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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything March 03,
2003
First appeared in
print in The Rhinoceros
Times, Greensboro, NC.
Dark Blue, Biographies, and Movies I
Won't Review
Kurt Russell is almost exactly my age, which means that when he
was a teenage actor, he was playing characters a couple of years
younger than me. That was almost a guarantee that I wasn't
interested in his early work.
And for a long time, as he made that horrible transition from
child to adult roles, he didn't get many parts that persuaded me to
regard him as anything more than a likeable, fairly competent actor.
His movies tended to get stolen out from under him. He did a good
job in Stargate, for instance, but James Spader walked away
with the movie.
Well, that ain't gonna happen with Dark
Blue. This may be the best cop movie ever --
sort of an answer to Dirty Harry by way of Bad
Lieutenant -- and, indeed, Kurt Russell had to create a
character who sometimes had to be Clint Eastwood and other times
Harvey Keitel.
I have no idea whether the LAPD prior to the Rodney King riots
was this corrupt, but we know that as a culture it was
corrupt, racially bigoted, and arrogantly detached from the public
it was supposed to serve. Certainly this film captures
that.
But the real triumph of the movie is that not one character is a
cartoon. The people who hold high offices act like the kind of
people who might get such jobs (which is rarely the case in movies);
the relationships with wives and lovers look and feel like real
ones; and the process by which a young cop is deliberately corrupted
is unbearably believable.
Still, the young cop, played unforgettably by Scott Speedman,
cannot steal this one from Kurt Russell, because for once Russell
was cast in a part that let him show what he can do.
Watching him move from the cocky, macho cop to the cowering
lapdog of his corrupt "controller" is astonishing to see; his
anguish and helplessness as he realizes just how much he has paid
for being "one of the boys" are perfect. He doesn't show
what he's feeling; rather he tries to conceal it.
I don't know how much of the brilliance of this film comes from
the original James Ellroy story and how much from David Ayer's
screenplay, but the result feels truthful without ever giving us a
moment to breathe.
This is one of the great movies. Like Silverado and
Patton, it comes long after its genre seemed to have
exhausted itself, but manages to be a corrective, even a satire,
while still being a perfect example of the genre.
If you care about great performances, great writing, or just
seeing a truly excellent film, don't miss Dark Blue.
*
On the other hand, you can miss Jungle Book
2 if you want to. Sure, it's good-natured and
harmless, and way more entertaining than, say, Jimmy
Neutron, but in a world that already includes the original
Disney Jungle Book, it's hard to find a reason for this one
to exist at all.
And I found my mind wandering enough to wonder where in India
they would have found rivers of lava. In fact, the mix of animals --
not to mention the overwhelmingly African music -- suggests that the
people making this movie thought that all jungles are the same.
Here's a clue: India has as long and great a musical tradition as
Africa. So why does a musical set in India have not a whiff of
Indian influence?
Never mind. If you have a kid and have to go see it, you
don't need to bring a book and a flashlight.
*
Review It Yourself. Here's a list of currently
playing movies that I would happily stand in line for half an hour
not to see.
Perhaps I'm too judgmental, but I think movie marketing people
usually do a pretty good job of letting you know what
kind of movie they're selling. And as often as not,
the promo makes me decide, emphatically, that this is a movie I am
not going to see.
For instance, I'm not going to see The
Pianist. It looks like it's brilliantly acted
and may be well written. My problem is that ever since I read
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a child, films that
take place within the Nazi holocaust are so emotionally draining for
me that I pay too high a price for watching them.
I went to Schindler's List and wept, even though I knew
Spielberg's version was full of lies and distortions and cynical
audience manipulation (little red coat, indeed!)
I also went to Life Is Beautiful and laughed and cried
on cue.
But I'm done.
No more coming out of the theater red-eyed and emotionally spent.
So even though The Pianist is nominated for best picture
and best actor, I won't be there. Maybe I'll catch glimpses of it on
cable.
When it comes to Old School,
on the other hand, I'm not going to the movie because I spent years
switching away from Will Farrell whenever he showed up on
Saturday Night Live.
I didn't do it on purpose. I switched away whenever SNL
was gratingly unfunny -- it just happened to coincide one-for-one
with Farrell's appearances.
So I'm going to pay money to watch his brand of humor for an hour
and a half in a theater? Ha ha.
I'm not going to see The Life of David
Gale, either. I oppose the death penalty for
practical, not theoretical, reasons, but that doesn't mean I want to
sit through a couple of hours of a "thriller" that promises to be a
politically correct diatribe on executions.
Nor am I ever going to see
Frida. I know enough about the
artist to know that I am interested in neither her life nor her art.
Plus, I start with the bias that films about "geniuses" are usually
ghastly, dishonest, pretentious, and boring. The promos gave no hope
that Frida would be an exception.
Shanghai Knights may be
wonderful. But it is clearly designed for an audience consisting of
people who don't fall asleep when they watch martial arts. I am not
in that category.
Final Destination 2? If I want
to be scared, I don't go to a horror movie, I tune to CBS and watch
the Dan Rather mannequin recite the news.
So if you want trustworthy reviews of these movies,
you'll have to read some other review column.
*
Biographies. I do love the tv show
Biography on A&E.
These one-hour overviews of celebrity lives (and, now and then, the
lives of genuinely important people) do a pretty good job of
presenting the most interesting points; and the interviews often add
perceptive insights.
