The Amazing Mrs Pritchard

There's dumb, then there's naïve. This British mini-series succeeds in being both. In spades. Ros Pritchard is a fellow citizen, common as muck, who goes haphazardly from grocery store manager to leader of the Purple Alliance to the Prime Minister of Britain. Right from the git-go she shows, in her capacity as store manager, how amazing she is by reaching around a male employee's waist and sticking her hands down his pants. Little Mamma-mia Ros just has to get her hands into everything.

Ostensibly, writer Sally Wainwright was attempting to create an amusing feminist fantasy with insights thrown in between the many laughs. But throughout the series, Wainwright confuses politics with governance. And she never gets up from under the absurd premise that the 'ordinary' people who comprise almost all the electorate, don't care two hoots what politicians stand for as long as they tell the truth. It's a cynical and contemptuous premise that flies in the face of the reality that 'ordinary' people hold strong convictions and care deeply about the issues they believe are important to their lives, their country, their world.

It wouldn't come as a surprise to those viewers who never watched the series through to the end, that when women engage in politics, lo and behold, they end up behaving like politicians. But Wainwright dishes this up as a revelation, not just to her viewers, but to her characters. For example, it only stands to reason that if lobbyists weren't so successful, there wouldn't be so many of them. Yet, Miranda, one of Ros' key advisors, is a political scientist, but her understanding of politics is such that she comes unstuck when she learns that a corporatist contributor to the Ros campaign demands something in return. The Purple Alliance threatens to come unstuck as well.

The Alliance become unstuck? Hell, just like Wainwright's premise, it's unhinged not just at the seams, but at the core. When people of different political hues come together under one banner, the center gets vacated as the participants go in different directions. Top down authority then replaces the center to hold the disparate factions together. Ros' motley crew have to be color-blind and black and white in their pretence that all they can see is purple.

Not surprisingly, then, the ending fades to grey. Without the title card additions the ending is a mess, not because it's ambiguous, but because everyone ends up undone in one way or another. Perhaps the message is that in trying to change or otherwise control the behavior of others, we ultimately end up victims of our own folly. But Wainwright goes further than that. She leaves everyone a victim, yes, but according to the title card captions, the revolution takes Ros back to where she started, namely, caring for her obligatory 2.5 children: her two daughters and a husband who's 50% half-wit and 50% baby. And does he like his bottle! Suggesting that a woman's worst weakness is a man. Not only that, but Catherine, her Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes over as leader of the Purple Alliance, thereby becoming Prime Minister. So the purple revolution accomplishes the amazing feat of giving Britain another big and small “c” conservative Prime Minister. You don't need a revolution of any color to accomplish that.

All the same, I watched Catherine with interest because she's a nerd. Women have to use their brains to smash through the glass ceiling, so they have to be hardheaded. And Catherine is. With the instincts of a political animal, she senses an opportunity and defects from the Conservatives to the Purple Alliance. But her head wasn't quite hard enough for that ceiling, we find, because she proceeds to act brain-damaged. More dense than hardheaded, she doesn't know how to connect the dots between having sex and getting pregnant. Alas, she's only smart enough not to wear shoes with laces and to end up at the top of the heap, forsaken in love and alone.

So what was the point of any of it? Damned if I know. I'm still trying to figure out why they made 10 Downing Street look like a one-room council flat.

Breaking Away

Some teens have a red carpet rolled out before them all the way to college and beyond. But for others, affording college and scraping up enough money to stay there takes a Herculean effort. For still others, well, by time they graduate from high school, they already feel used up and cast aside by life. They give themselves up for dead, all the while putting on a show about how they don't want to be like the people pulling out ahead of them. Oscar Levant said in Humoresque that it's not what you are, but what you don't become that hurts. He goes on to say, “Idealism is for the very young.” But, for some kids, idealism is a luxury they come to believe isn't worth affording, just as they come to believe their suspicions that the people who get all the breaks are in truth better than they are.

That's how it is with Mike, who believes his future is lost in the past when he was the star quarterback in high school. He wishes he was smart so he could expand on his dreams in college instead of having nothing to look forward to except becoming “mean old man Mike.” He's one of four 19-year-olds drifting instead of breaking away. As the children of men who worked the limestone quarries, they're called cutters, but Mike notes sourly that a cutter is just something else he'll never get a chance to be. Convinced he's lost his last game, he wastes his passion on corrosive resentment and bitterness.

His buddy, Dave, on the other hand, circumvents Mike's cynicism and dejection by wrapping his identity around the people in the cycling world he is trying to emulate. Unlike Mike, however, he doesn't have the courage to be himself. Being a nerd is his saving grace. He helps Mike see that unless you're prepared to settle for being a willing victim of fate, there's really only one way to break free, and that is through good ol' honest effort.

Peter Yates directed the film with a light touch that only serves to highlight the seriousness of the humor.

Bringing Up Baby

David (Cary Grant) is the classic nerd of fiction: a brilliant helpless dolt. He doesn't know his right foot from his “intercostal clavicle”. Mind you, he trips and flips beautifully. There's the rub. He's beautiful to look at, like you're watching a god frolicking in a playpen. BUT…he's such a baby, Alice (Katherine Hepburn) has to teach him not just how to laugh and have fun, but how to be alive. After all, as a nerd, he's a reluctant human being. All the same, it's humorous watching a scatterbrain teaching a god how to be human. Once he learns how to get the benefits of being a human, he tells her he loves her—with the nerd proviso, “…I think….” In any case, he gets his act together, but his life's work falls apart. Could be because it was being held together by the likes of an “intercostal clavicle”, ya think?

Death Takes a Holiday

The mortals arrive at the Villa Felicitá, in vehicles draped with flowers like coffins. The flowers have been cut off from their life source, and two of the young people playfully throw this beauteous death at each other. We never invented death but we like to believe we own the patent on it so we can amuse ourselves in much the same way that the gods do, by siccing it on anyone or anything capable of dying. Especially those who can't defend themselves.

At any rate, Death (Fredric March) follows the revelers as an uninvited guest. He's Sirki, vagabond prince of space, who is “the point of contact between eternity and time.” We're learning through medical science that death is a process rather than a singularity, but in this film, Prince Sirki is tired of being the most misunderstood immortal in the universe and beyond. So as a lark, a mad monstrous sublime joke, he forsakes his fatal mission by taking a holiday for three days to find out why we fear and loathe him. Death flirting with life. Intriguing premise, but more fool us if we take Death at its word. I mean, would you stake your life on it?

Sirki didn't really come here to find out about us, he came to lecture us about life. But as soon as he took on “the world, the flesh and the devil”, he learned in an instant that our pain, suffering and fear are sourced with our mortality, i.e., with death. So in studying life, Sirki only ends up studying himself. Some joke. He gets his laughs in other ways though. He begs us not to make a stranger of him and toasts life and all other brave illusions. And he eats. Interesting. Death takes a holiday by savoring the flesh and living things he devours. Death eating death while people jump off buildings, walk through fire, smash into moving vehicles and explode, only to survive. As for the poor miserable souls who try to commit suicide, not to worry. Death says he'll give up his game of ping-pong to send them condolences for their misfortune of surviving. Too bad he didn't choke on the irony.

