Category: Articles

The BBC’s Desperate Romantics

Amy Manson and Aidan Turner from "Desperate Romantics" (2009).

By David Ross. In my comments from last year on the Keats biopic Bright Star I opined that “film has no idea how to approach lives that are largely interior, with driving purposes that are inconveniently invisible and inscrutable. In consequence, film tends to emphasize the gossipy and scandalous, dwelling on the externals of sexual deviancy, alcoholism, and nervous breakdown.” This certainly describes the BBC’s Desperate Romantics (2009), but such a zesty and funny travesty is hard to resist, especially if, like me, you tend to think the twentieth century was rather a mistake.

The six-hour miniseries tells the story of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt – the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” – as they scheme and bumble in pursuit of eternal art and sub-eternal flesh. Rounding out the dramatis personae are John Ruskin, the sexually neurotic titan of Victorian art criticism and incidentally one of the greatest prose stylists in the history of English; Effie Ruskin, the great man’s warm-blooded young wife, disconsolately intacta after five years in the marriage bed; the flame-haired milliner-cum-muse Lizzie Siddal, the “original supermodel”; and the milksoppy hanger-on Fred Walters, a fictional contrivance who narrates the whole business from a perspective of exasperation and vicarious titillation. Rossetti and Fred competitively love Siddal (what’s not to love!), while Ruskin is disgusted by his wife’s post-pubescent nether parts and schemes to fob her off on the virginal Millais. Meanwhile, the prostitute-model Annie Miller – a buxom, lusty lass – places the inconsistently evangelical Hunt in a series of difficult, shall we say, positions.

Rafe Spall and Jennie Jacques.

Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris make a late appearance as nerdy idolaters of Rossetti, the former vaguely epicene, the latter fat, manic, and socially incompetent. This ignores Morris’ polymath command, the hard will of the inveterate and consummate creator, but it serves a dramatic purpose, I suppose, providing Rossetti with a foil and the show with a cuckold-ready goof.

Unlike the BBC’s reverent and impeccable interpretation of Pride and Prejudice (see my comments here), Desperate Romantics is a cheese fondue of pros and cons. It takes liberties with the biographical record (Wikipedia totals up the damage); it has no interest whatsoever in the substance of the Pre-Raphaelites’ art or ideas; it depicts Rossetti – an artistic and poetic giant – as a charming but shiftless skirt chaser, which is at best a partial truth; it takes a particularly sunless view of Ruskin, depicting him as coldly repressed rather than as gloriously nuts; and its theme song, a thumping folk-rock jig, is the most annoying piece of TV music since the Seinfeld bass segue. On the other hand, the series is full of impish humor and salacious shenanigans, and the brotherhood’s banter abounds in dry British wit. Especially delicious are the episodes in which the Ruskins and Millais bumble toward what we’ll delicately call a physical outcome. We might ask: “How many Victorian geniuses does it take to screw in a -.”  Apparently it takes quite a few. Continue reading The BBC’s Desperate Romantics

LFM Review: Love Crimes of Kabul

By Joe Bendel. Witness Islamic Sharia Law in practice. It is impossible to consider it anything less than institutionalized misogyny after observing the prosecution of “moral crimes” in Afghanistan. With remarkable frankness, Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian takes viewers inside the Badam Bagh women’s prison, where half the inmates are incarcerated on dubious morals charges in Love Crimes of Kabul, one of the laudable selections of the 2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival that actually addresses human rights abuses.

All three of Kabul’s primary POV figures are bright and attractive young women. All three stand accused of the heinous crime of premarital sex, but only one of them actually engaged in what would be perfectly legal behavior in a rational society. Not to be spoilery, but care to guess which one gets the most lenient sentence? Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that justice has no place whatsoever in Islamic Law.

Easily the most shocking case is that of seventeen year old Sabereh, who simply had the misfortune to be caught eating a meal alone with a boy. Suspiciously, when a medical examination confirms her virginity, the prosecution switches gears, charging her with sodomy – the equivalent of going nuclear. Of course, Eshaghian’s cameras were banned from Sabereh’s trial, lest the railroading be exposed to sunlight, but the fix was obviously in.

At first, Kabul makes the audience’s blood boil, but as the full implications of the injustices perpetrated in Badam Bagh become clear, viewers’ stomachs will turn to ice. Eschewing talking heads and voiceovers, Eshaghian captures a visceral sense of life for the accused. She also records some brutally honest conversations as the women struggle with their Kafkaesque situations. Despite the relatively short running time, Eshaghian patiently lets scenes play out so viewers can appreciate their full import. Though her overall access is quite impressive, when her cameras are banned (as during Sabereh’s “trial”), the significance is similarly inescapable.

While Eshaghian’s unfiltered approach is undeniably bold and bracing, she leaves one rather obvious question largely unexplored. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of Kabul is the considerable presence of toddlers in Badam Bagh, who were either delivered while their mothers were serving their time or were essentially abandoned by their fathers. Strangely though, Kabul never tackles the issue of these true innocents growing up behind bars.

