare to multiplexes. That’s something to cheer about, but simply being grown up shouldn’t mean having to settle for things you’ve seen before.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Last summer’s desert adventure makes a great rental.

Debuting this Tuesday (September 14) on DVD and Blu-Ray, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is about everything you could want from a summer action movie and maybe a hair’s breadth more. It’s a good-looking film, with Disney studios’ famous production design capabilities brought to bear on a time and place that haven’t been used a million times already. The talented cast is good-looking and energetic and the great Sir Ben Kingsley plays the heavy. Most action films have to make do with less – Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, had a more cumbersome script and less talented cast while not enjoying, if that’s the right word, a highly successful series of video games as its source material. The film tanked at the box office last June, but for late-summer rental viewing it’s a promising choice.

This comes partially from the film’s sense of familiarity. Despite all the handsome sets and lovely people, there’s sometimes a tired sense of going through the motions to much of the plot and action sequences, as if the story would rather be someplace else or serving another purpose. Director Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco) keeps the scenes moving from one to the other in rigidly linear fashion, even if his narrative rhythms are too choppy and too many scenes feel deeply truncated. At the risk of second-guessing, it’s hard not to imagine the director working with a set runtime in mind and keeping the action sequences in their entirety, at the expense of everything else. When it’s not trying to make up its mind where to go next, however, the film gets very entertaining at the drop of a dime.

The back story really only serves to give context to that exotic setting: fifteen hundred years ago, young Dastan is a street waif in the empire’s capital city, living on scraps with his wastrel friends. When he defies a group of soldiers in order to rescue a friend, his courage impresses King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup) who adopts the boy into his family. Fifteen years later, the adult Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his brothers Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell) lead an assault on the far-flung but holy city of Alamut, investigating reports that the Alamutians are selling weapons to Persia’s enemies. Dastan and his group of irregular commandos lead a flanking attack against the city, capturing it largely through Dastan’s impressive parkour skills. During the battle Dastan recovers the mystical Dagger of Time from one of the city’s defenders, and local high priestess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) is also captured.

During the army’s celebrations upon their return to the imperial capital King Sharaman is killed by poisoned robes Tus gave Dastan to present as a gift. Blamed for the murder, Dastan flees the city, inadvertently taking Tamina and the dagger along. He soon discovers that the dagger can turn back time, allowing him to step briefly back into the past and change events. The mystical power is drawn from the sands of time itself, Tamina explains, the same sands the gods once almost used to destroy humanity. Enlisting the aid of conniving Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina) and his knife-wielding bodyguard Seso (Steve Toussaint), the two attempt to prevent Dastan’s uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley) and his death-worshipping Hassansin warriors from stealing the sands for themselves.

The results, as you already know, are predictable, and for big summer entertainment anything else would likely disappoint. Action sequence follows action sequence, with some better than others: the duel between Seso and a Hassansin guard at the top of a glittering tower is particularly well-executed, and the siege of Alamut has a glowing, memorable intensity. Amar’s oasis of free enterprise and luxury, revolving largely around ostrich racing and betting, is gently hilarious thanks to Molina’s boisterous charm. If only the film had more such moments. Near the end of Dastan’s quest the story starts to get winded, and a Mulligan-esque plot twist may very well leave you annoyed instead of entertained.

Regarding the cast, Gyllenhaal is an actor who seems to have never quite found his niche, and as an action star he neither excels nor embarrasses himself. He’s beefed up enough for the part, a far cry from the slender milquetoasts of Zodiac and Donnie Darko, but the script lacks equal fleshing out in his characterization. Arterton gets to do more than she did in Clash of the Titans, her other sand and sandals epic this year, even if that more mostly involves scolding or rebuffing Dastan’s actions and advances. Kingsley is marvelous in a stock role, giving the scheming regent Nizam layers of phony warmth and affection that will make you question your (eventually validated) presumptions of his evil. As for Molina, he must derive some kind of satisfaction from stealing scenes from the younger and hunkier leading men of his films. Having already heisted chunks of Boogie Nights and Spider-Man 2, he continues that spree here. Probably no other actor could evince so much charming outrage over the fate of an ostrich.

Bruckheimer and Disney obviously hoped the film would spawn a series, much like Pirates of the Caribbean did seven years ago. (Unlike Pirates, they should remember not to make the sequels so staggeringly awful.) Look closely and you’ll see resemblances to Pirates in the plot events and locales – the orphan boy, the fight in the grotto, most likely others. Disney and Bruckheimer alike have never been averse to formula, either in concept or in practice, so much of this film will likely seem exotically familiar. It offers exactly what you probably expect, though sometimes more and sometimes possibly less.