Most of the film's humor is powered by irony, and for the most part it works wonderfully well. However, at times it might have been better if the writers hadn't been so enamored of their own writing, such as Death's speech about love. For all his pretty words, Sirki seduces life into embracing death. So he came to life to kill it with love. But he does more than that, by partaking in procreative activity, he engages in a self-referencing paradox. Unless, of course, he was engaging in protected sex. Death wearing a condom. Now there's sublime humor.

The Devil Wears Prada

David Frankel directed The Devil Wears Prada with enough finesse and smarts to avoid the pitfalls of artsy-fartsy cutesie techno-fluff that would intrude his ego between the audience and the film's contents. Given the contents, however, perhaps he should have just let 'er rip.

Meryl Streep plays Miranda, the High Priestess of the realm beyond the gods. Her voice modulated at control-freak frequency, she menaces those around her as she preaches from the high alter of maximus sanctimonious claptrapus. Anne Hathaway plays Andy, Miranda's second assistant, with such aplomb she blithely shows how enamored she is of the Tom Cruise school of acting. She starts by posing for the camera, zips along to posturing, only to graduate to preening. Upon meeting Andy, the High Priestess says to her, “You have no style or sense of fashion.” She doesn't bother to explain how it's possible for anyone to be styleless. She just starts and ends with the arrogant assumption that if she doesn't see it or approve of it, then it doesn't deserve to exist. Afterall, she has the right to criticize. She's a champ at dazzling her oh so stylish self by parading around in the skin of dead animals. Her kill rate matches the contents of her ego. If aping our prehistoric ancestors is the height of style and sophistication, then the theory of evolution is bogus.

The film doesn't say exactly what planet she's on, but it can't be far from Rimmer World, because everyone on Miranda's planet exists only to be a clone of her. The only thing human about them is their need to defecate, and it lands on everyone below them. With this much crap floating around, it's no wonder they keep dousing themselves with perfume. However, even her dime-a-dozen psycho clone wannabe first assistant has style. Not just style, but the charm of an uncoiling cobra. What with her bat wing shoulders, limp stringy hair and zombie eye-shadow, she looks like someone finally got fed up with her snotty condescension and let her have it right between the eyes. Because Little Miss I'm-the-FIRST-Assistant deigns to think she's fashionable, she doesn't think twice about using other wannabes as props in her neverending panic attacks. She's one with the rest of them on her planet in reveling in a contempt powered by arrogance that is as shabby as it is ugly.

Arrogance is an overestimation of one's worth, but who cares as long as it's fashionable, n'est pas? Miranda says, “...everybody wants to be us.” Amen. Everyone on Miranda's planet worships her with their fear and loathing. That's a source of her power. But it's their envy she lusts after. Only it's not her the wannabes envy, it's her job. She confuses herself with her work and that fatal flaw in reasoning is glossed over when the ego is boundless and a sense of self is tossed aside with the bits and pieces cut off in the inevitable cosmetic surgery. Not surprisingly, Miranda's wannabes are one with her in their shameless pandering to their own egos. They reduce their world to a mirror in which they see nothing but themselves reflected forever. They don't see the sweat shops or the animals sacrificed to assuage their insatiable vanity. No, theirs is a small, shrivelled, ill-defined and shallow world that can hold an infinite number of narcissists.

So what does any of this have to do with nerds? Well, Andy is a wannabe nerd who goes through the obligatory makeover. All's not well in Miranda's world unless women are working in stilettos. It makes them fashionably smart, and you can measure the size of their ambition by the height of the spikes. The makeover, however, rewards Andy with a line that tops the High Priestess herself in vanity. Andy says to her wannabe lover, “Turns out I'm not as nice as you thought.” Turns out he thought she was about as nice as a discounted pair of designer briefs he lucked upon, wore once and tossed unwashed in the rubbish. She figures that much out.

But not much else.

For instance, Miranda ties into her about the sweater she's wearing. It's not just blue or turquoise, Dumb-dumb. No, it's cerulean that's nothing short of devine because it was created by the fashionista gods who dwell in that exalted place beyond art. Beyond belief, too, considering that Andy has no style yet the fashionista create and select her clothes for her. Moving along, even if it were true that no one can escape the fashionista, it doesn't necessarily follow that Andy was wearing the blue that the fashionista gods originally created. Different colorists have different ideas of what cerulean can and should look like. Are we simply to believe that neither Andy nor Miranda have ever heard of dye lots? Besides, the same color doesn't look the same in different fabrics. Or in different light. Then there's water. One wash = two ceruleans. And who's to say that any two people see the same color in the same way? But Andy just keeps posing for that camera like Miranda's giving a sermon in claptrapus pompousidumb.

As with the other wannabes, Andy's sycophancy is rooted in a fervent yet secret belief that she's better than the object of her worship. So much better, Andy goes on to tattle with self-righteous mockery, on her absent victim and omniscient antagonist, who she reduces to a pathetic mannequin that, she would have us believe, all gods such as herself have no choice but to mock with venomous sanctimony.

But the maximus sanctimonious claptrapus award goes to Stanley Tucci's character. He chides Andy for being a whiner, then proceeds to whine about how ungrateful she is to be working at a place that has published artists so great that what they created was “greater than art because you live your life in it.” We wear clothes and live in dwellings. And some of us are forced to live in prisoner of war camps. That doesn't mean it's art or greater than art.

Like, who are these people trying to kid? Don't they ever look out their windows? People on the streets are wearing uniforms, e.g., suits or jeans and T-shirts. Just like the designers themselves, and those who attend their shows, wearing black like good little devout choir boys and girls.

The Devil Wears Prada is a name-dropping protracted ad that soars to such heights of pompous vanity that it goes past hot air to vacuous space. A trillion dollars to anyone who can design a spacecraft to take Miranda's wannabes on a one-way journey to this place beyond art.

Electric Dreams

Wonderful! A fairytale for computers, not about computers. Rusty Lemorande and Steve Barron's film is a sensual feast à la mode music video. And for the hero of this fantastical tale, they give us Edgar (Bud Cort), a computer with real attitude. He comes to the rescue of Miles, a disorganized bumbler who keeps his apartment clean, sparse and rigidly ordered. Edgar is supposed to get the rest of Miles' life in order and help him design an earthquake-proof brick that he likes to work on in his spare time. But the computer takes on a life of its own and ends up vying with Miles for the love of Madeline, the cello player who moves into the apartment upstairs.

A cello is just a piece of wood, well several pieces, and a computer is just a stupid machine, well…. Here's a quote from the film with a word left out: “What made that _____ special was you. Whatever came out of it, you put into it. Every sound, every scratch, every note, every feeling. And that's not lost because it's inside of you here where it will always be.” What's the missing word? Cello or computer? Remember the old adage: Garbage in, garbage out? That one's too easy, right? How about this one? In designing his brick, Miles shakes and bends an interlocking jigsaw puzzle. For those of you who like to build jigsaw puzzles, you've come to know the difference between a standard puzzle and one that's interlocking. So what's wrong with Miles' logic? Or how about this one? Buried in the credits at the end is a clever play on words about a 29,000 pound brute that lives on in our memory.

