Hollywood and race--again

Well, the world managed to survive the 88^th Annual Oscars.  Some white people won awards, and there was no looting in Watts, Harlem, or even Beverly Hills.  Congratulations.

I thought host Chris Rock, who I didn’t think much of after his first stint as host, did a masterful job of acknowledging the unfairness of the situation, while pointing out the hypocrisy of some of the attackers (yeah, Will Smith didn’t deserve what they paid him for Wild Wild West).  My favorite argument by the OscarSoWhite crowd was that a Black actor hasn’t won an Oscar in TWO YEARS!  My God, how long must this suffering go on?

But I want to talk about another aspect of the whole Hollywood and race issue raised by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight.  The show presented a piece on the many times Hollywood cast a White actor in a non-Caucasian role.  Of course, many of the examples given are ridiculous, egregious examples of ludicrously bad casting.  Mickey Rooney as a Japanese in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is possibly the low point in stereotypical characterization of a race.  Bad Hollywood!  Bad, bad boy!

But while I can see where in this day and age it is irresponsible to cast a White person as anything other than a Caucasian, I’m not sure all the examples given in the piece linked to are valid.  I can’t get worked up over Lawrence Olivier, then the world’s greatest actor, doing Othello in blackface.  It’s not like Shakespeare intended the role to be played by Black actors, any more than he intended that Juliet or Ophelia be played by women.  Othello wasn’t played by a Black actor in the Old Vic until David Harewood did it in the 1990’s.

I also can’t get upset by German Peter Lorre playing Japanese Mr. Moto, with the result being as good as it is.  Or Alec Guinness playing an Arab leader in Lawrence of Arabia, or Peter Sellers as an Indian, or Anthony Quinn playing a Mexican, a Greek, an Arab, or whatever.  These are examples of great actors showing range. They are giving a performance that fully evokes a character, not displaying a stereotype.

For many years in Hollywood ethnic actors simply weren’t available.  Were there any actors in 1930’s Hollywood of Japanese heritage to play Mr. Moto?  Or Chinese ancestry to play Charlie Chan?  When the BBC was producing all of Shakespeare’s work in the 1980’s, they hired Welshman Anthony Hopkins to play Othello as a light skinned Egyptian.  Their justification was that in the British Isles at the time there was not a Black actor with the reputation or gravitas to play the role.  How hard did they look?  I don’t know, but maybe they had a point.

This leads to a slippery slope.  There were some protests when John Cho was cast as Sulu in the Star Trek movie; Cho is Korean, Sulu is Japanese.  Luckily the original actor, George Takai, gave the casting his blessing.  I read that a project to film a Tony Hillerman novel with Graham Greene as Leaphorn and Lou Diamond Phillips as Chee (as a fan of the novel, let me say that is perfect casting) was scuttled because of protests that Greene and Phillips were Native Americans, but from the wrong tribes.

Also, how do you deal with characters that are half this but half that?  There was a controversy when Miss Saigon came to Broadway from London as the union insisted that the role of The Engineer, described as half Vietnamese and half White, be played by an Asian actor and not Jonathan Pryce.  Pryce argued that since the character was half White, why couldn’t a White actor play it?  Pryce was allowed to play the role and won a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical.

Let me point out one silly thing about the video I linked to above; they condemn Caucasian Linda Hunt for playing Asian Billy Kwan; they completely overlook the fact that FEMALE Linda Hunt was playing a MAN!  It’s okay for a woman to play a man, but not for a Caucasian to play an Asian?  I’m a little confused.

The practice of “Whitewashing” ethnic roles has been reduced in recent years.  One film that was largely undone by race issues was Cloud Atlas, which had actors or all races playing other races in different time periods.  While Halle Berry made a lovely Jewess, the Asian actress being passed off as a Southern belle was less convincing, and neither were the White actors playing Asians.  The Usual Suspects got away with casting Pete Postlethwaite as an Asian, but only because (Spoiler!) it was a figment of someone’s imagination.

Yes, if the TV series Kung Fu were revived today, I doubt if they would cast a 6-foot-tall Caucasian in the lead role (I always loved how characters always immediately identified Kwai Chang Caine as Chinese when he didn’t look the least bit Asian, with apologies to the make-up department).  But looking back in history, we should cut Hollywood some slack.  Cubby-holing actors into only playing the race they were born into is limiting.  As long as the actor was good and they approached the role with respect, let’s evaluate each performance on its own merits.

baseball made more dangerous by being made "safer"

In the movie Bull Durham (the best sports movie of all time, by the way), a coach tells his players, “Baseball is a simple game.  You throw the ball.  You hit the ball.  You catch the ball.”  It is a simple game, which is why it is so frustrating when the powers that be simply don’t understand it.