- Michael Kabel

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TV Reviews: Terriers, Rubicon

Two cable dramas in different stages of growth reveal the up and downs of basic cable original programming.

It’s no secret that, despite the major broadcast networks’ best (and worst) attempts otherwise, episodic dramas have for years now steadily migrated to the cable television outlets. With greater artistic freedom, looser standards and practices, and to a certain extent a snob factor, basic cable outlets – FX, American Movie Classics, TNT – are able to attract talent and stage subject matter that might otherwise prove impossible on broadcast television (imagine Mad Men on CBS or NBC.)

Two shows currently in their first season underscore how good cable television can become but also how different. Terriers and Rubicon have almost nothing in common, either in subject matter, tone, or narrative focus. They’re not on the same network on even the same night on the schedule. But for very different reasons they’re both excellent viewing material, of course albeit in very different ways.

Terriers premiered on FX just this week, with an outsized pilot following a marketing blitz that lasted most of the summer. Turns out, all those ads portraying the show as another vehicle for star Donal Logue’s smartass slacker persona (including that annoying “pick a bale of cotton” line) misrepresented the show’s attitude and feel by a good distance. Instead, the show is more a downbeat, acerbic look at two losers in a losing town (the junky, weather-worn San Diego suburb of Ocean Beach) not goofing off so much as getting by. From the first scene the show had a polished look to its grittiness, with character relationships already comfortable and fluid.

The premise wears its homages to detective fiction masters Raymond Chandler and Lawrence Block on its grungy sleeves: Alcoholic ex-cop Hank Dolworth (Logue) works small private investigation and recovery jobs with the help of his friend Britt Pollack (Michael Raymond-James), a former house thief who’s since settled down into respectable life with his girlfriend Katie (Laura Allen.) No job is too small for the duo, and by avoiding the respectability of professional licenses they can duck on responsibility. (“We’ve found by not having them, we don’t have to worry about losing them,” Dolworth tells a client.) Dolworth’s own marriage is more or less over, with his ex-wife (Kimberly Quinn) set to remarry an architect she met online despite the spark of affection left between them.

The pilot, written by Ted Griffin (Ocean’s Eleven) and directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow), moves briskly in setting up the show’s atmosphere and dynamics while presenting an intriguing mystery whose parts are familiar if but no less entertaining. The daughter of one of Dolworth’s old drinking buddies is missing, and the duo’s tentative, half-self-conscious investigation quickly implicates a fat cat real estate developer. There’s also a dead body in a lifeguard shack that has the daughter’s fingerprints all over it, bringing the case to the attention of Dolworth’s ex-partner (Rockmond Dunbar) and two thugs watching the detectives and everyone else. Again, familiar stuff, but genre fans probably won’t mind the repetition, given teh show’s energy and charm.

Logue is immediately comfortable playing the sort of character he’s played for many years, but Dolworth’s circumstances of disappointment and frustration give that persona new life and dimension. Raymond-James is sometimes a little too clever in his charm, but his best scenes with Logue have the Butch and Sundance vibe the show’s creators probably envisioned. Moving forward into the remainder of the season (IMDB indicates a thirteen episode schedule), the challenge for cast and creators alike is to keep the larger struggle between the detectives and the developer fresh and intense while maintaining the bleakly comic perspective. FX’s Justified, with which Terriers shares plenty of attitude, spent a lot of its inaugural season trying to settle on a tone for its individual episode storylines, and hopefully Terriers will learn from its missteps.

Amost two-thirds through its first season, AMC’s Rubicon continues to amaze and disappoint, often in the same scene. It’s becoming one of those shows whose greatness is alway just around the corner but never seems to fully materialize into something you can point at when recommending to friends. A mystery thriller whose general mystery is only glimpsed more than hinted at, it’s handsomely acted and pristinely staged, with cinematography and art direction that worthy of publication in Architectural Digest. Ratings challenged virtually from its debut this August (following a sneak premiere last June), it’s struggled to build an audience thanks to its slow pace and a time slot that’s probably too early for its target audience to sit still.

The premise is simple enough: espionage analyst Will Travers (James Badge Dale) realizes his bosses at a quasi-governmental policy institute may be involved in a shadowy, international conspiracy to manipulate world events. When his mentor and ex-father in law (Peter Gerety) dies under suspicious circumstances and leaving a trail of complex clues for Travers to find, he assumes the dead man’s position in the institute to research it from the inside. Subplots involve his halting, so-far unspoken attraction to the institute’s office manager (Jessica Collins) and his team’s efforts to identify and recommend a course of response to a terrorist-linked arms deal halfway around the world.