The injustices (ostensibly post-Taliban) faced by the women of Badam Bagh in general and young Sabereh in particular demand official American intervention. No doubt our current administration will get right on that, sometime after the U.S. Open. A shocking indictment, Kabul is a worthy companion film to The Green Wave, both of which are highly recommended at this HRWFF.  It screens today (6/22) at the Walter Reade Theater.  Part of HBO’s Documentary Films Summer Series, Kabul also airs on several of the network’s arms through July 27th.

Posted on June 22nd. 2011 at 1:13pm.

Megan Fox Joins Sacha Baron Cohen’s Saddam Satire The Dictator

By Jason Apuzzo. Hollywood Reporter broke the news yesterday that Megan Fox – and also John C. Reilly – will be making cameo appearances in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Saddam Hussein-based satire, The Dictator. I’ve made the daring editorial decision of featuring a picture of Ms. Fox above, rather than of Reilly.

We posted on The Dictator recently, I will reiterate here my excitement over what Cohen may have in store for us. His film is officially described as telling “the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed,” and is otherwise based on the romance novel Zabibah and The King, written by Saddam Hussein – yes, that Saddam Hussein. Dictators do stuff like this.

Cohen himself is said to play dual roles of a goat herder and a deposed dictator who gets lost in America. I assume that Cohen in his usual manner will find ways to satirize backwoods Americans as rubes and bigots … but the comic potential of him playing a Saddam-style dictator (not to mention a goat-herder) is off-the-charts, and this film is slowly achieving the status of ‘must-see’ in my book. I just hope he keeps it under an X rating.

Megan Fox – the mega-babe and former Transformers star, whose Facebook fan page is apparently boasting around 26 million followers these days (how is that even possible?) – will also be joining cast members Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley and Jason Mantzoukas already in the film. Ms. Fox probably needs stuff like this happening for her now, what with Transformers: Dark of the Moon soon to debut without her. The Dictator is set for release on May 11th, 2012.

Footnote: MTV is currently covering the Transformers premiere in Moscow.

Posted on June 22nd, 2011 at 12:55pm.

Libertas Update + Mini-Invasion Alert!: Reaction to Falling Skies, Super 8, Green Lantern

By Jason Apuzzo. Last week was extremely busy for me on non-Libertas fronts, and as a secondary matter I also happened to bust up one of my shoulders (no worries; it’s on the mend), making it a little difficult to write – so LFM was quiet for most of last week.

I wanted readers to know, however, that I was not completely AWOL while Earth was being invaded.

I’m referring here, of course to the alien invasions depicted in Green Lantern, Super 8 and the premiere of TNT’s Falling Skies – all of which I made sure to see. And although it would take a prohibitive amount of time and effort at this point to write full reviews of each project, I wanted to at least provide some brief reactions:

• The Steven Spielberg/Robert Rodat alien invasion series Falling Skies had a very big cable debut on TNT Sunday night, pulling in an estimated 5.9 million viewers. To put that figure in perspective, there’s not a single show on Fox News that comes even close to that sort of audience size.

The question is whether Falling Skies will keep that large audience – because although I generally liked what I saw of Falling Skies, and would’ve loved it if I was still back in high school (with the show’s Aliens-meets-Red Dawn vibe) … in 2011 I wasn’t deeply impressed with it. Indeed, I would say the show seemed inferior in many respects to ABC’s similarly-themed V series that just got cancelled after its second season.

Until the second half of Sunday’s Falling Skies premiere, I was generally finding the show dreary, humorless, and lacking in either pizazz, strong characters or imagination. Everything about the show was seeming like a re-hash of other, stronger projects – like Spielberg’s own War of the Worlds, or Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Noah Wyle was seeming wimpy, and I wasn’t enjoying Will Patton’s turn as the megalomaniacal Desert Storm vet.

Things picked up in the second half of the show, however, with the introduction of some colorful characters – specifically Colin Cunningham playing the post-apocalyptic renegade-outlaw-dude-with-stringy-hair John Pope, and Sarah Carter playing the bad-ass killer blonde Margaret. Finally the show started to click, gain an edge, and I was interested. Suddenly I was finding Noah Wyle engaging and sympathetic. Suddenly I noticed that Will Patton’s character, although unsympathetic and a caricature, was consistently being proven right in how he dealt with the alien menace. I was also liking the fact that the great Dale Dye was in the show. And suddenly I was digging the murky, close-quarters combat with the aliens, and the show’s implicit, Battle: Los Angeles-style endorsement of martial virtues.

I also think Spielberg & Co. are shrewd to not tip their hand early as to the aliens’ intentions. V occasionally seemed convoluted and over-plotted, while Falling Skies seems much simpler – though perhaps not as fun. In any case, I will continue to follow the series and see how it develops … Continue reading Libertas Update + Mini-Invasion Alert!: Reaction to Falling Skies, Super 8, Green Lantern

Brit Sci-Fi Invasion: LFM Reviews The BBC’s Outcasts

By Joe Bendel. Life on Earth has become untenable. It is not so much environmental conditions, per se, but man’s own inhumanity towards man that is destroying the planet. With drug cartels taking over Europe and Chinese militarism running unchecked, war is the only terrestrial constant. As a result, many have evacuated in giant space arks. Those lucky enough will find refuge on the planet Carpathia (named for the ship that stopped to rescue Titanic survivors). However, the colonists of Forthaven will find their new home is not exactly an Eden in Outcasts, a new eight-episode science fiction series that premiered on BBC America this past Saturday.

Though still a relatively young community, Forthaven already has a tragic history. During its early years, a mystery disease called C-23 nearly wiped out all of its children. The steps President Richard Tate took to deal with the disease will haunt the geneticist turned political leader in future episodes. With post-C-23 birthrates perilously low, the arrival of a new ship from Earth is understandably big news. Forthaven needs to replenish its future generations. Bringing down the transport safely is Tate’s highest priority, but a domestic incident will have macro implications for the colony.

Viewers quickly learn Carpathia’s dirty laundry. Tate had initiated and then canceled an ambitious genetic engineering program to create cloned humans, or “Advanced Cultivars” (AC’s). Presumed dead, those AC’s now live a nomadic existence outside Forthaven, which they most definitely hold a grudge against.

After a strong start, episodes three and four get somewhat bogged down with the dour ethical implications of the AC program. Fortunately, Outcasts rebounds thereafter (no sense crying over spliced genes), as the nefarious Julius Berger, a prominent survivor of the transport ship (and both a New Agey religious zealot as well as a moral relativist), plots a coup d’état against Tate. Series creator Ben Richards establishes a suitable environment for intrigue, with the PAS officers (the cops in charge of internal security) remaining loyal to Tate, while the XP’s (the military Expenditionaries) are inclined to side with Berger. As if Tate did not have enough to worry about, he also learns in dramatic fashion there is a reason the Carpathia’s indigenous hominid life forms died out eons ago. As they say in science fiction, they are not alone.

Richard Tate is a great sci-fi character and the key reason why Outsiders works so well. Initially he appears to be a commanding humanitarian in the Jean-Luc Picard vein. Yet Tate is a darker, more complicated figure. Profoundly touched by tragedy, he is still able to make hard decisions and sleep relatively well at night. Character actor Liam Cunningham has the perfect hard-nosed gravitas for the part, as well as the sonorous voice that plays so prominent a role in episode one.

From the BBC's "Outcasts."

In a bit of a misfire, Hermoine Norris plays PAS chief Stella Isen, Tate’s closest ally, with frosty reserve – much like her character Carol Jordan in Wire in the Blood. That worked much better playing off the manic squirreliness of Dr. Tony Hill than the steely resolve of Tate. Conversely, Amy Manson and Daniel Mays are rather engaging as Fleur Morgan and Cass Cromwell, respectively, our primary POV PAS agents, who harbor a Tracey & Hepburn attraction to each other – but are also burdened with secret pasts.

Though the special effects of Outcasts are eminently presentable, the series is more concerned with social speculation and character development. Sadly, it appears that the first eight episodes are all we are getting, at least for the time being. While the conclusion offers a measure of satisfaction, it provides little closure, leaving Forthaven poised on the brink of a multi-front war for survival. Indeed, one could easily envision the story continuing in a hard-driving action film. It is worth hoping for. Indeed, Outcasts is one of the better conceived and executed science fiction series featuring a genuinely compelling lead protagonist. It is recommended for all sf fans and Anglophiles, and it debuted this past Saturday on BBC America.

Posted on June 20th, 2011 at 3:03pm.

YouTube Jukebox: Meeting of the Spirits

By David Ross. In Greek mythology, the distinction between heroes and gods is rather thin; and so too in the world of the guitar. The film Meeting of the Spirits, which features Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1979, makes the point. Olympian is the appropriate adjective.

Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary – who’d love to do something like this – are in for a surprise: imagine a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed. Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so fast and economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely. During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason.

Let me adduce three songs of staggering technique and emotion: “Lotus Feet” (song of supreme spiritual beauty), “Meeting of the Spirits” (with uncanny solo by De Lucia), and “Meeting of the Spirits II” (with equally uncanny solo by McLaughlin). The latter clip is one of my YouTube favorites. I watch it repeatedly and obsessively as a kind of talisman against the slackness and mediocrity of daily life. Yes, there is some ‘fret buzz,’ but this is incidental. The Venus de Milo lacks arms. Who cares?

Meeting of the Spirits (DVD available here) was preamble to the McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration captured for posterity on the classic 1980 concert album Friday Night in San Francisco. This concert is equally or perhaps even more dazzling in terms of technique, but less soulful and deeply felt.

Posted on June 20th, 2011 at 2:20pm.