Baseball made a number of rule changes today.  Meetings on the mound now have to be no longer than 30 seconds.  I can’t argue with that; no one wants to go to a baseball game and attend a committee hearing.  Runners will now have to slide into second base.  That makes sense; no one wants to see Chase Utley run half way to right field to fling himself at the knees of the opposing second baseman. 

But the they had to do what I have been afraid of since the brought instant replay to baseball: they are eliminating “the neighborhood play.”

You know, that play that doesn’t bother you when your team’s second baseman makes the pivot on a double play two feet away from the bag, but makes you scream, “He was safe!!!” at the TV set when the other team does it.  From time immemorial, second basemen and shortstops have been allowed to miss second base by a foot or two when making the pivot on the double play.  I knew once we gained the false accuracy of instant replay, someone would call for an end to the neighborhood play.

They play may require an inaccurate call—the ump calling the runner out even though the fielder never touched the bag—but there was a policy reason behind it.  You COULD insist that the fielder touch the base, but that would make him a target for the runner coming in hard.  So you turn a blind eye to the base being missed, and spare all middle infielders the possibility of damaged knees or worse.

In fact, now that base runners are being forced to slide into the bag, it makes it that much worse.  Baseball is forcing runners to slide into the bag, and fielders to touch the bag when making the pivot.  That means both runners will be trying to reach second base at exactly the same time.

Ok, kiddies, what happens when two objects reach the same place at the same time?  Right.  Boom.

While I support the concept on instant replay in certain circumstances (home run calls, fair or foul calls), I think it is largely inappropriate for the game of baseball.  In football there are only 16 games, so every win or loss counts.  In baseball you play 162 games; you lose a call today, you get one in three months.  It all evens out.

You can have instant replay, but does that answer the question of when does a first baseman catch the ball, when it hits the back of his mitt, or when it enters his mitt?  Such precision is an anathema to a leisurely game that shouldn’t be measured in micrometers.

So, in making the game safer, baseball has put more middle infielders at risk.  Kids can play baseball, but it takes adults to really screw it up.

TV Review: The X-Files season 10

In a previous blog post I set out to determine the best science fiction television show ever produced, only to quickly discover that the answer was, obviously, The X-Files.  It ran longer that any SF show other than (inexplicably) Stargate SG-1, and during its run it scaled heights no other genre show had achieved: Emmies for Best Actress, Best Dramatic Screenplay, Best Guest Actor in addition to the usual awards given to SF shows for production design, and was a perennial Best Drama nominee and frequent nominee in the screenplay and directing categories. It affected the popular culture in ways that few shows have.

So it created a great amount of anticipation when it was announced that the FOX network was bringing the show back after a 15-year hiatus.  Now that all six episodes have been aired, a verdict can be reached: maybe they should have stayed retired.  The episodes weren’t all bad (although some were), but after so many years away creator Chris Carter and the writers he brought back seemed to have lost the ephemeral tone that made the show so distinctive.

Of course The X-Files was a collection of sub-genres with science fiction.  It could do straight sci-fi (Little Green Men), but also horror (Squeeze) and even comedy (The Unnatural, any of the Darin Morgan penned episodes, The Unusual Suspects).  As with Lost, every network tried to replicate what The X-Files did, but none succeeded because it was all based on a chemistry experiment that exceeded the goals of even Chris Carter.

Oddly, I thought the first episode, My Struggle, did the best job of replicating the completely batshit crazy zeitgeist of the original “mythology” episodes of the original.  Chris Carter’s greatest gift is his ability to have characters expound the most ludicrous exposition and make it seem moderately plausible, and that’s what was happening in the first episode with Mulder teaming up, not with Scully but with new BFF Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale) to uncover a new worldwide conspiracy to enslave the human race.  This conspiracy was formulated by the most powerful collection of men (they’re all men) ever imagined and have infinite resources at their disposal, yet Mulder discovers the truth in about an afternoon.  But David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson seemed happy to see each other, and McHale brought a fresh energy that the two leads were sadly lacking.

Founder’s Mutation was a throwback to another X-Files sub-genre, the gore-fest.  It would rate as a solid but unspectacular episode, with a plot line that never quite makes the audience fully involved.  Plus, they insisted on crowbarring in the past plot line about William, the child that Scully had (apparently by virgin conception), for no reason other than as a lantern for the finale.