It's way better than most bio-pics. (A few have been brilliant
movies -- Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia -- but that
doesn't mean they're good biographies.)
Still, good as it is, Biography is not the same thing as
an actual biography.
Biography has serious research in it, just like a book.
It tries to tell you not only what people did and what was done to
them, but also why. Of course, the why is always
guesswork, but it can be informed speculation, and
Biography does a good job of that, too.
What it can't give you is enough detail for you to form your own
judgments. It can't include the peripheral stories. It can't digress
into the lives of friends and family members. It can't cite and
evaluate the sources in any detail.
That's why we still need the books.
But how do you judge a biography?
Let me talk a bit about three biographies I am now reading or
just finished. Peter Krass's biography of Andrew Carnegie, called,
simply, Carnegie, is well written -- while
it meets scholarly standards, it doesn't sound scholarly.
Instead, Krass does a good job of keeping us interested in Carnegie
even though we may not approve of the things that Carnegie does.
Carnegie has been demonized for many years as one of the "robber
barons" of the great age of capitalism before all those nasty rules
that hem in the "free market." (Enron and other companies have shown
us that we still have businessmen with the same morals -- it's just
that now when they get caught, they go to jail.)
But you can't help admiring him for his boldness and
determination, and for his occasional efforts to salvage something
like a personal life and admirable character.
So much detail is presented, however, that it's easy for readers
who don't love biography to become impatient. Get on with
it! (I do love biography. However, I wouldn't want to read this one
aloud to a teenager.)
A biography I just finished was George Q. Cannon: A
Biography, by Davis Bitton, published for the
Mormon reading audience.
I must confess I picked this one up more because of the author's
name than the subject -- I know and admire Bitton's work. But such
is Bitton's ability that I soon became fascinated by Cannon's life.
For those who don't know, Cannon was the public face of Mormonism
during the last half of the 19th century. During the era
when Congress was trying to stamp out the Mormon practice of
polygamy in Utah Territory, Cannon was Utah's non-voting delegate to
the House of Representatives.
He was such an effective lobbyist (without ever paying a bribe)
that he was able to postpone or ameliorate anti-polygamy legislation
for many years. In the process, he became such a lightning rod for
anti-Mormons that they finally concluded that the only way to pass a
law with teeth in it was to remove Cannon from Congress first.
The story of how he "worked" Congress is fascinating, but so is
every other part of his life, and Bitton's book was one of the most
satisfying biographies I've ever read.
But where Krass was writing about a figure public opinion already
disapproved of, Bitton was writing for the Mormon audience
about a Mormon leader. His burden, therefore, was to
explain to Mormon readers why Cannon was the most hated man in
America for several decades.
Mormon readers would have accepted hagiography -- in fact, they
tend to prefer it. But instead of creating a "perfect" man, Bitton
created a fully balanced biography that could be trusted by
non-Mormons and even anti-Mormons to present every legitimate
viewpoint that the evidence would support.
Krass wrote about a "bad guy"; Bitton wrote about a "good guy."
But imagine how hard it would be to write a biography about your own
father-in-law -- who is still alive, and whose wife and children
(including your spouse) are extremely opinionated and outspoken and
brilliant and prone to criticize.
To me, that sounds like as good a description of one of the
circles of hell as you can find this side of Dante.
But that's what Boyd Jay Petersen set out to do with his book
Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life.
Hugh Nibley is an extraordinarily brilliant man, fluent in dozens of
languages, ancient and modern, and his scholarship has been
published and admired in peer-reviewed journals.
However, what made him famous -- and beloved -- was his
apologetics of Mormonism. Able to go straight to original materials
as the equal of any other scholar, he has been able to bring
powerful insights to the public defense of his (and my) religion.
At the same time, he has also been an outspoken critic of Mormon
culture, pointing out with sometimes painful candor just where and
how Mormons don't live up to their own supposed beliefs. He takes on
all comers, not in a belligerent way, but rather by simply telling
the truth, take it or leave it.
Still, by no measure can Nibley's life be considered normal. His
brilliance was recognized early on, and even though his siblings
were also brilliantly talented and encouraged, Hugh had the
advantage -- and burden -- of being singled out.
What Petersen achieves in this book is to let us see that
brilliance does not make one whit of difference in a man's struggle
for religious faith and for personal happiness.
One of the choices Petersen made was to separate Nibley's life
from consideration of his ideas and works. The chapters usually
alternate -- one of biography, one of overview-and-analysis. This
sometimes results in weird stumbles -- a whole chapter on the Hopis?
-- and in repetition, as information in an analysis chapter shows up
again in the biography chapter.
And the worst limitation Petersen faced was that, unlike Bitton
and Krass, who wrote about people who were strangers, and safely
dead, Petersen had to write about his wife and her brothers and
sisters. Count on it -- there's a lot of stuff he could
have written about that he simply skipped over.
And that's just fine. This is not the last biography of this
great and fascinating man -- it's the first. And as a first step,
it's a good one. It will be an excellent resource for biographers to
come.
The best proof of a good biography is that it is fascinating and
informative even to readers who didn't care about the subject prior
to reading it. I daresay that most readers of this column couldn't
care less about Carnegie, Cannon, or Nibley. But if you
love delving into someone else's life the way I do, I can promise
you -- as a gourmand, if not connoisseur, of biographies -- that
different as they are, any of these three will be fascinating. | 
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