When all's said and done, who will have the last word: us or the computor? For the answer, consult Edgar.

Ever After

A nerdy retelling of Cinderella, Ever After extols the virtues of a meritocracy, wherein it's not a matter of knowing your place or even of accepting it, but of creating a place for yourself by earning it. So Danielle, our erstwhile Cinderella, doesn't rely on anyone, least of all prince charming, to rescue her. She rescues herself.

In the meantime, she reads Thomas Moore's Utopia and acts on the assumption that it's possible to improve conditions in society for herself and others by being compassionate and just. And by educating others into being the same. Good thinking from a future queen with the power of life and death over others. But it takes a utopian world to educate people into being smart. A case in point is Leonardo da Vinci, who appears as a character in the film. He was forbidden by the Church to attend university because he was born out of wedlock. His brother, on the other hand, got the benefits of a university education. Any guesses who ended up smarter? At one point in the film, the prince (Dougray Scott) is dismissive of Leonardo as an old man who walks on water yet knows nothing of life. Ahh, but could the old man tie his own shoelaces?

Angelica Huston is superb as Danielle's stepmother. At once hilarious and menacing, Huston conveys the worst kind of wickedness: a self-righteous sanctimonious evil that carps, scolds, harangues and nags your soul to death. She makes the mistake of dismissing her stepdaughter as a pesky pebble in her shoe, and seals her fate by letting her favorite daughter burn Utopia.

Washed clean of the cinders of utopia by her marriage to the prince, Danielle does not question the wisdom or justice of so much power concentrated in the hands of so few. Instead, she uses her acquired power to punish her stepmother along with one of the daughters. Then we're told they lived happily ever after. Some more than others, it appears. And after what?

Gregory's Girl

Bill Forsyth's films have a disarming freshness and lyrical quality. Gregory's Girl is no exception. No matter how idiosyncratic his characters are, we laugh with them rather than at them because he doesn't flatten them into cartoons or deaden them with clichés. Rather, he imbues them all with a basic dignity. And intelligence. They're realistic creations in an ideal world.

The students populating Gregory's world are wide-eyed enthusiasts, explorers and champions of life, love and the pursuit of every kind of passion they can imagine. Especially if it involves fooling around with numbers. Want a snapshot of life? Eric's got all the angles. Don't want to fall off the planet? Keep dancing. That's Gregory's philosophy. Having trouble getting girls to stay around long enough while they're eating lunch, to hear you explain about how veal is made? Andy's got the solution. Just write CARACUS on a piece of cardboard and try hitchhiking your way to Caracas where the ratio of women to men is 8 to 1. It's a well-known fact. You just know that when he learned the human body is made up of moving parts called cells and atoms, Andy made it his business to find out what the cumulative total of all that action is. If the ability to listen is a sure sign of intelligence, then Andy's buddy, Charlie, is the brains of the bunch. He keeps counsel with himself. Nerds are often portrayed that way, i.e., supposedly brilliant but unquestionably inarticulate. In Forsyth's films, however, even if you manage to avoid being taken in by the obvious, he still manages to surprise you.

A Guy Named Joe

Optimistic yet sad, A Guy Named Joe, is about fliers who have the courage to live, love, fight and die in World War II. For those who think transcendence is an effete bridge too far beyond the lust for intestinal puree, the film's mystical elements amidst the crash and burn urgency of war, may come across as namby-pamby prettifying of the blood and guts of armed conflict. You know, the good stuff that makes war so much fun for warriors toughing it out in over-stuffed armchairs as they get off on having others do the bleeding and dying for them. If head counts of the dead are what really matter, then we have to concede that Hitler won the war.

But Pete (Spencer Tracy), is made of better stuff. Instead of wasting life after life with less effort than it takes to say, “Bang, bang!”, he has a totally different concept of fun. He says that when he flies for fun, he likes to fly alone. He tries to explain to a group of children that when you're up there half way to heaven, it's the only time you're ever really free, because the earth is so far below you it doesn't matter anymore. No one intrudes upon your thoughts or does the thinking for you. You're the whole show. It's just you and the sky and you're free to soar ever closer to heaven because time ceases to exist. The eternal now beyond fear or redemption.

Another admirable example of this yearning for oneness with the universe is in the movie, Blue. In both films the idea is that ultimate freedom is to be found in life, not death. Except Blue's nirvana is down below rather than up.

Pete's vision of freedom gets clouded by jealousy, but A Guy Named Joe makes no bones about what it means to be free. Pete learns the hard way that death doesn't set you free, because you're not really dead unless you break faith with the future. Dorinda (Irene Dunne) is the sky-flying cowboy who loves Pete and finds freedom in her own way, on her own terms, between love and death. In classic nerd foreplay, she says to him, “You love me.” “I love planes,” he says. “That's the same thing,” she replies. Far from the stereotypical heroine who is made worthy of the man she loves by being rescued by him, Dorinda earns her place beside the men she loves by putting her own life on the line to save the day. The way all real heroes do.

There's not a careless word in Dalton Trumbo's screenplay, which is full of pathos, humor and irony right up to the end wherein Pete, as the loving guiding spirit of good, rejoices with pride at the destruction of life. Nevertheless, the film is a wondrous homage to fliers (albeit a blatant recruitment flic at times), but more than that, it reveals how at its best life is the humorous side of death. On this side of eternity, however, we need the future to be free. And we are the future the film envisages. We're the children who would climb out of the dust and muck and “fly like a generation of angels”, free as the air we breathe. Yes indeed, we're free to breathe the air we've turned into dust and muck. Free to breathe the fallout from the bombs we continue to rain down on the only home we have.

Hotel de Love

Hotel de Love is the kind of place where dreams are made of papier-mâché, the world famous waterfall, Niagara Smalls, is three feet high and LOVE flickers on and off in neon.

Not exactly your classic hangout for nerds. Alas, not all is as it appears on the surface. It's a great deal more. Vast expanses of glass invite you to look in, but the suites close you off from the world outside. Each is a world onto itself. In Subterranean Seduction, for instance, buried feelings wreak havoc on seduction. Leaving love where? Rick (Aden Young), the manager of the hotel, says, “…if love is anywhere in the world, it's not here.” But he says in the same breath, “Love is poo.” By the force of his own logic, he's saying that the hotel is poo-free. So which is it, a curse or a blessing? Whatever his answer, his yin-yang twin, Stephen (Simon Bossell), is bound to say the opposite. The opposites connect, however, in their love for Melissa (Saffron Burrows). But they connect the way atoms do when they “touch” each other. Stephen calculates love in terms of percentages and statistics, whereas Rick can't get it to add up to anything but zero.

