Notes on a Scandal: Deliciously Vicious

The British have a special knack for making awfulness engaging. From Shakespeare’s Richard III to Mike Leigh’s Naked to Steve Coogan’s “I’m Alan Partridge,” there is a rich English tradition of making great art out of unapologetically malevolent protagonists. The latest entry into the genre is Notes on a Scandal, directed by Richard Eyre, written by Patrick Marber (Closer) and based on a novel by Zoe Heller.

Notes on a Scandal stars Judi Dench as Barbara Covett, a bitter veteran of decades of teaching history at a lower-class London school. Cate Blanchett plays Sheba, a new art teacher who Barbara instantly loathes for her “trendy politics” and “abhorrent jacket.” But Barbara, who lives alone, changes her tune when Sheba extends an offer of friendship. When Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a 15-year-old student, her first impulse is to report her to the headmaster, but she quickly has a better idea: she can use her knowledge of the dalliance to blackmail Sheba into being her best friend.

The King of Queens

The Queen did something I never thought possible: it made me care about Princess Diana.

Maybe it’s because I was too young to catch the royal wedding, or maybe it’s because my American sensibilities are not refined enough to see how occasionally smiling in public was so scandalous, but Princess Di struck me as little more than a bejewelled mannequin who was beloved mainly because she happened to marry an ugly man who didn’t love her back.

The interesting thing about The Queen is that it doesn’t engender sympathy for Diana by showing us who she was–in fact, she’s barely in the movie–but by demonstrating how cruel the royal family was to her, even in death. In this, The Queen is not so different from Cinderella or Snow White, movies about dull, innocuous princesses who we care about only because they’re treated so badly.

Best Sopranos Tangent Episode Ever

1) The Russian (Season 3)

After a nearly eight-month interruption, I am finally finishing off my list of the best Sopranos tangent episodes ever (I was waiting for the second half of Season 3 to appear on On Demand).

Before I begin, here’s a refresher on the rest of the top five:
2) The trip to Colby(Season 1)
3) Tony, Paulie and Christopher Go to Italy (Season 2)
4) Tony meets his father’s gooma, Tim Daly gets into gambling (Season 5)
5) The FBI wiretapping episode (Season 3)

In this episode, a routine collection turns into a disaster when Christopher and Paulie are sent to get $5,000 from an alcoholic Russian giant. They get the money but antagonize him and end up killing him–or so they think. Since the Russian is “like brother” to Slava, Tony’s Russian money launderer, Tony orders Paulie to make the Russian disappear. They take him down to south Jersey, to the Pine Barrens, during the dead of winter. When they open the trunk, the Russian is still alive, and he’s pissed. They walk him out to the woods so he can dig his own grave, but he escapes. They shoot him but are unable to find his body, and end up lost in the Pine Barrens. They spend the night in the woods, sleeping in an abandoned van and eating frozen ketchup and relish packs for sustenance.

The irony of calling this episode a tangent is that at the time, we all thought this was vital to the plot of Season 3. When Christopher and Paulie are finally saved by Tony and Bobby–and they find that Paulie’s car is gone–we all assumed that meant the Russian was out there and would have his revenge. Visions of interethnic mob warfare danced in our heads, alongside the notion that perhaps Paulie had made an unforgivable mistake. But three and a half seasons and six years later, there have been no repercussions.

Unread Letters

Did anyone else find it odd that the National Board of Review yesterday called Letters from Iwo Jima the best movie of 2006–when the first review I know of only appeared in Variety the day after the National Board of Review’s list came out? Rotten Tomatoes only has one review; Metacritic doesn’t have a single one.

My problem with the National Board of Review publishing their list before anyone–including critics–have seen the movies in question is that they create a frontrunner, which is a particular problem during awards season when critics and Oscar voters tend to follow a herd mentality. Perhaps more of concern is that the 150 members often have terrible judgment; in 2004, they chose Finding Neverland as the best movie and didn’t even recognize Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. I’m also bothered by the Board’s lack of transparency; unlike all the American film critic societies, they don’t publish their membership. That always opens the door for shenanigans.

I’m not suggesting that Letters from Iwo Jima is bad movie–indeed, the Variety review makes it sound terrific, a subversion of the World War II war film genre–just that the NBR is giving it an unfair advantage come award season.

Where’s the beef?

Richard Linklater has taken a curious approach to his adaptation of Fast Food Nation, the bestselling nonfiction book by Eric Schlosser that helped spark America’s early-’00s disillusionment with McDonalds’ and its brethren. He’s turned it into a fictional account of a dozen souls tied to the fast food industry.