The high point of the resurrection, predictably, was the Darin Morgan episode “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster.”  Morgan wrote arguably the four best episodes of the original series (Humbug rates an 8, War of the Coprophages a 9, and Clyde Bruckman’s Final repose and Jose Chung’s From Outer Space are both 10’s) and he brought back his unique perspective on Mulder and Scully, namely that they are both wasting their time on this nonsense.  This episode had some nice call backs to the series (Scully reminding Mulder that Clyde Bruckman told her she wouldn’t die; the grave stone for former producer Kim Manners) and some other meta references (the character dressed like Carl Kolchak from The Night Stalker).  It was a hoot, but not quite up to Morgan’s previous work.

Home Again was, thankfully, not a sequel to the show’s most notorious and divisive episode Home (count me among the haters), but an exercise in what the show did increasingly as it went along, create a menace that was strange in some way but in no way that was logical or well thought out.

That brings us to Babylon, easily one of the worst episodes of all time (Home still holds the record).  The show starts off with a somber depiction of Muslim suicide bombers blowing up an art gallery in Texas, the gives us a pair of Mulder/Scully doppelgangers for no reason, and ends with Mulder hallucinating line dancing with Skinner and The Lone Gunmen (seen all too briefly).  The X-Files was great at slipping humor into dramatic situations, but the tonal shift here was jarring and even offensive.

Season 10 concluded with a sequel to the first episode, My Struggle 2.  It has one obvious, glaring flaw: Mulder and Scully have virtually no scenes together.  They were often separated in the show (Carter once commented that he couldn’t imagine doing the series without the invention of cell phones) but still for a series based largely on the chemistry of the two leads, this is a problem.  Furthermore, the doppelgangers from Babylon show up again, as if they are waiting for their spin-off despite the fact that they have one one-thousandths of Mulder and Scully’s chemistry.  The episode is stuffed with Carter’s worst exposition (“It’s like a virus inside a virus!” What does that even mean?) and ends . . . well, it really doesn’t.

FOX has indicated that it is pleased with the ratings enough to produce more episodes if Duchovney and Anderson are available.  Last time I checked Californiacaton had been cancelled and Anderson was doing The Return of Johnny English, so I think that’s a safe bet.  If they do produce more episodes, I hope that this six-episode excursion was a warm-up, and that Chris Carter can produce some episodes reminiscent of the old X-Files the next time around.  Despite what the caption in the opening credits said, this may not be the end.

Movie Review: Hail, Caesar!

The Coen brothers have, alas, reached Woody Allen stature in the film industry.  By that I mean a) they can get any actor they want for any role, no matter how small; b) since they get great actors at a discount, their films don’t cost much meaning it is easier for them to get their films financed; and c) because of a) and b) they can get films produced on an assembly line basis, even if their idea isn’t terribly inspired.

Hail, Caesar comes off of their last film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which I felt was their most disappointing movie.  My favorite one-line review for that film was by someone who said, “I kept waiting for something to happen; it never did.”  Hail Caesar is more enjoyable than Davis, but that’s not a high mountain to climb.  My reaction to Hail Caesar is that I much preferred the trailers to the actual movie.

Caesar is about a 1950’s studio “fixer” named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) who works for Capitol Pictures (the same outfit in the much better Barton Fink), where he takes care of starlets who find themselves pregnant, locations that are shut down by rain, and missing movie stars.  That last is the case of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who is drugged on the set of his latest blockbuster and kidnapped by a group of communist writers. 

The setting of a studio in the 1950’s allows the Coens to poke fun at several film genres, notably Esther Williams musicals and highbrow dramas (where dialog includes words like valise, foyer, and divan).  There is a knocked-up bathing beauty Deanna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) who needs a husband pronto, and a cowboy star named Hobie Doyle (little-known Alden Ehrenreich, who steals the picture) whom the studio brass want to put in a drawing room drama with dialog that includes lines such as “Would that it t’were so simple.”

Mannix has to raise a $100,000 ransom, find a husband for Moran, and tap dance around twin gossip columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton) who smell something fishy going on.  This never reaches the critical mass necessary for an out-and-out farce.  I was wishing the Coens had run the screenplay through a word processor a few more times to sort out what sub-plots work and which don’t.  A sub-plot about a musical star (Channing Tatum) with uncertain allegiances falls flat (despite Tatum’s wonderful performance in an oddly homo-erotic song and dance number in a sailor musical called, “No Dames”).  On the other hand, Hobie’s studio-compelled date with starlet Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio) is given short shrift, given the chemistry that develops between both the characters in the movie and the actors making the movie.

The resolution of all these various plots feels perfunctory and lacking the brilliance of how the Coens fit previous jigsaw puzzles together.  It’s almost as if they had the all-star cast lined up (I haven’t mentioned glorified cameos by multiple Oscar nominees Jonah Hill and Ralph Finnes) and had to start filming before they finished the script.  With such a cast the acting is of course superb, but no character is given enough time to build a realistic character except for Brolin and Ehrenreich.