The point is, which one is the nerd? The one who wears the Leonardo t-shirt, or the one who has Kill City on his t-shirt? The one who makes love with his watch on and gives Sartre's Being and Nothingness to Melissa as a present, or the one who writes the worst love poems in the world and sniffs books instead of reading them? Remember, not all is as it seems. Hint: he's the sensitive one.

This movie is the philosopher's stone that turns a simple love story into magic. Just goes to show what a little honesty and artistry can do. Hats off to writer-director, Craig Rosenberg, for daring to use epiphany, existentialism and humor to tell the truth. Through his art, he poses an interesting question: How do you tell a philosopher you love her? In rhyme, yet. Rick lets 10 years slip by because it took him that long to unthaw his heart and reach the poetry in his soul. He knew he couldn't compete with Keats or Wordsworth. All his efforts sounded as poetical and endearing to him as his parents' incessant bickering, so he gave up on her and himself. But it wasn't Keats or Wordsworth who gave her heart a shove.

How to Steal a Million

Sometimes when I listen to Mary Chapin Carpenter's My Heaven, I think of How to Steal a Million. And I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where nothing menacing, sinister, malevolent, grotesque, ugly or evil exists. Where the people are as bright, sophisticated and beautiful as Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole (He plays the glamorous, urbane nerd.), and you can live, work and love to your heart's content and get away with pulling capers.

The way they go about it in the film is clever fun. An Irish burglar used much the same method to rob an art museum, but his life was filled with notoriety and he spent much of his time running scared. Not exactly the stuff Heaven is made of. But in Wyler's world, you get to live and love in your very own puzzle. When you come right down to it, that's what our lives are, really, puzzles for each of us to figure out in our own way and time. Trouble is, too many of us leave time to do the solving and resolving for us. Take time away. Does your life stack up and hang together? Or does it disintegrate into madness or oblivion?

The preternaturally beautiful world created for the characters by William Wyler is seductive, in much the same way that Woman In the Dunes is. Except that Woman in the Dunes seduces by lulling you with rhythmic undulating beauty, into believing you're not in Hell. Imagine being trapped in a sandpit without feeling gritty. Instead, you feel like soothing water is lapping your skin while your lover's silk teases your body. That's the genius of Woman in the Dunes.

Humoresque

One way or another, we pay for what we are. Especially when we choose our own path and make it a lonely one by refusing to let anyone else share it with us.

As a boy, Paul Bouray practices the violin not because he has to, but because he wants to. What does he do for amusement? Play his violin. That's still very much the case when as an adult he falls in love with a woman whose soul is the mirror image of his. It's her tragedy—and his—that she shares all his qualities, both good and bad. Everything, that is, except his talent. In his determination to become a virtuoso, his intent isn't to make someone else pay the price, but his actions betray him. He plays like he has a chorus of gods in his violin, but his soul never quite gets into tune. His life is in his violin, but the yearning to get back to the happy simplicity of his youth isn't in the violin, it's in him. The pain is too, but it's also in the people who love him. He knows that his god-given talent is worth living for, but he's left wondering whether any gift from the gods is worth dying for. Not once, but endlessly.

Humoresque is a treasure-trove of thought-provoking one-liners with the incisive wit and intelligent angst of Oscar Levant and Clifford Odets.

Hurt Penguins

To be true to yourself, you have to create your own music. What to do, though, when your creative side isn't jiving with your intellectual side? Sometimes you crave a hamburger but you get Châteaubriand; other times you want reasoned discourse but you get fisticuffs.

Harriet (Michèle Muzzi) just can't find the midground between infomercials and highbrow documentaries. She's caught between a rocker and a hard sell. However, the differences between the temperamental artist and the almost impotent, unhip schlep are more apparent than real. For the most part. Harriet makes hot and cool music with Nick, and she steams those music sheets with Jeremy. They're penguins just trying to make it through life in one piece, which is problematic for Harriet because she's a flightless bird determined to soar above everyone else. Jeremy says that if something burns brightly, it doesn't burn long. True enough unless, of course, you're a star; and these penguins jockey for star billing in each other's fantasies. But one of them is a killer whale who swims with sharks and outmaneuvers the prey in a sea of reprehensibility. Trouble is, most of us have come to be protective of killer whales. So who's the bad guy? More to the point, who says there has to be one? Mind you, they end up jailbirds in Prison.

Myra Fried, co-creator of this bright quirky gem, stars herself in the story as Robin, the songbird who weaves the music through the plot. In this role, she gets to tell one of her characters not to touch her. Interesting, considering that Robin doesn't seem to have a life outside of her relationship with her fellow birds. But the casting is perfect. With those beaks, they really do look like birds.

It's a Wonderful Life

It's a Wonderful Life is skilfully directed and cleverly written. So much so, it's easy to overlook how dishonest it is.

For many people, life never amounts to more than what they're willing to settle for, which is the case with the film's hero, George. Sure he's a victim of circumstances, but he compounds his victimization by settling for rationalizations rather than the fulfilment of his dreams. So instead of building a bridge, he ends up using one to contemplate killing himself for money. As a young man, he wanted to take on the world, no holds barred. He was brimming over with ideas and believed passionately that he was the guy who was going to create a beautiful world for himself and others by building cities, airfields, skyscrapers and other glorious things. The way he defined himself, however, isn't the way fate defines him. In the breach he fails himself by betraying his dreams. Locked inside him, his suppressed dreams and the passion he had for them ferment into rage and abysmal hopelessness.

According to Capra, however, George isn't really a failure because he has friends. Lots of them. You know, all those people he helps, who take and keep taking from him in his time of need. They love him because they get what they want from him, but they don't love him enough to help him get what he wants. It never occurs to anyone, not his mother, brother, friends or the woman he loves, to help him achieve the greatness he believes he's capable of attaining. He wishes to be free to use his talents to create a better world; his future wife, however, wishes the opposite for him. Her wish cancels out his and becomes his command. And tragedy. Whenever he attempts to break free and leave, someone just happens to need something from him. As in, sorry, George, go back to the end of the line. Notice that no one in the town puts up their home or business to make up the $8000 shortfall he needs. Instead, they pool their petty cash. There is something morally distasteful about people scrounging around for nickels and dimes so a banker can be paid twice for the same thing. It strips bare the film's slogan at the end, revealing it to be a version of Barnum's quip that there's one born every minute.

Capra undercuts his friendship message in other ways. For one thing, like Capra himself, both George's brother and his friend go out into the world and garner not only fame and wealth, but friends as well. For another thing, friendship isn't enough to get George out of his predicament. He has to have the help of a mentally challenged angel to show him the way to embracing his lot in life, thereby suggesting that George wasn't worthy of his dreams in the first place, because he was too stupid to know his own mind.

In framing the story, Capra posits an either/or fallacy to manipulate the viewer's feelings, all the while pandering to sentiments that confuse pity with compassion. Either George can be poor and have friends, or he can be rich and friendless. Either he has a wife and kids, or he has the world. Either he loans people money, or they become miserable curs with a penchant for striptease joints. Either he marries her, or she becomes an old maid. Not just an old maid, but a librarian!?! Quelle horreur! A freak of nature! George has to rescue her from this fate worse than death, as if without him it would have been impossible for her to have accepted “God's greatest gift” gracefully by loving life and marrying one of the Maker's other children.

