FILM REVIEW

Becker (1998)

“Why do women always scream when they're surprised? Can't you just clutch your heart and drop dead like a man?”
— Dr. John Becker

Now that the internet connection at home has been restored fully (see earlier post), I thought I’d do a quick short piece for the Overlooked/Forgotten films and television meme over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. I saw a couple of fairly good films over the past few days, not counting Hitman, but neither of them fits in the above category (this one may not either).

I also watched a recap of the week’s episodes of Two and a Half Men and something about Charlie Sheen’s character, the self-centered Charlie Harper, rang a bell. I mean, he reminded me of someone I had seen on television before, in another entertaining sitcom. 

Not Frank Barone. The patriarch of the Barone family is cranky and obnoxious and openly critical of his wife Marie but he’s not egocentric in the way the lustful Charlie is.

It was someone else…someone with a medical degree and a stethoscope around his neck, someone who hated the world and made sure that everyone hated him. A description like that could only fit Dr. John Becker who one reviewer at IMDb aptly called a “misanthrope” — yes, he would be the original Charlie Harper minus the obsession with women and sex. 

Becker, played by Ted Danson, is a good doctor and a cynical bastard and is convincing in the shoes of both the characters. He runs a clinic in the Bronx along with Margaret (Hattie Winston), his superefficient receptionist whose opinion of her employer is none too flattering, and Linda (Shawnee Smith), his assistant who has her head in the cloud and her two feet above the ground.

Dr. John Becker: The world is full of idiots, and someone needs to point it out to them or they will never know. 

But, Dr. Becker is a decent man who cares about his patients though he is also wont to send them off with a cure and a depression at the same time. 

After peppering Margaret and Linda with a liberal dose of his profound cynicism, Becker takes his misanthropic ways to his favourite diner across the street, to Reggie (Terry Farrell) who runs the place, his blind friend Jake (Alex Désert) who runs a newsstand inside the diner, and the effeminate Bob (Robert Benito), the fast-talking super at Becker’s apartment who drops in frequently, to ask Reggie for a date rather than to order a meal. Reggie and Becker have a thing for each other but neither will admit it.

Dr. John Becker: If you and I were the only people on the face of the Earth, that would be the only thing we'd have in common.

John Becker, who smokes cheap cigarettes, hates his life and hates other people’s lives too and has a grouse about everything and everyone, a fact he doesn’t hide from Reggie, who is quite exasperated by his attitude, and Jake, who takes his friend’s sarcasm in his stride. 

Ironically, Becker’s angst, about nothing really in particular, is what gives the sitcom its entertainment value. The thirty-minute serial, which ran from 1998 through 2004, is hilarious with deadpan Beckerisms coming at you from the start, as the mighty opinionated Becker takes on the world even if no one takes him seriously. Becker’s rile is so much bile but, hey, there’s a John Becker in all of us.

The tagline of Becker, created, written and produced by Dave Hackel, is “His bedside manner is no manners at all!” I’d modify that to “If you are happy and feeling on top of the world, steer clear of Dr. John Becker!”

Dr. John Becker: Oh great, no cigarettes, the perfect cherry on this crap sundae of a morning.

Ted Danson is a talented and versatile actor and one of the best comedians to come out of Hollywood in the past three decades. I remember him most in his comedy roles, especially in Three Men and a Baby and its sequel Three Men and a Lady, as well as the very touching film Dad alongside Jack Lemmon and Ethan Hawke, and Getting Even with Dad with Macaulay Culkin. He plays a father in the initial two films, a father and a son in the third, and once again a father in the fourth – roles that seemed to have been made for him. I have heard much about his long-running sitcom Cheers though I have never seen it.

Hitman: The movie of the game

Last week, my home Wi-Fi modem went bust and I was without an internet connection till this morning when the new D-Link wireless modem router I purchased on Saturday finally put us back into cyberspace. Since I started blogging, I have been watching very little television, save for the odd serial like Two and a Half Men or a classic on TCM or MGM. The lack of internet over the weekend left me more time to catch a film or two (as well as renew my USB-based wireless broadband device). I watched Hitman (2007) on HBO with my teenage son and I quite enjoyed it.

While I was vaguely familiar with this movie, my son knew all about it. He told me that it was based on the ‘Hitman’ game series first released in 2000. In fact, he even had one of the game CDs in his PlayStation collection. I have never played this game with him before.

Hitman, the film, is about a cold-blooded super assassin called Agent 47, played by Timothy Olyphant, who works for a secret entity called “The Organisation” or “The Agency” that could well be the CIA. Agent 47 knows no emotion other than the motion of killing, and killing quietly and swiftly. He is embroiled in a political conspiracy and finds himself on the run from Interpol and the Russian military even as his handlers disown their once blue-eyed boy and put his enemies on his trail. As Agent 47 goes on a killing spree, he meets Nika Boronina (Olga Kurylenko), the mistress of Russian President Mikhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). He is ordered to kill Nika because she supposedly witnesses his assassination of Belicoff who turns out to be a body-double.

