I Watched the Unauthorized Full House Movie

Cinema is all about light. From before the earliest days of movies as we currently understand them, before movie cameras allowed even the early luminaries like Georges Méliès to ply their art, there were "magic boxes" and kinetoscopes that allowed light to be filtered through the spinning image to create the illusion of movement. Light gives life to the screen as much as it does to the Earth. Light is absolutely everything.

Last year, I wrote a review of the movie Winter's Tale and complained that when teaching film to students in the classroom, one of the hardest concepts to get them to understand is how important editing is to the final film product. The same is true of lighting, the control filmmakers exercise over the primal element of the medium. Now, having seen the Lifetime Unauthorized Full House Movie, I finally have the appropriate tool to demonstrate what happens when no concern is taken for lighting at all. Scenes seem to be lit by whatever lights were on in a room or location when the crew arrived. There is a scene in the casino where the three male leads are standing at a craps table and there is so much light shining directly on top of their heads that I actually made a comment out loud. When John Stamos is performing in How to Succeed in Business on Broadway, he exits the theater after the premiere performance into what is clearly the middle of the morning. They didn't even get a blackout tunnel to cover the door. Scenes in offices and homes are lit by open windows, and household or office lamps. That plus the brutal combination of extreme hard stops before every punchline, and sight gags so hoary and hackneyed they might have actually appeared on Full House itself, gives the whole thing the vague aesethtic of a Mentos ad.

You can also tell that there was a lot left on the cutting room floor, including, apparently, a sub-plot in which John Stamos is secretly in love with Dave Coulier's wife. Also, the final twenty seconds of the film reveal that there has been a voice-over narrator the whole time, and it is the third to last cast member you would have expected (I would have given a month's pay for the narrator to have been Andrea Barber, who played Kimmy Gibbler), because the role of voice-over narrator carries certain expectations about whose story it is that we are watching. I don't know, ultimately, in whose story Full House, its cast's lives, and their adventures took place, but I would bet that it is not the character who ends up summing up the experience. That would be a hard pill to swallow.

Are these odd criticisms to lob at a Lifetime Movie about a bad sitcom that aired for eight seasons and went off the air twenty years ago? Probably. Part of the reason that I am focusing on them is because despite them I absolutely loved the viewing experience. There is something almost Twilight Zone-esque about the way Bob Saget complains to Dave Coulier early in the film about how all the comics they came up with have hit it big except them, only to discover that the two shows that ultimately made him a household name (Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos) were a Tartarian torture that ate away at his soul and consumed his sensibilities. Nor is he an innocent victim in his own slow destruction. At one point he name checks Richard Pryor and George Carlin to insult Full House "Pryor was funny, Carlin was funny...this is not funny." The implicit statement in that kind of remark is that, left to his own devices, Bob Saget belongs in the class of Pryor and Carlin. He does not. His stand-up, even then, wasn't of the moment, it wasn't artistic and fine in the way that Pryor's and Carlin's were. Saget was a guy who made dick jokes, and the filthier the better. In the end, the movie positions Full House as his punishment for thinking that he was something more that he was. 

Coming in at 90 minutes (with some commercials), I walked away feeling that this would have been better as a five night mini-series then as a made for TV movie. It isn't like cost was a factor, it clearly cost nothing to make. But I would have loved more time on the Olsen twins, Candace Cameron finding religion, ANYTHING involving Jodie Sweetin, an exploration of the Lori Laughlin/John Stamos relationship, the implosion of Dave Coulier's life after the death of his sister and his wife blindsiding him with divorce papers. And ultimately, how can I give a bad review to something that left me wishing there had been more?

Rating: 2.5 / 4

Available OnDemand

TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead

Part of the beauty of  the pilot episode of AMC's hyper-hit The Walking Dead was the way it elided over the collapse of civilization. Deputy Rick Grimes was shot in the mundane world, and awoke from a coma into a nightmare. We hear bits and pieces of the fall of Atlanta, but by the time we are eye-witnesses the collapse of American civilization is fiat accompli. As a narrative device it was riveting. We were forced to learn the rules of the new world along with Grimes. So much so, in fact, that even when the show went off the rails for whole seasons at a time (the farm, the Governor) the turbo charged power of the opening hour was enough to keep audiences locked in. Now, with the 90 minute pilot of the "spin-off" (more technically we might call this a parallel narrative than a spin-off), Fear the Walking Dead has provided us another glimpse into the first hours of the collapse, and a laser focused view on one families attempt to survive it.