Not impossible, George, just unthinkable. That's what happens when you start out in life as Daedalus, but never get to fly with or without your dreams because those who profess to care about you find it in their best interests to club your wings down.

In Capra's world, not surprisingly, angels get their wings by helping the male ego run amuck.

Jilting Joe

Every now and then through no fault of our own, we turn a corner and stumble into Hell. If the gods please, our sojourn is mercifully short, but sometimes….

Childhood sweethearts, Olivia and Joe, love life and each other. She wants to fly and design air planes; he wants to travel the world. Match, set, play? No. Match, set, Hell. Afraid he's going to stop loving her and will leave her eventually, she follows the advice of her father that the best form of defence is attack, and she launches a preemptive strike by jilting Joe at the altar. No one in this film believes in taking prisoners. They imprison themselves. She's walled in by cowardice and a poor sense of self. His weapons of choice for putting the screws to his own life are resentment, false pride and spite.

Ten years later, her life with all it's attendant feelings is parked underground in one of the multi-storey space facilities she designs for her father's company. But, she's self-sufficient, successful, solvent, safe and secure. As for Joe, he travels all over the world, but no matter where he goes, he's still left standing at the altar. Their paths cross again at another wedding. This time, for their parents. And the war resumes. He calls her a shriveled, desperate, cynical, repressed, uptight, anally retentive control freak. In short, a nerd. She calls him a deceitful, spiteful, manipulative, cruel, two-faced, vile, duplicitous shit. And a cliché to boot. Ostensibly, in this scenario of love as war, the victors are those of us who aren't controlled by our feelings. We're the ones who divide our feelings to conquer them. Fine, but this makes our feelings the victims. We litter the world with the carcases of our wounded, battered, misplaced, discarded feelings. To the victors go the spoils.

Love anyone?

Jonathan Creek

Jonathan Creek is personable in a forgettable sort of way. As the “idea man for a conjurer”, he's the unseen hand pulling the strings that control the conjurer.

The series is entertaining enough, especially if you like repartee that's indistinguishable from nagging. And it intrigues you to watch sleight of hand being pitted against slight of mind. Over and over. For me, the fun is in partaking of the unintentional humor. In one of the episodes, Dance Macabre, being the whiz he is, Creek solves a locked room mystery by acknowledging and examining the only pieces of evidence left behind the scene where the crime is supposed to have taken place. Sounds like standard fare, and it would be too, if you can make yourself believe that the police would ignore the only things left at the scene. Not only ignore the evidence, but that it won't occur to anyone—Forensics? Bah, what forensics?—to check it out. No one, that is, except the Mighty Creek. He says that everyone gives up because they make the big mistake of sticking to what's likely instead of what's logical. Fair enough, but is it logical to follow fallacious thinking to it's logical conclusion then act on it? Not likely. Besides, just how logical do you have to be to outwit blithering idiots?

Also, for those of us familiar with Edvard Munch's work, the title of the episode is a spoiler.

Local Hero

Not all of my favorite films have nerds in them, but almost all of them are the creations of auteurs, or nerds, if you will. Like this one by Bill Forsyth. The film is wonderfully imaginative, playful, enchanting, beautiful and wise. Richard Nixon cast a suspicious eye on both the film and its creator, deeming them to be threats to The American Way. Unfortunately for Nixon, he wasn't suspicious enough of the message in An Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

In Local Hero, the would-be hero cum corporate cog has to negotiate with a nerd, not in a glass box, but out in the open on a beach. Not with green backs, either, but with grains of sand. If you know roughly how many grains of sand you can hold in your hand, then you can make an educated guess who wins the negotiations. Another nerd worth watching is the marine biologist. A mysterious nymph so in tune with her work and environment, she's one with the sea and the stars. An enchantress with transcendent knowledge, beauty and understanding, in the way only mermaids and other mythical creatures of the sea can be. Dare you love her?

Love Potion #9

The nerd makeover theme is so prevalent in Hollywood that it has become a genre onto itself. In Dale Launer's Love Potion #9 the two nerds are sorely in need of a makeover. Apparently. They're losers when it comes to getting dates because they're too clueless to know how to dress themselves and comb their hair. That is, until they're rescued by the faceless, soulless, ubiquitous fashion fascists who tyrannize others to line their own pockets.

Paul is a biochemist and Diane is a comparative psycho-biologist, who uses chimps in her research. When she takes the love potion #8 thereby becoming attractive to men, she ditches the lab coat and glasses and starts wearing make-up, miniskirts and stiletto heels. Lucky chimps. Who cares about being in captivity and used for experiments when your tormentor is wearing a miniskirt? But why would she bother to change her wardrobe and paint her face when the potion makes captives of all heterosexual men who come within hearing range of her? She should be the one telling them to change.

One of the problems with this movie is that the lead characters aren't really nerds at all. They're simply horny caricatures dressed up in demeaning stereotypes. Another problem with the movie rests with the plot itself. At the beginning, Paul has a healthy libido but lacks the courage to ask Diane out on a “real” date. He's attracted to her without any potion. So what, pray tell, were the potions for when they work on the libido, not courage? Marisa could answer that. She's the hooker who ends up with potion #8. In a eureka moment, she figures out that the power isn't in the elixir. It's in what you do with it. She smiles slyly then says, “Now I think it's time for a little magic.” Hopefully a little more magical than, “Let's get out of here!”, which are Paul's last words. It's amazing how often that line is used in films, considering that it's invariably said in scenes where it's axiomatic.

When filmmakers tackle the subject of nerds, they sometimes forget that their nerds can only be as intelligent as their creators. Launer, for one, provides silly motives for complex behavior. I suppose it's possible to think beyond your intelligence, but that's like being four dimensional in a three-dimensional world. For instance, Charly is a fine movie and Cliff Robertson is outstanding as Charly, the retarded man who becomes a genius. However, when Charly becomes super-smart, he starts talking in clichés and platitudes.

The Palm Beach Story

Tom and Gerry lead us on a merry chase from Park Avenue to Palm Beach. Gerry (Claudette Colbert) is tired of being a rotten, useless wife to Tom (Joel McCrea), who's a flop at almost everything except dreaming. Their love vanished with his prospects, and nothing's left but admiration and respect. Besides, as Gerry says, men don't get smarter as they get older, they just lose their hair. So with the help of the Wienie King she splits for pastures the divine color of money. Wherever she goes, however, Tom follows, smoking up the path with such zeal he arrives there before she does.

Enter John D. Hackensacker III and his sister Princess Contimillia. Good thing sin is as common as dirt and their money, because Tom could use some of it to build a working model of his latest and greatest dream: an airport stretched over New York city like a tennis racket. Just think, you'd still get to see the sky and breathe, as long as the wire mesh didn't sag when it's loaded with planes. Happily, John D. is too dense to see any holes in the project. What could be simpler, more practical, safe and secure than to tap him for the money? After all, in his family money grows under trees.