Agent 47 spares Nika’s life because, in spite of being genetically engineered, he is still capable of developing feelings and falls in love with her. In the end he kills all his enemies including the hitman sent out to eliminate his girl —“I told you to leave her alone. You should have listened,” he says, posing with his long-range rifle over the dead body of the sniper on the terrace. 

Timothy Olyphant looks the part of the Hitman from the video game. He is tall, well built, and bald with a tattoo at the back of his head which distinguishes his kind of people from others. He is not the only numbered agent. He wears a dark suit and a red tie. He has a stern look on his face, he speaks without moving his lips much, and he seldom smiles. He raises his gun, fires point blank, and walks away. Just like that. When he is not using his two silver guns, he uses his hands and legs to engage his enemies in mind-boggling martial arts. But, in spite of his don’t-you-mess-with-me persona, Agent 47 doesn’t look as menacing as you would expect a hired genetically-engineered assassin to look.

Agent 47 is also highly trained to observe and store everything in his brain, or maybe he has a sixth sense, that enables him to perceive certain things that normal people cannot. For instance, while dining with Nika in a restaurant, she asks him, “The woman, two tables behind you — what’s she wearing? Agent 47 counters: “The one with the red hair and the silk dress — facing you?” When Nika nods, he says quietly, “That’s not a woman,” referring to the transvestite that Nika and the viewers can see over his shoulders.

Hitman is full of the Arnold Schwarzenegger type of one liners, inane but funny. Here are a few of them, courtesy IMDb, just so I get the quotes right.

Yuri Marklov (screaming): You bastard!
Agent 47: Yell all you like — the Lord himself won't hear you.

Agent 47: Nika…
Nika Boronina: Yes?
Agent 47: Stop talking or I'll put you back in the trunk.

Agent 47: Eat your sandwich. I need to get some sleep.

Nika Boronina: What are you going to do?
Agent 47: What I do.

Nika Boronina: What colour underwear am I wearing?
Agent 47: You're not wearing any underwear.

Like I said, Agent 47 doesn’t talk much.

Hitman is entertaining, the kind of film you can watch when your modem goes kaput and you are suddenly left without internet. Now for 'Hitman' the game…

BOOK REVIEW

The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock 

by Anna Katharine Green (1895)

This novella is my contribution to Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the fine mix of reviews by other book lovers.

“God! What have I done!” 

Last evening, I spent a pleasant one hour reading The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock, a 50-page novella by American poet and novelist Anna Katharine Green who is regarded as one of the earliest writers of detective stories. She introduced her now little-known detective, Inspector Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force, in The Leavenworth Case in 1878, well before his more famous counterparts Sherlock Holmes came to life in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and Hercule Poirot made his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).

In The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock, which I read as an ebook on my desktop, Ebenezer Gryce is a young, energetic and determined police detective who is entrusted with the investigation of the high-profile murder of Mr. Hasbrouck, a wealthy and influential resident of the Colonnade in Lafayette Place. The murder creates a stir in the neighbourhood as men and women peer out of their windows and doorways and gather in small groups to talk about the crime and who might have committed it.

After his customary interrogation of Mr. Hasbrouck’s family, consisting of his wife and three servants, Ebenezer Gryce steps out onto the balcony and looks at the people gathered below, when he spots an attractive woman holding on to her husband who matches her good looks. The seemingly devout couple, he discovers, are Doctor Constant Zabriskie, a blind but highly skilled doctor, and his wife, the very graceful Helen Zabriskie. He also finds out that Hasbrouck and Zabriskie were not just neighbours but also esteemed friends.

Inspector Ebenezer Gryce’s investigations lead him to the house of the Zabriskies where he meets Helen, apprehensive in her bearing, and Constant, who is so agitated as to confess outright that it was he who killed his dear old friend. The dutiful wife, in a desperate effort to save her husband, pronounces his confession as the rambling of a blind man with an unsettled mind. She insists that her husband is hallucinating and is taking responsibility for Mr. Hasbrouck’s unaccountable death. The doctor is equally adamant and implores the inspector to take him in rather than be certified as a mad man. 

Anna Katharine Green

“No, no, it is false! I will never believe that your hands have been plunged in blood. You are my own pure-hearted Constant, cold, perhaps, and stern, but with no guilt upon your conscience, save in your own wild imagination.”

Stricken by guilt, Doctor Zabriskie makes an unexpected offer to Inspector Gryce and his superiors at the New York Metropolitan Police Force, a proposition that causes further anguish to Helen, even as experts judge him insane and incapable of shooting anyone. To prove his sharp skills with a pistol, even in his blind condition, and show that he is as sane as the rest of them, the doctor offers to shoot at a clock no sooner it strikes five.

“Can you shoot a man dead without seeing him?” asked the Superintendent, with painful effort.

“Give me a pistol and I will show you,” was the quick reply.

The blind doctor hears the clock go off, turns and fires, except it’s the wrong clock, held by his wife and set to go off a full minute before the one he was supposed to fire at, to prove his sanity and his capability with a gun. Helen dies on the spot but not before telling her husband that she could never have survived the proof that he had, unwittingly, killed Mr. Hasbrouck.

