The State Within

Some of the best things we've seen on DVDs we've borrowed from the Library have been TV series we never caught up on when they were first broadcast.  If they were broadcast here at all.

Over the last couple of days we've watched the six hour-long episodes of The State Within, in which Jason Isaacs plays the British Ambassador in Washington, a man of considerable integrity and honesty, and an unwillingness to play the warmongering game that the current Secretary for Defense is playing.

The series had innumerable twists and turns - some of which, in hindsight, seemed to be there for no reason more than to cast suspicion on a character - but it was well written, very well directed and presented, and had a solid cast of Brits and Yanks. And a big budget, too; early in the piece a passenger plane is blown up over a motorway, and this is only one of a number of large set-pieces.

The series was written and directed by Daniel Percival, and co-authored by Lizzie Mickery, a writer with a great deal of television experience behind her.  Percival began his career as a documentary maker, and his eye for the right detail shows throughout this series.  Michael Offer also shared the directing credits. There'd need to be a co-director: taking on the mammoth task of directing more than six hours of film would require the stamina and brain of a workaholic.  However the work was shared out (they claim three episodes each on imdb.com) there's no sense of this not being all of a piece.

Isaacs more regularly plays suave villains, some more evil than others (The Patriot, Harry Potter), but here he brings his talents to a role that requires him to be hero, substitute father, solid friend, lover and whatever else he has time for. He's on screen for a great deal of the time, and makes a considerable impact, and gives a solid centre to the series.  His offsider is played by Ben Daniels, who is required to keep us guessing throughout (even after it's been revealed which side he's playing on).  Daniels manages this difficult task well, especially as in a couple of instances there seems to be a bit of a puzzle in the scriptwriters' minds as to how far into the double-dealing game he's gone.  There are a host of other characters, many of whom stand out, but it's great to see Sharon Gless, Cagney from the 80s Cagney and Lacey series in a role that allows her some wider leeway for her talent.

The series, which was made in 2006, hasn't dated at all; warmongering with smaller nations, which plays a strong part in the plot, is as rampant as ever, as is the hyping-up of terrorism as an excuse. 

"The US"

I have a tendency to talk about 'the US' as though it was one united country in which everyone agreed with the policies that Washington and the Presidency promote.  Of course this isn't the case, and there are millions are very sensible Americans who don't go along with all the political and patriotic nonsense that's foisted upon them.  I have to be even nicer about Americans these days because I have a wonderful American daughter-in-law, and she has a lovely family, and lots of great friends. 

So when I talk about 'the US' please remember that I'm meaning, usually, those in power, and those who are seeming warmongers. Obama slides in and out of this group; for the most part he manages to be on the edge, but there are others who seem to wholeheartedly race towards any opportunity to go to war.  Regrettably they have the clout to bring their country to such situations very readily. 

These are the kind of hypocritical people I'm talking about when I say 'the US.'  And these are the people who can, without blushing, say to Syria, we're going to bomb you unless you destroy all those nasty chemical weapons.'  But as Gwynne Dyer points out in an article today, the US, (those whom I've been defining up above) cannot, if it wishes to keep its integrity, call Syria a harbourer of chemical weapons, as though no one else had any.  As Dyer notes, 'the US' (yup, that same crew again) 'agreed to destroy the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other lethal gases that it owned within 10 years. That's 30 times as much as Syria has, but 10 years should have been enough. It wasn't. In 2007, Washington [another way of saying, 'the US'] asked for five more years to get rid of all its poison gas, the maximum extension allowed under the Chemical Weapons Convention. [This is the same Convention that Syria has just been forced to sign.] It didn't meet that deadline either, so last year [yup, just last year, so 'the US' has a very short memory] it announced a new deadline: 2021.  Given its own record, the US will find it hard to use Syrian delays as an excuse for resurrecting its bombing threats.'

Could the hypocrisy be any plainer?  I'm learning Psalm 119 at the moment (and have been for several months, and will be at least until Christmas!) and one of the recent verses was: I hate those who are double-minded.  Does that ring any bells?  Is it surprising that 'the US' does itself no favours when it acts in such double-minded, double-standard fashion - as it has done continually over Guantanamo Bay (a situation where Obama has slid into the 'the US' camp as well) and the spying on private citizens?

There's a difficulty in being the World's Policeman, the Greatest Nation, a Modern Empire.  Unless you bring integrity into the picture, and throw double-mindedness out the window, you're going to defile yourself continually, and all your best efforts to do great and grand things will come to naught.  Increasingly 'the US' has failed to keep its integrity.  And as more and more of its 19th and 20th century history is exposed, we're seeing that this lack of integrity goes back a considerable way.  Historians  bring these failures to light, journalists too, and artists even more so. Let's pray for a swing towards a greater integrity in 'the US.'  Without it, this nation will eventually become yet another victim of its own success, just like Greece, Rome, Russia, and many others.

politico

I just came across a news website called Politico.com. Fascinating stuff if you're into US politics in a big way - and by 'big way' I mean a really, really big way.   Every jot and tittle is covered until your brain is soaked in the stuff.  It's like being in New Zealand during the Rugby World Cup; supposedly nothing else goes on in people's minds except the awful game (and of course, I mean 'awful' in the old sense: awe-ful - don't I?)  Talking of which, though I hadn't intended to, the USA beat Russia yesterday; bit ironic, huh?