I imagine he figured two things: one, that Morgan Spurlock had already made the definitive documentary on the industry, Super Size Me, and two, audiences would be more responsive to a star-filled drama than a Frederick Wiseman-style expose. But as good as Super Size Me was–and it was excellent–the perfect complement to its personalized look at the nutritional horrors of McDonalds would have been a globalized investigation of the infrastructure that produces a 576-calorie Big Mac with 12 grams of saturated fat for $3.10. A documentary would have made visual what was implicit in both Spurlock’s movie and Schlosser’s book. Instead, Linklater has made a disjointed, unconvincing, unengaging, occasionally dismally acted mess that fails even to shock until its final minutes.

My Own Favorite Critic

I was poking around the Internet and found this fantastic interview with Owen Gleiberman, one of the two lead critics for Entertainment Weekly. He’s a remarkably eloquent guy and he has some really interesting things to say about the narcissism of Pauline Kael, his hatred for Wes Anderson’s movies and his love for Carrie and Natural Born Killers. The interviewer clearly did his research, asking about Gleiberman’s experience as a juror at the Sundance Festival the year of Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ‘66 and a line from his review of Steal This Movie. I also didn’t know that Owen got his start at the Boston Phoenix, in my hometown. (His break was the movie critic equivalent of getting discovered at a bus stop in Hollywood: the movie critic for the Phoenix, Stephen Schiff, saw his college writing, liked it and hired him to come to Boston.)

I don’t know why, but reading this interview somehow gives me hope that I’ll get a paid job as a movie critic some day as well. A fella can dream, can’t he?

Ranking Scorsese

In honor of The Departed’s success, I’ve decided to rank Martin Scorsese’s movies from best to worst. This is by no means comprehensive; I limited myself to his full-length dramatic works (which regrettably excludes The Last Waltz), of which there are 20. I’ve seen 16 of them. The four I have not seen are: New York, New York; Boxcar Bertha; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; and Who’s That Knocking On My Door? Because any ranking of “best” is inherently subjective, I’ve looked at this exercise as more of a question of which movies I like best than a question of which movies are best-made.

Robert Altman Dies

Robert Altman died today.

He was one of those great directors who made so many movies, especially so many small, intimate movies, that he was hard to keep track of. I’ve only seen a handful of his flicks–Thieves Like Us, Nashville, The Player, one or two others–but his movies are always remarkable for how much he allows the actors to create their own characters. Unless he’s directing a movie version of a cartoon (Popeye) or a satire (The Player), no character is ever allowed to be simply a type or a caricature; they are all idiosyncratic, real, flawed people. At the same time, though, I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone that’s named a Robert Altman movie among their most cherished favorites. His approach is so subtle, so humanistic that he is paradoxically a hard filmmaker to fall in love with.

I Think I Smell Borat

Borat is an extremely funny movie, but don’t be misled–it’s a rather different breed of comic animal from Da Ali G Show.

Da Ali G Show gets its laughs from the painful tension between Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters and his unwitting subjects. It’s a contest between who’s going to break first: Cohen, who says increasingly offensive, ignorant things while staying in character, or his subjects, whose demeanor of politeness is stretched to its illogical limit. The winner, of course, is always Cohen, who never breaks character (or at least as far as we know from the televised footage).

But Borat the movie mixes that comedy verite with a more traditional brand of staged slapstick. In Da Ali G Show, the only person on film in on the joke is Cohen. In Borat, there are a whole number of scenes where the subjects are in on the set-up: the opening sequence in Kazakhstan, all the interactions Borat has with his Kazakh producer (who is played by an Armenian-American), the bear’s encounter with the kids, the date with the overweight hooker, the grand finale with Pamela Anderson. And there are a number of scenes of questionable veracity: the arrest at the brokers’ banquet, the stop at the “gypsy” flea market, the encounter with the frat boys in the RV. And even those scenes which were not staged often did not happen in the location that the movie says they did.

Some quick thoughts

As I try to clear my schedule over the next week or so to see Borat, a couple thoughts:

As you probably know, Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan won the weekend box office with $26.5 million. Many in the industry considered it a surprise because awareness levels of the movie were fairly low, and Fox even admitted that it was tracking behind Santa Clause III (further evidence that we are a nation of retards).

But the most amazing thing about Borat’s box office is that it came on 837 theaters–which makes it only the second movie since 1982 to win a weekend with fewer than 1,000 theaters. That translates to a $31,607 per-theater average. According to boxofficemojo.com, Borat had the third-best ever per-theater average for a wide release. Historically, it trails only Pirates of the Caribbean II and Spiderman in best per-theater average for a wide release. And those two movies ended up the sixth- and seventh-most successful movies, respectively, of all-time. It looks like Borat will not “be execute.”