It is silly to try to stake strong critical opinions on 90 minutes of television. Fear the Walking Dead could quickly descend into the realm of the painfully dumb, or, worse, into the rote and routine. That is the potential trap of all excursions into the world of genre narrative. In fact, the switch in shooting location from L.A. to Canada for the rest of the season is already a little concerning. There is a certain light and life in L.A. that Canada has been notoriously bad at mimicking, and if the show loses even a little of its panache, that would be a shame.

That being said, the opening episode demonstrated a clear approach and a steady hand. Instead of a world destroyed, Fear the Walking Dead's pilot asks us over and over again how it is that we can ever come to terms with the horrifying images inside of our own heads, and how we separate the horrors that we take in from the world from the ones we invent in our own minds. As one character says "what I saw either came from the dust, or from my mind...and if it came from my mind, then I'm insane." That all of this is happening inside of a civic structure that is still, for the time being, entirely in place is fascinating. At what point does one begin to notice the fall of civilization? At what point does the slide into mindlessness become impossible to stand against. Fear the Walking Dead has set up the questions with a brilliant opening salvo. All that's left is to see if they have any answers.

Rating: 3 / 4

The Psychomech Novels of Brian Lumley, One Man's Literary White Whale

In the academic year 2003-04 I was a senior in high school. Because I had enough credits to graduate, and because I felt that high school kids who took classes in local colleges because they have maxed out their high schools were goobers (I still tend to think this in cases that don't hinge around mathematics and/or students who need to take financial advantage of the state paying for their credits), because my high school had a closed campus, and because my schedule that year was first period creative writing, free hour, free hour, lunch, lunch, free hour, gym (basketball), gym (swimming), I spent periods two through seven in the library.

There were windows in the library all along one wall with spinning book racks of trade paperbacks separated by sets of chairs. I started at the row furthest to the left (upon entering the library), and over the course of the semester read everything on every one of those racks. On one of those racks I found a book that was going to haunt me for a decade: Brian Lumley's Psychosphere, the first novel in the Psychomech trilogy.

I went to Fantastic Four

As I was duly informed last night, as I sat in a theater that contained me (one man of approximately 30 years) and dozens and dozens of high school students on group dates at the $5 Tuesday movies, by the trailer for the remake of Point Break, a film that I am sure millions upon millions of people were clamoring to have made, "the only law that matters is gravity." I'm not sure if this is true, but whatever, sometimes it is true. More to the point, sometimes it is true as it relates to film reviews. Sometimes the initial press about a film is so bad, that no matter what actually occurs on the screen it is going to be savaged by reviewers. This rarely happens to great films (though it has), often happens to films that by cosmic justice have pre-earned such treatment, and occasionally it happens to a film that is okay but doesn't have the wherewithal to defend itself. Such is the sad tale of Fantastic Four--a film roundly being decried as an abomination unto the Lords of Light and THX. The only problem is, Fantastic Four just isn't that bad.

Movie Review: Straight Outta Compton

Straight Outta Compton, the new biopic about the pioneering hip-hop group N.W.A., caught me off guard. Hollywood has become very good at the production of trailers. In many instances, trailers are better than the features they advertise (see Steel, Man of). The trailer for Straight Outta Compton, however, left me cold. As a result, I walked into the theater not expecting much. I walked out blown away.

True Detective Season Two, The Big Bang Theory, and the Problem of Excessive Reference

In my review of the first episode of the second season of True Detective I mentioned that the episode had a kind of excessive allusiveness to it, as if writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Justin Lin were trying to clue you in to their awareness of the vast history of California noir. There were references to Chinatown, The Maltese Falcon, the novels of James Ellroy, etc. Now, having taken some time to ruminate on the season as a whole, it is clear that a big part of what made this season so problematic was that this habit never went away. The continual flood of references actually became the fabric of the show, taking the place of an original story.

Movie Review: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

So, after a trip to Canada last week and a short visit from my in-laws I took a little break from the blog. I saw some movies, watched some TV, read some books, but didn't write about any of them.

But two nights ago I went to see The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the new Guy Ritchie film starring Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer, and Alicia Vikander, and I had to write about it for three big reasons:

1. 2015 has been a stirring year for spy pictures. Kingsmen led things off, and is still one of the most entertaining films that I have seen this year, Melissa McCarthy's Spy was an astonishingly funny send-up of the genre, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation was the best film in that franchise, and Spectre is coming to us this December with high expectations. U.N.C.L.E. is a strong addition of this set of films.