If ever there was an artist who knew how to put humor to good use, it was Preston Sturges. His wit was so sharp and deadly accurate, that with one quip, one well-placed image, he could shoot down a foible anytime, anywhere on Earth. And he shared his genius with all his characters. Not surprisingly, everyone's a philosopher in this romp.

For the fun of it, try putting the ending together with what happens in the opening credits. Good luck sorting out who's who.

Perry Mason

He says he's a paid gladiator. Della Street says he's a god. The kind that's part devil. Being the gladiator he is, when he spars with Della, he doesn't let her win.

There's only one female he ever lets win. She's so intriguing and perplexing, Perry can't resist her. She's beautiful yet unseen, attainable yet elusive, gracious yet wrathful, mysterious yet revealing, blind yet clear-sighted, revered yet despised, absolute yet measured, necessary yet negated and she never plays favorites yet she always chooses sides. Her name is Justice. She never sleeps. Not with anyone. Which is fine with Perry because he never gives it a rest either, and he's got Della. Woe to the devils who tip the scales of Justice when he's on a case. They may see themselves as mighty vanquishers of gladiators, but they seldom get past “We who are about to lie--” before Perry has them going around in syllogistic circles.

You know why the world is in such a state that the doomsday clock keeps caressing midnight, don't you? It's because Perry Mason doesn't exist in real life, but Justice does. Along with her alter ego, Injustice.

Rider on the Rain

Katherine Hepburn in Pat and Mike, refers to Charles Bronson as “the little one.” He went on to become a big man in action adventure films, but along the way he starred in a remarkable film, Rider on the Rain. In this Cheshire cat and mouse thriller, before Mellie (Marlène Jobert) falls down the proverbial well, her sole purpose in life is to get and keep the approval of grownups. Such as her “Mommie”, who tells her she can't do anything right; and her husband, who gives her an allowance and refers to her endearingly as Chicken. With childlike impotence, Mellie clings to his authority even though he comes undone whenever he has to do simple things for himself like boil an egg. Once her cellar door is opened, however, and she looks down, down, down, she has to grow up fast and hard to stay alive.

There are no throwaway lines or cheap shots in this film masterfully directed by René Clément, who defies you to outthink Sébastien Japrisot's diabolically clever script.

Rome Adventure

Watching Rome Adventure is like being trapped between the crinolines of a can-can dancer. When the dance is on, there's action all around and you can sense some of it is titillating, but you see precious little of it. All you get is starched fluff rubbing you the wrong way.

Before I get accused of watching the film to mollify a sadistic streak, I have to say that I watched it through to the end because the makers of the film lingered lovingly on the Italian scenery, fanning the flames of desire in me to visit Italy.

The truth be known, however, I got hooked at the beginning when Prudence Bell (Suzanne Pleshette), a New England private school librarian, says in true nerd fashion that she's going to Rome not to fall in love, but to study love. Sometimes nerds show up in the weirdest places. I suppose some would argue that when nerds show up they make places weird, nevertheless, this film has three nerds that caught my attention.

Let's start as the film does, with Prudence, except we'll join her as she's about to abandon Italy. Her Italian suitor tells her that she came to Italy to be free then found that the price was too high. Actually, the price of her freedom wasn't too high, the writers just refused to give her the courage to pay the price. But she agrees with him, so he goes on to lecture her about how women are making a big, BIG mistake in trying to be free like men. You see, lovers must learn, and the great lesson is that woman's most important function in life is to anchor men, so they will turn “from the wild, free hunters they naturally are, to the responsible, civilized creators of civilization they can be.” This is the stuff vomitous is made of, yet she gives him a tearful thanks for spewing it out at her. She couldn't do much else given that she's an anchor, a thing that weighs down men, she's not a human. If she were, she would have caught that his sermon is piffle.

Stripped of the macho verbiage, his argument is that women exist to civilize the creators of civilization. She's the civilizing force and he's the creator. So who's the civilizer? But if men are so high and mighty that they and only they are the creators of civilization, then why don't they have what it takes to control themselves? The answer to that is smack in another fallacy in her suitor's reasoning. He said that men are naturally wild killers. Naturally. So being creators of civilization is not natural. Not to men, at least. And just how do women control these wild gods who are not natural creators? According to the writers of the film, women do it by flunking their studies in love. That's how Prudence weighs down, secures, holds in check her man, who, by the way, is the All-American boy next door. So what was the point of going to Italy? At any rate, she imprisons him in his love for her (in this story, love = sexual desire = lust) so he can be unfree enough to create instead of killing.

As a nerd, Prudence is a dud, but the architect student (Troy Donahue) she anchors, isn't. Because he's a man. Naturally. Instead of appreciating that there's a beautiful woman in her night clothes in the next room, he yells at her to turn the music down so he can work. Other than that, he's tiresome in his obsessive need to protect women from men.

The third nerd, is less of a human than an object of ridicule, a prop with which to set up punch lines. All the same, Albert (Chad Everett), is more interesting than the other two combined. He's a self-proclaimed anti-love music man, who invites gladiators to march around in his head while he works on the origins of the Etruscan alphabet. He says that the Rosetta Stone was his first love. But he's not so enamored of rocks that he can't get “spazzed out” over Prudence. At the beginning when he and Prudence are about to sail away to Italy, she asks him if he's excited. He replies that he is “to a degree.” Yeah, and never a smidgen hotter than insipid. He encounters a hot blond at an outdoor market and says to her, “Excuse me, but I could tell you're an American from behind.”

Try beating that for a backward come-on.

As it turns out, she's a camera nerd, who deluges him with techno-babble relating to the operation of her camera. She needs his help like he needs another hole in his head, but she appeals with fawning eyes for his opinion. Colder than insipid on ice, he tells her his mother needs him. This scene is extraordinary insofar as the writers refrained from inflicting on him and us the cliché that nerds are invariably attracted to each other and stick together like the paste--legend has it--they eat when they're kids. The scene gives him the dignity of being discriminating.

Now, if only the writers had refrained from their starchy moralizing. Rome Adventure is a 60's pre-cultural revolution bodice ripper. Italy invented the word romance, but kinky is the word that goes with ripping a bodice that's been overly starched.

The Sandbaggers

Writer Ian Mackintosh penned most of the scripts for this spy series, with the same cocksure impatience with stupidity as his hero, Neil Burnside. If you don't get it, too bad, the show must go on getting more and more complicated. And intriguing. There are no in-betweens with this show. It'll either get your grey cells hopping, or it'll rock you to sleep with an explosive barrage of acronyms, abbreviations, manoeuvres, machinations and syllogistic political reasoning. MoD, SAS, KGB, FCO, DOPC, SPT, SIS, DGI, JIB, PUSS, DOO....Here's one that spooks each episode without being heard: OCD.

In the name of intelligence, the characters are manifestations of a cold war morality that runs the gamut from questionable to despicable. A morality that claims it's good to do wrong to make things right. Ostensibly. The storyline is a telltale look at the world of the professional bureaucrats who wage war by other means.