It is too much to expect Joel and Ethan Coen to produce a masterpiece like Blood Simple, Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou, and No Country for Old Men on a regular basis, but given the resources available to them, they should be able to do better than Burn After Reading, Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail Caesar.  Less splashy films like A Serious Man and The Man Who Wasn’t There would be a step up from working with stars like Clooney and Johansson in not-very-well defined roles.

The Coen Brothers will always be two of my favorite filmmakers, so maybe I hold them to a higher standard.  It’s been three years since their last film, and after that long one wishes for more of a meal than a morsel such as Hail Caesar.  Their average output is way above that of Woody Allen, who has become mired in mediocrity, but their output since winning the Best Picture Oscar has been ( to my mind) three clunkers (Caesar, Davis, and Reading), an interesting small film (A Serious Man) and remake of a mediocre original film (True Grit).  The TV adaptation of Fargo has been the best burnishing of their reputation in the past few years, and they didn’t have that much to do with it. 

Hail Caesar isn’t bad, but the Coens should be able to do better.

Where's the joy, Cam?

In the two weeks leading up to Super Bowl 50 (or Super Bowl L, if you insist on roman numerals) the number one topic of debate was Cam Newton.  The problem, in some people’s eyes, was that he played with joy.  He beamed smiles during football games.  He smiled in press conferences.  He danced when he scored touchdowns, and gave little kids footballs.  Some people thought it was impolite for quarterbacks to be so happy, and other people thought these people were racist. 

Now that the Super Bowl is over, I have one question.  Where’s the joy, Cam?

For a player who had spent most of the season smiling and dancing and pretending to be a disrobing Clark Kent, Cam Newton was somber during most of the Super Bowl.  If he wasn’t ebullient during the game, he was downright surly in the mandatory post-game press conference, where he stormed off after only three minutes. 

Why the change in attitude?  What possibly could have caused this dramatic shift in personality?  I’m just guessing here, and I’m not sure, but I would guess that the number one reason for the dramatic personality alteration was that, unlike in 17 games during the season and post-season, the Panthers fell behind quickly and ultimately lost the game.

It’s not so easy to play with joy when you’re being sacked seven times, overthrowing receivers ten times, being forced to fumble near your own end zone twice, and generally being harassed for sixty minutes by the league’s best defense.  My biggest laugh of the game was when crack announcer Phil Simms said, “The Panthers have faced some good defenses this season . . .”  They hadn’t.  They had faced the second easiest collection of defenses any team had faced since the merger.  The Panthers didn’t beat a single team with a winning record during the regular season.  In sum, they were a good team that beat up a bunch of mediocre teams and thought they were invincible.

Do I mean this to be an indictment of Cam Newton?  No.  He’s just a young man who needs to gain experience and eventually even out his emotions.  A few lower highs and some not as low lows.  Wearing his heart on his sleeve isn’t a terrible thing, but it is not productive.  It doesn’t help your teammates when you react so emotionally when things don’t go your way.  You have to realize that just because you go 15-1 doesn’t mean you deserved to go 15-1.  Luck is always involved in any sporting success, and accepting all the credit for success while pouting during adversity just makes you look like a spoiled child.  Hopefully he will learn something called humility.

It's an equation: the more arrogant you are in victory, the more humble you have to be when you lose.  You can’t claim to be invincible and then sulk when you lose.

This reminds me of when some athletes, notable LeBron James and Peyton Manning (!) who have refused to shake hands after a loss, claiming “I’m just too competitive to shake hands.”  That’s just poor sportsmanship, yet athletes try to make it into a positive character trait.  Newton did shake hands with Manning after the Super Bowl, so give him credit for having more class than Peyton had after Super Bowl XLIV when he lost to the Saints and wouldn’t shake Drew Brees’ hand.  Of course no one who loses WANTS to shake their opponents hand; character isn’t built by doing what’s easy.

As an aside, what is Peyton’s legacy, assuming this was his last game?  He will go down as the greatest “regular season” quarterback ever.  That asterisk, “regular season,” has to be present, given his post-season record is one game over .500.  He’ll never be the GOAT, given Montana’s four rings and Brady’s four and counting.  I’m fairly confident the HGH allegations will go away, and even if there is some fire to go with the smoke Peyton is perfectly situated to pull the patented Mark McGuire, “I did it to heal, not to gain an advantage.”  In five years he will be a no-brainer first year HoF inductee.

Maybe he can celebrate by watching Tom Brady win Super Bowl LV against the Panthers, after which Cam Newton will congratulate them during his post-game conference.