I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death

You can find this media blow in a numbered Zurich account.

The Final Cut: the third installment of the House of Cards trilogy and an excellent farewell to the series. You never really watch the show for amazing sophistication, so much as to marvel at the utter depravity of everyone involved. Ian Richardson as a gloating, Shakespearean villain trumps most actors’ attempts at being subtle. A couple observations:

• Not one, but two Indiana Jones villains! If M. Witty can ID them without resorting to IMDb I’ll reward him in the (costless) manner of his choosing. Or anyone else, but I think he’s my only reader who’s seen all three.

• Did somebody send a memo to the writers and say, “Nice work, but Season 3 definitely needs more tits and gunplay. Like, a lot”? Because I don’t see how else this happened. And you know those slicksters at WGBH just can’t get enough tits and gunplay.

Illmatic: This one, I think, will end up overtaking me like The Wire. At first I couldn’t see anything special about The Wire, until I realized that each show was technically perfect and exceptionally real. Similarly, I don’t know yet if Illmatic merits five mics, but I Can’t. Stop. Listening.

The Ministry of Fear: The last of Graham Greene’s three “entertainments” that I bought a few months back. I liked it just as much as I liked the others so I have nothing more to add except: buy these books and read them! And: Greene writes an awful lot in this novel about “rumpled bachelors” living in “furnished flats,” which made me feel a bit self-conscious at first. Then I decided to own up to the title. I am a rumpled bachelor! And yes, I do live in a furnished flat! What of it?

The Searchers: Being a stranger to the distant year of 1956, I can’t tell how much of John Wayne’s virulent hatred of the Comanche Indians stems from his character’s racism, and how much from the movie’s racism. Yes, the movie establishes that Ethan Edwards, unrepentant Confederate veteran and wanted coach robber, might have some internal issues. Consider his tendency to shoot out the eyes of dead Indians - not because he thinks it’ll prevent them from navigating the spirit world, but because he knows they think it will. At the same time, it’s John Wayne. He’s the big-shouldered hero. No one can make Wayne so despicable that an audience of men won’t want to emulate him, except perhaps Howard Hughes.

Interpreting the movie with some charity - the Comanche, though not savage subhumans, certainly did raid and rob lone settlers, and any film set in the West between 1830 and 1910 needs some villains - I find The Searchers pretty exceptional. Any student of film or aspiring director needs to memorize John Ford’s cinematography in this project, for one thing. The door silhouette onto Monument Valley? Yeah, that’s Ford right there. And the movie’s not just about the epic quest of two men to recover a kidnapped girl - it’s about, to quote Ebert, how it’s about it. Don’t know if I’d call it the best Western of all time, but it’ll do until the ruckus come along.

Finally, as several sources have noted, author Thomas Disch committed suicide this past 4th of July. I reread his savage satire Camp Concentration this week (funny how novels set in prison camps seem to speak to the modern audience!) and loved it. Dissidents and prisoners in an alternate future get dosed with a derivative of the syphilis spirochete, which dramatically expands their intelligence at the cost of killing them in nine months. Between the mad genius of the infected prisoners and the bland, Kafkaesque bureaucracy of their captors, the story weaves a poetic nightmare of a mind, and a society, slipping into oblivion.

and it feels like love, got the radio on and that’s all that we need

A memorial media blow:

First off, I’m saddened to hear of Sydney Pollack passing. I only knew two of his films well enough to comment on them - The Firm and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? - but those two showed enough of his style to merit some acclaim.

Bridge of Birds: A grown-up fairy tale of the first caliber. The broad-backed village farmhand Number Ten Ox and an ancient scholar, Li Kao, set out on a quest to discover what plague afflicts the children of Ox’s village. In doing so, they discover swordfighting ghosts, limitless treasures, impervious tyrants, hermit sages, invisible monsters, lost cities and a dozen other wonders of Chinese folklore. Exciting, sweet and ironic all at the same time. Recommended without qualification.

The Defection of A.J. Lewinter: Back cover copy describes Lewinter as “the American LeCarre,” which I take as a deviously subtle insult toward America. The story of a missile tech’s defection to the Soviet Union may be set in the 1970s, but it reads like it’s from the 1870s. I had the hardest time placing the dialogue until I realized that it read like a modern translation of Dumas. The plot twists seem almost juvenile. For instance, the CIA agents who interview the defector’s friends and family in the States find out that someone has already been asking questions about him. It doesn’t occur to anyone except Our Brilliant Protagonist that maybe, just maybe, the other people asking questions are Russian agents. In a LeCarre novel, you’d take that for granted.

About halfway through, I stopped reading it as a straight spy thriller and started reading it as a sort of vulgar satire - like The President’s Analyst or The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - and had much more fun with it. You have bumbling spies on both sides of the Atlantic, making dire pronouncements based on threadbare speculation. This made the novel much more satisfying for me, especially at its conclusion.