Throughout the series, which has the look and feel of an insider's point of view, the cold war is brought into stark focus through these black and white thinking men in boxes, who play deadly zero sum games as though the fate of the world hinges upon their every move. The way of life Burnside so ardently protects and worships, what has it brought him? Behind each word he speaks, is a hiss that resonates with the finess of a bullet seeking out its target. For all his self-assurances that he's saving the Free World from annihilation, if ever there was a miserable cynic locked in Hell by his belief system, it's him. So what is he really fighting, scheming and losing sleep over? The enemy. It's all about keeping one step ahead of the KGB. Try to image Burnside without an enemy. He thrives on and lives for the enemy. An enemy not chosen by him, but inculcated into him by others on his side. The truth be known to him, he doesn't have to look very far to find his own worse enemy. But he doesn't think beyond his all-consuming belligerent cynicism, it just comes with the territory. So with the blind certainty of someone who fanatically believes his own lies, he gives unquestioning obedience to his jingoism. And paranoia. For him, detente is a word used by journalists who peddle fiction in the guise of news. But, hey, he's one of the good guys. They're on our side. Which side is that? you might well ask. Forward or backward? Right or left? Or doesn't it matter as long as we're vain and devout enough to believe it's our good side?

Like the cold war itself, Burnside is tragic without being noble or heroic. He starts from the premise that certain realities are immutable, e.g., them and us, free and red. Then he dedicates his whole existence to attempting to change them to suit his purposes or to keeping others from changing them. He's overly sensitive and enamored of the special relationship with the CIA. His petulance, tantrums, lies and vicious manipulations are all for the good because, we're to believe, without the master/puppet relationship with the CIA and the special favors brokered by massaging the Langley behemoth, all would be lost. As in the empire would be put at risk and maybe, dare one even think it!? be history. As if the CIA would suddenly cast aside allies like Britain, and start cosying up to who? The Soviets?

Still, actor Roy Marsden is so in tune with his character that it's hard to imagine anyone else as Burnside. His eyes are the color of ice on a stormy day. With his lightning quick temper, his eyes flash with fire and smoke snorts out his nostrils. And you just know that whether he's fire or ice, you'd better not get too close or you'll get burned.

At the end of the Special Relationship episode, which could just as well have been titled, What's Love Got to Do with It? or Love Be Damned, Burnside is an anonymous figure who gets less significant as the camera pulls up and away. He disappears into a speck that forces us to see the big picture. It's all there, the connection between that speck and the city, the very heart of the civilization that is, after all, worth protecting. NIMBY be damned.

Sapphire and Steel

Sapphire and Steel are extraterrestrials who dwell in the shady side of time. They're what Dr Who would be if he wasn't Peter Pan's cousin. At times, Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) is a conduit for godly knowledge; at other times, she senses and intuits information, while Steel (David McCallum) reasons and understands. The combination, however, transcends testosterone engorged moralizing because Peter J. Hammond, the creator of the series, avoided the pitfall of having her shine in the reflected light of polished steel.

The limited production values make for interactive viewing in the sense that you have to exercise your imagination. But who needs scenery when Lumley's on screen? Hers is not a subtle beauty, but her acting is infinitely subtle, helped by a voice that invites you to linger forever on each word she says. Just right for Hammond's use of ambiguity as a device to keep us guessing and to spare him the need of answering troublesome questions posed by the plots and the ideas underlying them. For instance, the two heroes get trapped in empty space that's nowhere and forever, like they've fallen through a page of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. But if they're in empty space, how could it be empty? Even if they have been reduced to non-entities, they are still capable of thought, so then the question becomes: If a thought exists in space, is space empty? A thought requires time. If space is empty, where is time? Infinite space could well pose infinite possibilities, e.g., the corporations that intrude upon the final adventure with their Godzilla-sized credit cards, could rescue our heroes from Hammond's inchoate, ill-conceived limbo. Sapphire and Steel are left dangling in the space between lines where there's only one thing left to say, and they get to say it ad infinitum, ad nauseam: “Let's get out of--” dead stop, because in empty space there is no here or there, only forever.

All of us on this planet, by the by, are trapped in space. Like, does anyone know where we're going or who's taking us there? Hammond said in the extra that he knew the ending of Adventure 6 before he started writing it. Unfortunately, it shows. The ignoble ending is unworthy of the heroes, who deserve a more inspired, imaginative and intelligent fate.

Say Anything

Some people find it easy to love a nerd. They don't try to prove how much they love you by assailing your intelligence. Nor do they try to change you or make you look more presentable (= like everyone else). Their love doesn't diminish you in any way. They just want to love you and get you to love them. It takes a special kind of person to be that way, because they need the guts to trust themselves and the wherewithal to know how to get your attention and keep it.

Lloyd (John Cusack) is one of those people. At the beginning, he's warned by friends that getting a date with beautiful, brainy Diane (Ione Skye) is an impossible dream. But he's a guy who's looking for a “dare to be great situation.” He opens her heart with laughter and makes his heart vulnerable by giving it to her. Wrong move, because his heart isn't for the taking, it's for loving. She gives him a pen in return. Along with an excruciating mix of ecstacy and grief. Her best friend, who happens to be her father, tries to dissuade her from “championing mediocrity” by allowing Lloyd into her life.

Follow the pen. The one who ends up with it isn't her best friend. He's the one who will say anything to get and keep her allegiance.

Cameron Crowe draws his characters carefully and fully. They're flawed yet complete with varying degrees of spiritual, intellectual and emotional attainment and commitment. So he doesn't have to preach to make his point. The moral ambiguity generated by his characters does that for him.

Siam Sunset

Out of the blue, tragedy falls on the happy, sensible yuppy life of Perry, an industrial chemist. His wife is killed by a stroke of fate, and his life is shattered. Irrevocably altered. He can't make sense of the remaining fragments or of his pain that leaves him so numb he can't get to that place inside where he can feel enough to acknowledge the horror of his loss and let himself grieve. He's excruciatingly sad without feeling it, and dangerously disconnected from the normal flow of reality. Life is meaningless without feelings and the universe is whacked, but he can't escape his demons. They manifest themselves as disaster that pursues him. Relentlessly. In his journey from England to the Australian outback, the arrow of fate points directly at him, but the senseless harbingers of death don't visit him directly because his spirit is already dead to the world.

Perry gets the point. He doesn't try to relate to a reality devoid of love, where his demons rule as sadistic deities. All he wants is peace, which for him is the color of his wife's hair when they were on a beach in Thailand. Finding the color is no mean task, given that he's lost in a black and white world. For a colorist such as himself, that's pure unmitigated hell. But there's a way out because he understands that what he seeks is not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but the rainbow itself. A part of it that for him colors the whole world. He has to break free from a state of being in which all the colors that ever were feel the same. Through it all, however, he keeps his faith in the power of color to touch us. And when he finds release, the capacity of music and color to evoke emotions we are oftentimes too afraid or demoralized to set free, come together with Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

For those of you who have a love/hate relationship with your therapist, you can watch with cathartic glee what happens to the psycho-babbling villain. You name the metaphor, it zaps him. Metaphors abound in Siam Sunset. Whether you watch it for laughs or explore the depths of the ideas that color its world, something in it is bound to touch you.