Anyway, back to Politico.com.  It's the online version of a real newspaper which has a relatively small circulation of 32,000, according to Wikipedia.   However, that's bolstered more than a little by the 6.7 million (unique) visitors the online version gets each month.   It kind of doesn't matter that the paper version is so small, when you add those two together.  

Politico focuses on the backstories, rather than the big headlines - according to its mission statement - and they aim to make their stories just as interesting as talking with the reporter over a sandwich or a beer.   Amongst of heap of stories floating around their site, I found this line: post-Sept. 11 veterans suffer a 23 percent unemployment rate. “After a decade of war, it’s time to focus on nation-building here at home. And our veterans, especially our 9/11 generation veterans, have the skills and the dedication to help lead ... 

There's a great deal about veterans on the site; it's plainly a big issue in the US, but not one that has hit our newspapers here with any great impact.  Our involvement has been so minimal, comparatively speaking, in the so-called war on terror, that we can practically count our lost soldiers on one (maybe two) hands.  Not so in the States, where thousands of men and women have died fighting a war that, IMHO, should never have been.  But it was, and now the US is facing the consequences of that.  There are sites where you can find information on a Military VA Loan for instance (I'm assuming VA stands for something like Veterans' Association, but I could be wrong). and the need to get veterans back on their feet is obviously very high on everyone's priority list, including Obama's.   Veterans can get home loans with no down payment, for instance, and the maximum loan you can go for is a whopping (by NZ standards) $US719,000.   That's some loan, but hopefully the Vets are getting enough in payments to cover that sort of mortgage.  

From where I sit (and I'm not likely to be alone in not understanding the full ins and outs of the current American monetary crises) it's hard to appreciate everything that's going on in the US economy.  (It's always been hard, mind you, not helped by the overly involved system that's evolved over there.)   For me it becomes a big clutter - even seven seasons of West Wing didn't help greatly.  I guess the way to understand it better would be to focus on something like the Vets and their situation.  I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to focus like that, but at least, when you're faced with a major issue, breaking it down in some way helps!

Charlie Wilson's War

Began to watch Tropic Thunder last night but gave up fairly quickly. Apart from being schoolboy gross and full of foul language, it just wasn’t engaging – at least for us. Fortunately I’d got it out as my introductory ‘free’ New Release from Video Ezy after finding that the Civic Video had finally closed. Not surprising; it’s looked very unwell for some time.
I’d bought a couple of other DVDs, as it happened, one of which was Charlie Wilson’s War, which turned out to be a trifle odd also, but nowhere near as odd as its predecessor. For one thing, it may have been that Tom Hanks was playing a loose-living middle-aged Congressman with a penchant for whisky. I’ve often found that certain stars just don’t come across well when they play too far away from their usual screen persona. Most of them have screen personas that are broad enough to encompass a fair range, but when they step out of that and play the opposite type of character for instance, it generally doesn’t work – in my mind.
Denzil Washington is a prime example. He’s made a few films where he’s played against type, and, because in the audience’s mind he’s a man with integrity and heart and warmth and compassion, we just don’t believe him when he tries to play someone who’s really bad.
Can you imagine Danny de Vito playing any sort of hero or heroic character? Unlikely to succeed, and wisely he’s stuck to his conniving, grubby-minded characters. Gene Hackman, even when playing the hero, will be fairly flawed, but he seems to have found his niche in playing characters that are untrustworthy, venal, and ruthless. Jack Nicholson has managed to bring off a few characters that are sympathetic, but it takes some doing. He has to bring the audience around to ‘his way of thinking’ as it were. (About Schmidtt is an example.)
So to return to Tom Hanks. Tom will not easily play an out and out villain. Offhand, I can’t remember him doing so. He’s been fairly rough-edged a few times, but his trademark ‘innocence’ is what he does really well. Charlie Wilson isn’t innocent. He has integrity, but it’s very mixed, and the opening scene in the movie, with him in a spa pool with several other naked people, seems uncomfortable for Hanks.
However, once we get used to Hanks in this role, the film is well worth watching. Julia Roberts makes a brief appearance early in the piece and then vanishes for a good deal of the movie, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who knows his place in movies as a wild man character, whether he’s playing good or bad) takes up the rest of the slack.
If the film wasn’t based on a true story we’d be unlikely to believe it, but since it apparently is, we have to assume that the scriptwriters haven’t played too fast and loose with the truth.
I said the movie was worth watching, nevertheless, it doesn’t seem well constructed for all that. There are several wonderful individual scenes (particularly Hoffman’s first appearance, and also his first encounter with Hanks), and the piece is uniformly well-acted, and directed, but there isn’t much suspense. It’s almost a forgone conclusion that Charlie Wilson will get his way and ‘save’ Afghanistan from the Russians. Along with Hoffman he’s a renegade who happens to be invisible enough in Congress not to cause huge anti-waves when he sets about supplying arms to the beleaguered country. And while the characters are well-drawn up to a point, I don’t know that I entirely believe in them. There were plenty of flamboyant characters in West Wing, for example, but they worked better than Charlie Wilson does, and both Hoffman and Roberts seem to be playing people who do their own thing and get away with it without a snub from anyone. Interestingly enough, Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. It has plenty of his trademarks: snappy dialogue, smart one-liners that fit the scene, good scene construction. It’s just the overall effect that doesn’t quite hold. Maybe Sorkin needed a sub-plot to offset the main story, as he so often did in the TV series. Here he’s denied that.