2. I absolutely adored the television series that this film is based on.

3. That series, which ran from 1964-1968, and now the film are perhaps the best examples of the vast degree of interconnectedness that run through all culture. To name just two of these connections:

1) Robert Vaughn (who played Napoleon Solo), was long thought to be the father of Matthew Vaughn, who has directed several of the X-Men films (as well as the aforementioned Kingsmen). As if this connection between the television series and contemporary super-hero movies weren't enough, it turned out that many years later a paternity test revealed that Matthew Vaughn was in fact the son of George de Vere Drummond, an English aristocrat who was the godson of King George VI, whose father was elevated to the dormant "de Vere" title whose most famous previous holder was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who many people have (erroneously) credited with writing the works of William Shakespeare. The connections spawned by that web only gets crazier from there as you track them out.

2) The concept for the character Napoleon Solo was designed by Ian Flemming, the author who brought the world James Bond. I won't even get into all of the consequences of that creation.

Now, you can play this kind of game with any television show or film, but the amazing thing about U.N.C.L.E. is the way the connections seem to double and treble, forging woven cords connecting disparate forms of popular culture. It is like Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton family, but in real life. Which is kind of cool.

So, it was a foregone conclusion that I would see the new film. Which, naturally, raises the question: how was it?

Well, it was good. Not great, but good.

It was slick, professional, and featured some fantastic moments. Hugh Grant does some of his best work in ages as Waverly. Alicia Vikander provides further confirmation of Rogue Nation and Mad Max: Fury Road's argument that women can anchor films built around action set pieces. Her character is the most fully realized of the three major parts. She is having a fantastic year, having already gained some attention for her role as Ava in Ex Machina. To make a long story short, Guy Ritchie has demonstrated that he is adept at making a particular kind of movie, and U.N.C.L.E. is no exception. I would expect it to make something like $280 million internationally, earn a sequel, and all of the usual steps that a movie like this goes through despite being crushed domestically by the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. That almost doesn't matter anymore, and the early reports are that Russia has embraced the film.

The reason the film isn't able to transcend being merely "good" is that neither Solo nor Kuryakin are convincingly acted.

Henry Cavill is a perfect actor to play Superman because he is, at heart, as square of heart as he is of jaw. There isn't a cool bone in his body. Even though he is gorgeous and chisled, there is not one ounce of that charisma that animates a performer like Matt Bomer, who (my wife pointed out as we left the theater) played a better version of this role on USA's White Collar.

Hammer is only slightly better off. But while David McCallum made Ilya Kuryakin into a cultural phenomenon (publications from the sixties frequently referred to him as "the fifth Beatle" because of the way that female fans flocked to him wherever he went during the years the show aired), Hammer seems content to play him as a violent psycho barely in control of himself. The difference in the performances was that McCallum's Kuryakin was a cipher, Hammer's is...well, he performs like his name implies he would, with force but no subtlety.

But there are parts that are funny, some parts that have some genuine emotional heft, and some high quality set pieces. Even if you aren't a superfan of the show like I am, there is stuff worth seeing here.

Rating: 3/4

The Making of a Successful Hamlet

Last night I had the pleasure of taking in a performance of Hamlet at the main Festival Theater at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. There is a lot that can be said about the production, much of it positive, and a few things negative, and taken on the whole it was a fine theatrical experience. Rather than dally too long on the particulars that displeased me [1], I thought it would be better to meditate, for a while, on what goes into the successful execution of Hamlet as a role. Because whatever else may be good or bad in a production of Hamlet is going to ride or die on the performance of the actor playing the prince. So what is it that makes a performance successful?

Last Days of Pompeii, or, the Anger and Beauty of the Earth

Today, while touring Casa Loma, the magnificent neo-gothic estate of Sir Henry Pellatt, in the upscale DuPont neighborhood of Toronto, I found myself staring into a beautifully appointed room in the Adams style: soft colors, elaborate plaster works, and, in this particular room, representations drawn from the decor common in the Roman city of Pompeii, displayed in a Romantic style that had more than a little of the feel of antediluvian Atlantis to it, the tragic lost paradise. I found that it turned my stomach.

Cher's Five Cher-iest Songs: A Ranking

Hi, everyone! It is 6am local time, and I have been up for several hours already (including a drive to Flint and back). While making that drive I had some time on my hands to consider the following question: which Cher tunes most fully encapsulate the Cher experience? There are few voices in the history of American "pop" music that are as unique and distinctive as Cher's. Even when she is bad, she is great. While the power of some pop stars lies in their ability to totally enmesh themselves in a larger structural apparatus designed to churn out music with the broadest possible appeal, Cher's power derived from her ability to speak to those outside of that range. She is the patron saint of particular kinds of non-conformists, and has made more from her measure of natural talent than many performers who have capitalized less fully on greater natural gifts. After some thought, I settled on five. Before I dive into the list, however, I should do a quick rundown of the rules I followed to compile this ranking: