Crazy, Stupid, Title

Am I the only one who is bothered by this? (Well, no, as it turns out.)

A poster recently appeared at the Clinton-Washington stop on the C line, informing me that Steve Carell is starring in a movie called Crazy Stupid Love.

So far so good. I like Steve Carell well enough, and the movie is getting good reviews.

Then I learn that the actual title of the movie (despite the lack of commas on the poster) is Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Why? Why? Why? Why is it that a studio can spend millions of dollars making a movie and not spare a few bucks to hire a reasonably bright middle-school student to check that the title doesn’t violate basic rules of American punctuation?

It occurred to me, as the article linked above suggests, that some might say that “crazy” and “stupid” are not actually adjectives modifying “love” but that all three words are just jumbled together because of their associations. It’s possible, but it would be weird. And I doubt it.

I have not been this annoyed by a movie title since Jacknife with Robert DeNiro. 

The mysterious Jay Landsman

Jenn and I have been watching The Wire on DVD, and are in the middle of season 3. In the last episode, the mostly useless sergeant Jay Landsman, who is usually seen eating something, delivers a profane and heartfelt eulogy at an Irish wake, for a rather average cop who collapsed while using a Stairmaster.

For a couple of episodes before that, I had noticed the name Jay Landsman in the credits too. What was going on? Was an actor named Jay Landsman playing a cop with the same name? And if so, why?

Retired cop Greg Redmer explains it all on his blog. Seems that there was a real Jay Landsman on the Baltimore PD. After retiring he turned to acting, and played the mild-manned gray-mustachioed Lt. Dennis Mello on The Wire. Meanwhile the portly Delaney Williams played a character based on and named after the original, real Jay Landsman.

To make things even more interesting, the real Jay Landsman was also the inspiration for Detective Munch, played by Richard Belzer, whose character has appeared on no fewer than eight different TV series—allegedly a record.

A dissenting opinion on The Tree of Life

Critics, to judge from the 4- and 5-star ratings, love Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life. As far as I can tell, the audience I saw it with on Memorial Day loved it too. They didn’t applaud when the credits started, but they sat, as they had for the previous two hours and twenty minutes, in a reverential hush.

I didn’t really like The Tree of Life. One test might be whether I would see it again. No—or not without a pretty good reason.

I feel bad about not liking The Tree of Life, for a few reasons. (Spoilers below.)

First, Malick’s Days of Heaven is one of my favorite films of all time.

Second, Malick is a true cinema artist. The images he puts on the screen are stunning, and their effect can be so subtle that you would miss them on the small screen. Since this is the age of the small screen, that is a daring way to go.

Third, Malick makes very few films. Like Orson Welles, he is a perfectionist. When he does release a new film, I want to see it and I want to like it.

Fourth, the acting in The Tree of Life very good—fortunately, because the script is extremely minimal. The young boys seem natural, and Jessica Chastain as the wife rivals Liv Ullmann in what she can express through her face alone.

Fifth, the music is excellent.

Sixth, The Tree of Life reminds me of a few other films that I liked a lot: Days of Heaven, The Fountain, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even Oblomov, of which I remember almost nothing but a long, heartbreaking final shot of a little boy running through a sunlit field. Yet I didn’t like The Tree of Life as well as any of these.

And seventh, the family in The Tree of Life is not so different from mine. The film focuses on three boys who are growing up in the 1950s in what is apparently a suburb of Waco, Texas. The youngest son dies at the age of 19, though offscreen and for unknown reasons. The oldest son appears later as a troubled and middle-aged Sean Penn.

I grew up as the oldest of three sons in the 1960s, in a small town in upstate New York, and I lost my youngest brother too—later in life, though still too young.

So what’s my problem? Why don’t I share the euphoria of so many professional film critics? Am I a Philistine who doesn’t appreciate gorgeous images? Has my attention span been shortened by email and video games?

No, I love gorgeous images, and I loved the ones in The Tree of Life, including the recapitulation of life on earth, and even the surprisingly tender (and improbable) encounter between two dinosaurs. And my attention span is long enough for watching Barry Lyndon and reading Proust.  But is it unreasonable to expect a little more story?

What happens in The Tree of Life? We see three boys grow up in Texas. Their father (Brad Pitt) is an ex-navy man who flies planes, or maintains them, or something. He gets a phone call that he can barely hear due to the thundering engines of the planes. His youngest son has died.

We go back to the dawn of time, and follow the earth from a ball of molten glop through the first stirrings of life, the first tree, and the strangely compassionate dinosaurs.

Then we return to the family in Texas, in the years before the youngest son’s death. The father is working as in a plant of some sort. He plays the piano, and we learn that he once dreamed of being a great musician. He is a strict father, and oppresses his family, including his warm and sympathetic wife. He angers his oldest son so that by the time he is twelve or so he wishes for his father’s death. In flash-forwards we see Sean Penn standing around moodily in glassy skyscrapers. He could be an architect of some sort. He has almost no lines.

The father, who has always prided himself on being tough and self-sufficient, loses his job at the plant. The family is forced to leave their home and go who knows where. And that’s about it.

Moment by moment, The Tree of Life is often ravishing. But is it well crafted as a film? And is it really that deep?

The Old Masters with Sam Waterston

Having already bought my tickets, I feel no hesitation in letting you know about the staged reading of The Old Masters with Sam Waterston and Brian Murray, at the Met on June 20 and 27.

If reviews of previous productions can be believed, this will be a treat—even without the trappings of a full-dress play. And if, like me, you have enjoyed Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields and I’ll Fly Away, and if you are still smarting from the cancellation of the original and best incarnation of Law & Order, you might want to catch this. I’m not familiar with Brian Murray, but anyone who’s been nominated for Tony awards in The Crucible, The Little Foxes, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can’t be all bad.

Mysterious glowing orb

Walking home through the fog over the Manhattan Bridge, I glanced to the south, over the choppy, shadowed surface of the East River, and noticed an intensely glowing sphere. It floated close to the ground near the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge, glowing with a milky-white light. The sphere bobbed gently up and down, as if it were examining something in the area.

I reached the end of the bridge, walked through the Jehovah’s Witnesses compound, down Adams Street and past Grimaldi’s until I reached the entrance of the park on the riverfront. I cautiously entered Brooklyn Bridge Park and gained a closer look at the mysterious orb.

Surely there was no rational explanation for this apparition. Could it be a return visit by the little gray aliens who kidnapped a young woman near the bridge in November 1989?

I crept closer and snapped another photo. White tents and high-intensity lights were visible, and a bustle of activity. The glowing craft had apparently been captured and was linked to the ground by a tether of some kind.

As I took the picture, a muscular young man with short black hair and a bomber jacket came up to me.

“Bet you’re wondering what this is about,” he said.

I nodded.

“We’re filming a Range Rover ad. No UFOs, fortunately!” He gave a strained laugh.

“Range Rover,” I said. “Sure.” There was an awkward silence. I turned slowly and made my way out of the park. When I glanced back he was still looking at me.