The most common complaint about the show seems to derive from its slow pace,  with series creators and Dale alike making press statements exhorting viewers to have patience. But in many episodes the pace isn’t the issue so much as the intensity of the material presented. Events can transpire slowly – look at how Lost spun its wheels for years – so long as the level of drama remains compensatingly high; but Rubicon’s level stays flat too much and too often.The mood is almost always downbeat, melancholy, faintly desperate, and with no variations in pitch. The scenes involving Travers’ team need a war room-like intensity to them, but too often dissolve into talky bickering despite the talent of the actors involved (Lauren Hodges, Dallas Roberts, Christopher Evan Welch).

Another important problem lies with its structure. Though ambitious, the counter-running storyline involving the widow (Miranda Richardson) of one the conspiracy’s members attempting her own investigation is waterlogged and dull, dragging on with only incremental progress from week to week. Handsomely and capably acted by Richardson, the story nevertheless hasn’t matured in eight episodes, with individual storylines running together in a blur. It’s possible that once her story intersects with Travers’ own that all will be made clear, but there’s little foreshadowing indication as yet that such is the case.

A bright spot, and cause for hope, lies in the standout performance by Arliss Howard as Travers’ supervisor Kale Ingram. Smarmy and invincibly self-confident, Ingram is the kind of villain you love to hate, a smartass with the mind of a genius who’s infuriating because he knows he’s always right – which he is. As these things always seem to happen, he’s also got the best lines of dialogue: “I have the immune system of a hydra;” “You will act as if you’re not the stupidest son of a bitch in this building and…” A recent revelation that (SPOILER) he may be sympathetic to Travers’ mission after all has been one of the few, and best, surprises so far.

Terriers airs Wednesdays on FX; Rubicon airs Sundays on AMC.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Get Low

A cast of legends can’t get Oscar-winning director’s dark comedy off the ground.

As we said in our preview of the film, Robert Duvall has played the eccentric, misunderstood loner so many times now that his screen persona has become virtually synonymous with the role. Defining a character as a “Robert Duvall” type will in the years to come likely provide an efficient verbal shorthand for such parts, at the same time establishing a benchmark against which similar performances can be measured. In the same way no one played an angsty teen like James Dean or a swaggering badass like Lee Marvin, no one plays a wily old coot like Duvall.

Get Low, the feature debut for Oscar-winning short film Aaron Schneider, lets Duvall go through the motions of his trademark performance yet again, cementing a based-on-true story about a 1930′s-era Tennessee mountain man’s odd, grasping last chance at redemption. It also features Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and prolific character actor Bill Cobb in parts they too could play standing on one leg. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily: it’s always a pleasure to see all three do their work so well. The film sinks, however, beneath scattered, arrhythmic direction from Schneider and an undercooked script by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, becoming ultimately a journeyman effort that feels unfinished and unrealized, despite its veteran cast and wooly, lived-in production design.

This time Duvall plays Felix Bush, an irascible mountain man who’s kept to his own rustic cabin and property for 40 years, long enough to become a local bogeyman among the nearby townsfolk; children dare each other to throw pebbles at his windows, and his infrequent visits to town offer an occasion for gossip. But Bush is getting old, and fearing his impending demise he contacts the local minister (Gerald McRaney) for help in staging a “funeral party” in which guests will share the lore he’s acquired for himself over the long, lonely years. When the minster refuses, Bush turns to the town funeral parlor managed by Frank Quinn (Murray), a semi-hucksterish salesman fled into the hinterlands after an unhappy divorce in Chicago.

Desperate for business, Quinn agrees to Bush’s plan, even helping him plan publicity for the event. When Bush announces on a radio program that he’ll raffle off his 300 acres of virgin timber woods at the party, expectations and attendance begins to snowball. Amid the mounting expectations, Bush is reunited with old flame Mattie Darrow (Spacek), who’s recently returned to town after the death of her husband. There’s a spark of the old romance between the two, and the rumpled Bush is still able to charm her until secrets of a long-buried affair start to come to light. Meanwhile he’s also restarted communication with a distant preacher (Cobb) who’s aware of his shameful past but reluctant all the same to grant the anguished Bush the absolution he fairly demands.