The Confidential Agent: What a contrast, to turn from Littell to Greene. While Greene infuses his spy thrillers with a healthy spritz of melodrama, it still comes with a dry British wit and the dark heart of a world at war. If Raymond Chandler’s protagonists worked for OSS instead of a one-man detective firm, he would write these sort of novels. A bit fantastic, but that’s usually to its benefit.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: A little slapdash. Spielberg could have tightened the screws a little more: the pacing needed work, the dialogue felt rough and I had little investment in the new characters. But I wouldn’t demand a refund.

The first three movies had the virtue of solidly incorporating the theme into the action setpieces. In Raiders, Indy must choose between satiating his own curiosity about the Ark and blowing it up to keep the Nazis from using it. In Temple of Doom, Indy has to choose between “fortune and glory” and doing the right thing - freeing the kids, restoring the shiva stones, etc. And the tension between theme and action works at its best in Last Crusade, when Indy has to find the Grail in order to save the father he’d long ago written off. Compare those to Crystal Skull where, in the last 20 minutes, our heroes simply walk until they run out of space.

I did not have as hard a time with Shia LeBoeuf as I feared I might. I don’t know that he could play a tough guy, but he can definitely play a motorcycle punk greaser who thinks he’s a tough guy. Cate Blanchett frankly didn’t satisfy me as a villain: she doesn’t do anything typically villainous, like execute henchmen or torture civilians or conduct human sacrifices. And Harrison Ford can only recapture the trademark wry cynicism of Dr. Jones about fifty percent of the time; the rest of the time, he just looks tired.

The film discards about one third of its subplots and barely develops any of its characters. The third act plot twist barely counts as a twist - more of a Moebius strip half-twist, really. But the worst of the four Indiana Jones movies still ranks higher than the best of the Hellboy movies any day of the week, so I can’t complain.

(Also: is anyone disturbed by the remarkable similarities between Crystal Skull and this SomethingAwful parody page - the latter of which was published fifteen months ago, before anyone knew anything about this movie?)

even if we’re just dancing in the dark

Bundle up tight - ’tis a frosty media blow:

First, an anecdote: According to IMDB, which never steers me wrong, NBC producer Brandon Tartikoff lamented, in the early 80s, about the poor acting chops of the leading males in the channel’s primetime slots. He and his assistant came up with a (joke) concept called “The Man of Six Words.” Each episode would start with the guy getting out of bed with a different woman (”Thank you”). He’d then get an assignment from his boss (”Okay”), get the drop on some bad guys (”Freeze!”) and save someone’s life (”You’re welcome”).

“What about all the rest of the dialogue?” his assistant asked.

“I don’t know,” came the reply. “We’ll give him a talking car or something.”

Knight Rider: This one wasn’t bad - and I’ve seen more bad TV in the last year than I normally watch in three - but it just reinforced the mediocrity of prime time television in every aspect. When we’re introduced to our hero, Mike Traceur (French for “the tracer”), he’s tooling up a drag racer for some mid-level thugs in Southern California. They demand $90,000, which he doesn’t have. “What, are you gonna break my legs?” Traceur asks.

“Are you kidding?” the boss exposits. “You’re an ex-Army Ranger. No, that’s what he’s here for.” He snaps his fingers at his big flunky, who proceeds to get beat up by ex-Army Ranger Mike Traceur. The boss then pulls a gun out and points it at the head of Traceur’s plucky roommate/sidekick. So … why bother trying to engage Traceur in fisticuffs when you’ve got a gun, and intend to threaten his pal, anyway? (I know why: to spice up the pacing and to show our hero as a badass. But is there a real-world reason?)

A bunch of forgettable soap opera vets, Sidney Poitier’s daughter and Bruce “I’m Not Harry Anderson” Davison round out the cast. Greg Ellis (”Michael Amador” from S3 of 24) plays the head of a team of mercenaries (how do you know he’s evil? because he’s British). David Hasselhoff has a cameo as a half-filled duffel bag perched atop a suit stuffed with ham the original driver of KITT. Val Kilmer plays the voice of KITT, miraculously failing to impress me with what should be the easiest role in the show. You’re the sarcastic computer! Come on!

Breach: A remarkably accurate depiction of the Robert Hanssen takedown. Cooper’s portrayal of Hanssen is subtle but compelling. There’s a scene where Hanssen (a rigidly Catholic hardass) is being photographed for his service anniversary portrait. He loses his temper at being fussed over for twenty minutes by the homosexual photographer and stalks off. A lesser film would have made the photographer not just gay but fa-LA-ming, and had Hanssen not just walk off bitterly but throw a temper tantrum. The understated touch, however, pays off here.

The script impressed me with its intelligence. In addition to Cooper’s star turn, Laura Linney, Dennis Haysbert and Gary Cole also do some remarkable work, and Ryan Philippe doesn’t screw anything up too bad.

This Gun For Hire: One of Graham Greene’s early “entertainments.” A hitman assassinates a British minister in 1936, nearly kicking off another Great War. Betrayed by his employers, he scrambles for shelter one step ahead of the cops. Greene has a pretty remarkable ability to put us in the heads of all of the minor characters - their concerns about class and the petty mundanity of life, their fears, their history, etc. It’s not as rampantly Catholic as his later books (like The Power and the Glory) but still contains some philosophical divergences on the notion of sin and redemption. Good light reading.