Antwone Fisher

We’ve had a DVD on the shelf for some time which my wife has seen, but I’d never got around to. Antwone Fisher, written by Antwone Fisher and directed by Denzel Washington.
It’s a small scale movie with no ‘action’ except a bit of fisticuffs early in the piece, but it’s typical of the best stuff that Washington puts his hand to: warm and full of integrity. Derek Luke plays the title role with ease and performs well in his many scenes with Washington.
It’s about a young man in the Navy with an anger problem; Washington is his psychiatrist, and through the course of their conversations we hear of the abuse the young man has suffered, and the way in which he’s been abandoned by his mother. After some time he decides to go looking for his family, and even though his mother remains distant and unable to come to terms with this stranger who’s her first-born, his father’s family welcomes him with open arms. There’s a wonderful scene after he’s gone off with his uncle to meet his mother for the first time in twenty or more years. When they return to the uncle’s house, instead of there only being his aunt and the other uncle there, the whole family has gathered to welcome him, from the youngest to the oldest. The matriarch greets him personally, holding his hands in hers with great tenderness. And they’ve put together a feast for him as well. It’s a great moment, and echoes the dream that opens the movie, when the child Antwone walks into a great barn full of not only his living relatives but his ancestors.

The Write Advertising

Ever thought about what you might put on a pen if you had the chance to do it for free? You know the sort of thing I mean: advertising pens, the kind that get given away by firms in the hope that you’ll remember them every time you do some writing. Remember them instead of the competition, who’s also given you a free pen.
But if you were given a 1000 pens that you could your own individual message on, what might you say? Jesus Loves Me? Mike Crowl Blogs Way Too Much? Everyone Deserves a Sabbatical?
I’m sure you can come up with some other ideas – let me know…it’s some time since anyone commented on anything in here! (boo hoo)
Looking through my HitTail results, it’s possible you could use one of the following enigmatic phrases: How Tall is Denzil Washington? Branson, Music Capital of the World. I’m an In-Law. The Endless Itching of Athletes’ Foot.
Just while I’m on the subject of HitTail search results, here’s one that’s really off-the-wall, and a little scary: All sort of home kitchen crowl insect.
When will people learn that Crowl isn’t the spelling of Crawl?

Actors and stars

I wrote about Adam Sandler yesterday and the way his screen persona doesn't seem a lot different from his real life persona. Persona might be the issue: having played a lot of crude-mouthed characters, perhaps that's the 'image' he now portrays in real life. It's hard to know. Screen actors, more so than stage actors perhaps, tend to mould their parts to themselves, and get parts that are moulded to their natural person. I find Danny de Vito, for instance, always seems to play loud-mouthed, and often foul-mouthed, characters. Different, but similar, to Sandler's.

Denzil Washington, on the other hand, is more in the vein of the gentlemanly person, and rarely plays a villain, especially the sort of villain who has sadistic or violent streaks. Whether these are just outside his natural acting limits, or whether he prefers not to play them, it's hard to know. He has played a few unpleasant characters, but something doesn't quite work, it seems to me, when he does. This is not to say he can't be aggressive or strong, or domineering when required. But in general it's his humanity and warmth that we go to see him for.

Maybe because we seem so close to screen actors we find it hard to distinguish between them and the kinds of roles they play. The camera doesn't let an actor away with a lot; it readily picks up false notes in a screen performance, especially that of a major star. (Character actors and supporting players are a different kettle of fish.) You can sense when a star isn't comfortable in a role. The most recent example I've seen of this was Michael Caine In Educating Rita. Caine playing a professor, even an alcoholic, washed-out professor, just didn't seem to work; and you sensed the actor being out of sympathy with the character in a number of scenes.

Johnny Depp, though he produces great characters, still brings a sensitivity and vulnerability to all his roles. This meant, when he played the writer in secret Window, he could engage our sympathy throughout the movie, and give us a nasty shock at the end when he turned out to be the murderer.

Of course, producers play to their stars' strengths. That's only natural. And I guess if a scriptwriter turns up with a story that requires a crude character in crude situations, then they'll ring Sandler's agent, or de Vito's. There's no way Washington or Depp would fit the bill. And equally, you can't see Sandler in one of the 'commanding presence' roles that Denzil Washington – or Harrison Ford – plays.

I suppose actors get cast to what they do best. Whether that's the best approach is another matter, since it never stretches the actor. Whether stars can be stretched may be another issue as well.