They mystery of that affair, announced by the opening scene’s of a man on fire fleeing a burning house, drive the script towards its climax, in which Bush finally comes clean with the assembled townsfolk about the fateful night that drove him into seclusion decades before. Interestingly, and not completely successfully, the revelations are presented not as narrative flashback but as a long, rambling address by Bush to the crowd. Duvall is a master actor, of course, and he’s able to command the attention just telling a relatively simple story. But as presented the revelations feel anticlimactic, and too familiar to gather much shock value or depth of tragedy. For as well as Duvall carries his character’s secrets, the secrets themselves are strangely inert, and rote.

Schneider won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2004, for adopting the William Faulker short story “Two Soldiers.” Get Low, with its hinterlands setting and impoverished atmosphere ripe with secret passions and desperation, is by its nature and scope Faulknerian to the point of derivation. But the film stops short of dwelling on the psychological darkness that motivated so many Faulkner characters – good and evil alike – in favor of a redemptive ending that falls flat for that exact lack of character depth. Bush confesses and everything more or less falls into place, and everyone gets what they want.

There also sometimes doesn’t seem to be enough story to stretch the plot through to its 103 minute runtime. Scenes drag on, and plot elements are introduced but not fleshed out or followed through. The funeral home is burglarized, but the thief is never revealed; Bush’s confrontation with a local bully implies forthcoming retribution that doesn’t materialize. Of the principal characters, Quinn’s assistant Buddy has lots of screen time but his importance to the events remains opaque.

Of all the performances, it’s only a slight surprise to find Murray doing the best work, investing yet another sad sack with subtle gestures of compassion, anxiety, and fear. Quinn is a lifelong salesman, not proud of his work but not ashamed of it, either, and Murray seems at home in that sliver of acute self-awareness (Small wonder. After a decade of superb dramatic work he’s still largely known for comedies he made twenty-five years ago.) As we used to say about Jeff Bridges,  that Murray doesn’t have an Oscar yet is a more damning comment about the Oscars than it is about Bill Murray. Duvall, Cobb, and Spacek are handsome and comfortable in handsome and comfortable roles, and Black is workmanlike.

Ultimately, Get Low is a modest film. Modestly budgeted, with modest aims and modest accomplishments, it’s entertaining enough and not too much of a disappointment to feel as if you’ve wasted your time. Its cast and crew didn’t waste time making it, either, and Schneider could yet prove himself a director to watch. For the film to be better, with the exception of Murray everyone might have set their sights a little higher.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Cinema: Zardoz

Trying for a fresh perspective on one of the strangest science fiction movies ever made.

Beyond restraint. Beyond good taste. Beyond sense.

When subjects like “failed ambition,” “hubris,” and “wretched excess” come up among film enthusiasts and science fiction fans alike, inevitably John Boorman’s Zardoz enters their conversations. The head-shaking and long, confused sighs that inevitably follow are the film’s most enduring legacy. Ambitious to a catastrophic fault, packed with enough leering self-indulgence to capsize three smaller-scale films and seemingly crazed with adolescent sexuality, at its weird heart sits a nonetheless intriguing dystopian concept. If you can find it.

Yet for all that, and despite its many coats of oily decadence or possibly because of them, it’s a harder film to understand now than ever before. Almost four decades of social change have made its vision and sensibilities quaint but not charming, like a randy old man at an otherwise polite dinner party. Few science fiction films of the 1970s, with their precocious zeal for addressing the immediate social problems of their time, have aged well (though Silent Running and Soylent Green continue to grow perennial), and Zardoz’s pervasive subtext of sexual curiosity and exploration feels dated and shabby in this era of purity rings and government-backed abstinence education. It’s always strange to see a future that never happened, especially one that doesn’t come close; Zardoz isn’t even in the ball park, but the future it proposes (that kernel of an intriguing idea) is no less alluring.

Since I don’t believe words would do the film aesthetic justice, here’s the unbelievably NSFW trailer. See for yourself:

That in just its first few seconds the film bills itself as belonging in the company of (or even exceeding) Stanley Kurbrick’s visionary masterpiece or George Orwell’s classic of political allegory indicates how lofty the film’s self-image remains for the entirety of its runtime.

Its story is slightly easier to absorb: two centuries into the future, following a society-destroying cataclysm, the human race is divided into two sects. The lower class, known as “Brutals,” live in a state of near-barbarity within civilization’s wreckage. The upper class, the Eternals, live in idyllic, force-shielded protected valleys known as Vortexes. The Eternals, in particular the foppish scientist Arthur Frayn, dominate and police the Brutals with a militia known as Exterminators. However, the Eternals have grown sterile and myopic thanks to their endless lifespans spent under the supervision of a sentient computer called Tabernacle; some have given up living and exist in semi-catatonic states, becoming known as Apathetics. The Seniles, aged into decrepitude by Tabernacle in punishment for various crimes, live in a perpetual delirium resembling a grotesque dance ball.