Small Back Room

Edgy, dark and intense, Small Back Room, zooms in on Sammy, a war-weapons scientist, and stays uncomfortably close to him, giving the film a claustrophobic feel that never lets up even in the outdoor scenes. Our hero is one of the anonymous “boys” who are relegated to small rooms underneath grand government buildings made of stone and even stronger stuff like a consummate lust for power. The kind of place that the holy powers at be would have seen fit to house da Vinci when he was sketching out his war machines. While his Machiavellian “superiors” trod on him from above and unsuspecting folk walk to and fro overhead, Sammy formulates ideas that are realized in megadeath. Ideas that wars are fought with and power-loving bureaucrats' reputations are built on. Ideas that blow children to bits in the name of all that's holy.

An amputee with only one foot, Sammy doesn't have the stomach for the politics of arm chair warriors whose egos blanket his universe. In his desperation to feel whole again, he uses Susan, his lover, as a crutch and settles for the highly addictive yet fleeting peace that comes from the explosive release of self-pity and rage. He understands that weakness is not in being wounded or in the ensuing pain, but in surrendering to it.

An enduring peace eludes him, however, because he seeks redemption in drugs and denial rather than in courage. His demons tick, tick, tick away like the clock mechanism in the head of a bomb. He tries to keep them contained in a whiskey bottle, but he comes uncorked when Susan isn't there for him to lean on and rag at. He aches for her like his missing foot. And like his foot she has no business being separated from him. So his love for her is contaminated with a pathological envy. He says to her that women “don't worry about anything except being alive or dead, and being dead to them means beginning to smell.” Unreasoning animal that she is, Susan takes his malicious drivel with a hint of a smile, like she can smell the putrid soul of a rat, dead or alive. Some things, like some back room boys, are better left undisturbed under rocks.

Star Trek: Shore Leave

The concept behind Theodore Sturgeon's Shore Leave episode of the original Star Trek series is enticing with tremendous potential. Captain Kirk puts it in a nutshell when he says, “The greater the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play.” That's true up to a point, but the gist of the amusement park the crew members partake of, however inadvertently, is that play isn't necessarily simple. Also, if it's true that great minds have a greater need for play than simple minds, then Yeoman Barrows should have been left aboard the Enterprise to pick the lint off Kirk's chair, and Spock should have joined the party at the park.

In a place where you only have to imagine your fondest wishes to have them appear, Barrows wishes for what she says “all a girl needs”, namely, to be sexually assaulted. She's a screaming nincompoop who keeps conjuring up attacks on herself so she can latch onto a man to protect her—no doubt from her rank stupidity. Spock, on the other hand, can't see the point in rest that doesn't leave him comatose. The logic behind play as rest escapes him, which is an abyssmal failure of imagination. Yet he's supposed to be an intelligent, sentient being. Sturgeon's logic is haywire. I don't buy the idea that if your intelligence isn't littered by a panoply of conflicting emotions such as Kirk's, then you don't have a need for fun and games. There are all sorts of ways to play. Work as play, for one. Spock could create ways to make the park more enjoyable for others then join the recreators where the real action is. This is a park, after all, that plays with reality. A place, in other words, for gods to amuse themselves. Surely I'm not the only one who remembers the SPOCK FOR GOD t-shirts.

The Sure Thing

Alison and Gib bicker their way across a continent and into each others hearts, and yours too, if you let them. Throughout their journey they screw up, give up, loosen up, fess up, make up and grow up. All in the service of teaching him that no matter how alluring and tantalizing your fantasies are, reality gives you more bang for your buck. Even when the fantasies are a sure thing.

The creators of the film crafted the characters affectionately without a hint of contempt. Alison has organized her life into a perfect tyranny ruled by her schedule book, while Gib is bent enough to keep her from going in straight lines in the lap pool. Exuding a way-too-cool-to-be-a-nerd persona, he tries to seduce girls with an astronaut routine that has them encapsulated in space with giant thrusters blasting. The world simply isn't big enough to contain his imagination. The high school girls don't get it, but Alison is an ivy league nerd. When Gib places their conversation amongst the stars, she finishes his sentences with allusions to classical mythology. As Gib says, somewhere out there is some intelligent being who is looking back at us and wondering who and what is out there. And the being's name could be Andromeda, Cassiopeia or Perseus.

John Cusack, who portrays Gib, infuses iconoclastic life into the nerds he plays. In Sixteen Candles, he steals every scene he's in. He's the quintessential budding nerd, with just the right mix of bewilderment and curiosity, but what makes him particularly delightful is that he's not a concave-chested, bespectacled, undersized or oversized misfit. Au contraire. He's a good-looking kid whose life isn't controlled by the vagaries of vainglorious hormones in overdrive. Not yet, anyway. But in The Sure Thing, Gib's hormones have blasted into warpspeed. Go ahead, ride with them.

Theodora Goes Wild

Dumb title, but the film is a delightful satire on the wickedness of middle-class morality.

Theodora (Irene Dunne) lives in Lynnfield, a small uprighteous town where it's a sin to have a little fun because civilization hasn't arrived there. So the townsfolk go around saying “there ain't no evil.” Not in Lynnfield there ain't. That's about all anyone gets to say—out loud, anyway—because everything else is censored by the fierce warriors guarding middle-class morality, aka, the old biddies of the literary circle. Theodora teaches Sunday school, plays the organ in church and writes “brazen filth” under a pseudonym. Filth that covertly pays the bills of her parental aunts as well as the shotgun for her friend's wedding.

Michael (Melvyn Douglas), or Brassy No Account as he's known in the literary circle, enhances Theodora's sexy trash with his illustrations. Saying that it's a crying shame for her to waste her talent, beauty, youth and dreams on the repressive cloister she's trapped in, he promises to break her out of Lynnfield and give her to the world. Not much of a promise, considering that she's already done that herself through her writing. However, he understands that any morality that deprives you of your soul by making you be untrue to yourself is more than a crying shame, it's downright sinful. He can see only too clearly how she's boxed in by placing too much value on the opinion of others. Yet his freedom is sourced in a snobbery that allows him to say and do whatever he likes as long as the right sort of people don't know about it. His is a commonplace conceit shared by the old biddies he condescends to ridicule. As with them, his snobbery is nourished not by conscience, but by hypocrisy that boxes in his options in return for the appearance of being free.

Theodora can see only too well that he thwarts his own freedom. How she shows him is wickedly funny and charming without being sentimental. Simply shocking, scandalous, disgraceful fun, especially when you look around today and see how clever people have become at protecting their little boxes while denying they exist.

Z

Through a lens darkly, the photojournalist in Z places himself in harm's way to uncover the truth. Not the truth being manufactured by the military junta, but the truth being hidden behind loaded guns. First the junta imprisons Rhadamanthys, then they kill Socrates. No matter how many times we kill Socrates, some people just don't get the message. And to make sure others don't, they kill the messenger. Z is great cinema but disturbing in its implications.