Frayn surreptitiously manipulates the exterminator called Zed (Sean Connery, who in the early 70s was still pushing past his tenure as James Bond) into educating himself, planting clues within a library that prove the Eternals’ supremacy is only illusory. When the floating head that is Frayn’s transport for providing the Exterminators with guns and collecting their grain shipments next arrives, Zed stows away inside, shooting Frayn and sending him tumbling to Earth. Once in the vortex, he’s kept by May (Sarah Kestelman) and Friend (John Alderton), a pair of curious Eternals who want to study his “beastial” nature. Their colleague May (Charlotte Rampling) would rather see Zed destroyed outright, especially after Zed indicates an erotic attraction for her in front of the other Eternals.

The savior of mankind. No, really.

But Zed is smarter and wilier than the Eternals realize, and with Consuella and her followers’ assistance he helps his fellow Exterminators evade the force-shield protecting the Vortex, even while learning how to overcome the Tabernacle and the (feeble) resistance the Eternals offer. As the Exterminators  sack the Vortex’s riches and murder its inhabitants (who welcome death after their protracted lifespans), Zed and a repentant, love-struck May flee to the safety of  a cave, where they begin a normal human romantic relationship that culminates in the birth of a son. Some of the surviving Eternals flee the Vortex for a life among the Brutals, presuambly ending the centuries-old segregation. As the film ends Zed and May grow old in time-lapse progression, ageing and decaying in seconds.

Fashion zombies: Zed and the Eternals

Writer-producer-director Boorman runs into some of his biggest trouble imagining his future world and the distance between its social classes. Given the trope established by other caste system science fiction as found in The Shape of Things to Come or, less explicitly, Logan’s Run, the use of rural Ireland with its sweeping hillsides and rustic stone mansions as the residence of the chosen few seems an awkward choice; the super-science that they exhibit rests largely in their somewhat corny mental powers, a bauble ring that acts as communicator with Tabernacle, and a mirrored pyramid on the estate grounds. Far from an elite and elegant master race (as for example the Eloi of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine), the Eternals are a faintly grungy-looking group of British hippies clad in pastel Renaissance Fair costumes that routinely prove unflattering for the men and exploitative of the women.

Boorman had complete creative control of the production after the box office success of Deliverance  the year before. Perhaps as a result, the mis en scene here remains a baffling example of uncompleted thoughts, of not following ideas and theories through to their logical conclusions but instead placing the “purity” of the narrative impulse over the pragmatisms of restraint and revision – the benchmark “freedom” of the 1960s, and the inadvertent cause of so much bloated overindulgence in the 70s. Zardoz looks very much a film of its era, with nudity that must have seen daring at the time but now seems – thanks again to changing public tastes – merely gratuitous, and even a little sleazy. Nudity appears whenever possible, not whenever and only whenever necessary. Sometimes it helps to further a point, sometimes not – more often not – and the extra use cheapens the ideas of class distinction and personal identity presented elsewhere.

There are a lot of things going on in this picture. A lot of things.

As a director, Boorman allows himself plenty of latitude in building a linear narrative. Scenes jump and cut away, especially those depicting Zed’s early confused rambles through the Vortex. Others, such as those set inside the Tabernacle, have a psychedelic goofiness that’s meant to seem powerful and dramatic but – again thanks to poor aging – fail to make much of an impact. This improves somewhat in the final act, when the Exterminators’ impending attack gives the story a momentum that prevents the preceding soup of exposition and sex from repeating their distractions. Except its tone is all over the place, and the confusion of ideas – especially regarding the merits of dying versus living forever  - get lost in a set piece that’s part gunfight, part orgy, part chase sequence.

Upon co-writing the film’s novelization in 1974, Boorman stated in its introduction that perhaps the story would have been better presented not on the screen but in print. That’s an odd capitulation to make considering the entire film is so much the evident result of a singular – if confused and tumescent - artistic vision. Perhaps the filmmaker realized there was so much to explore in the premise that two hours of film wouldn’t give it ample breathing room. Or that the film had wasted time appealing to instincts that had nothing to do with its ideas. In the four decades since, as Western cinema has moved away from the auteur model and towards standardization of aesthetic and theme, the mis en scene of most science fiction has become numbingly uniform. Zardoz is its own creation, a fascinating oddity that’s now more relic than prophetic. Not to be mistaken for a good film, but rather a curiosity, it’s a bold and frightening journey into the past.

- Michael Kabel

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