Inspector Ebenezer Gryce suspected the truth behind the murder long before this tragic turn of events. Doctor Zabriskie, it seems, loved his wife deeply but was also insanely jealous. Suspecting Helen of having an affair, he returns home one night with the explicit purpose of shooting her mysterious lover. In spite of his blindness, the doctor never misses his doorstep but that night he does and stops at the next door…that of Mr. Hasbrouck.

“Am I not correct in my surmises, Dr. Zabriskie, and is not this the true explanation of your crime?”

With a strange look, he lifted up his face. “Hush!” said he, “You will awaken her. See how peacefully she sleeps! I should not like to have her awakened now, she is so tired, and I…I have not watched over her as I should.”

This may seem like one spoiler too many but there is more to this fascinating story.

The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock is only the first of forty books by Anna Katharine Green I have read and I am already willing to certify that she is the original queen of detective fiction. She tells a captivating story in a simple and lucid style even as she astounds the reader with her rich and flawless narrative. There is an old charm to her writing reminiscent of the period she lived and wrote in.

Green has an uncanny eye for detail, particularly legalese, which she may have inherited from her father, a defence lawyer from Brooklyn, New York. Her characters, though just three in number, have depth and are entirely convincing. For instance, Green’s characterisation of the blind and intelligent doctor, Constant Zabriskie, and his lovely wife Helen Zabriskie is so real they seem to come alive through the pages, as if you were watching them play out their emotional drama on screen. 

Inspector Ebenezer Gryce, on the other hand, is an excellent specimen of a detective who, I have no doubt, influenced fictional sleuths of the future. He is a clever and calm-headed detective who holds on to the case till he has solved it. He goes about solving Mr. Hasbrouck’s murder with precision and in the absence of clues because there aren’t any. The mystery unfolds as you read. He is described as “eccentric” though I did not find him peculiar in any way. In fact, Gryce is portrayed as sensitive and considerate, especially towards Helen for whom he has a deep admiration. He sympathises with her plight and tells her, rather quietly, that he is her friend. This is his story and he recounts it as a spectator in spite of being at the heart of the mystery.

The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock is a superb piece of fiction by Anna Katharine Green and one of the best short novels I have read in recent times. I intend to read her other books most of which are available online legally.

FILM REVIEW

Cocoon (1985)

Cocoon is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other fascinating reviews over there. 

“Men should be explorers, no matter how old they are. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm going.”
— Art Selwyn (Don Ameche) 

No one likes to grow old, fall ill, and die. Every one wants to live forever, with health, vigour, and a dash of spice. Like the elderly folks in Cocoon.

Director Ron Howard made this enchanting film under the sf banner probably because Cocoon can never happen in our life and on our planet. You need aliens to make you feel young and happy and invigorated all over again. Prozac and Viagra is the closest thing we have to a fleeting rejuvenation of mind and body. Crack is no more than a mind-numbing addiction spelling slow death. Of course, there is spiritual nirvana, but how many of us get that far.

So Howard leaves it to a small group of intelligent and peace-loving extraterrestrials from a distant planet called Antarea to inject a new life-force into the elderly people living, with their aches and pains, in a retirement home in Florida. The four aliens, disguised as humans and led by Walter (the very gifted Brian Dennehy), travel to earth to retrieve the cocoons his kind had left behind thousands of years ago.

But things don’t go as the aliens plan: instead of taking back the lost Antareans in their giant cocoons, they offer the “vacant seats” to the elderly who, except for one gentleman who has lost his wife and doesn’t believe in distorting the divine laws of nature, happily accompany the aliens to their new home — where there is no decease, decay and death and where an immortal life awaits them all. 

Wilfrod Brimley (behind), Hume Cronyn and Don Ameche.

There are some unforgettable moments in Cocoon. For instance, when three elderly men from the old-age home — Art Selwyn (Don Ameche), Ben Luckett (Wilford Brimley) and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn) — accidentally discover the life-force in a swimming pool (where the cocoons are stored) and are never the same again; or when one of them inadvertently spreads word about the magical powers of the pool and all hell breaks loose among the retirees, much to the annoyance of Walter; or when Jack Bonner (Steve Guttenberg), a local boat owner, falls for alien Kitty (Tahnee Welch) and the two, presumably, make cosmic love in the swimming pool without physical contact.

In spite of his overbearing presence in most of his films, Brian Dennehy is rather restrained as the alien chief, Walter, but that’s because the role demands it. He is an alien and already far superior to earthlings. Hollywood veteran Don Ameche is his usual affable self, the trademark smile a permanent fixture on his face. The amiable Steve Guttenberg, hired by the aliens to ferry them to and from the spot where the Atlantis sank, the original site of the cocoons, is in awe of all the strange things happening around him but he knows how to keep a good secret. 

Steve Guttenberg and Tahnee Welch make cosmic love.

Cocoon, as far as I can recall and at least among the movies I have seen, has the maximum number of elderly people in one film, stealing the show from beginning till end. They are all character actors, most of them well known, such as, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Jack Gilford, Maureen Stapleton, Gwen Verdon, and Herta Ware. All of them reprised their “youthful” roles in the 1988 sequel Cocoon: The Return. Sadly, however, none of them, including Don Ameche, is alive today.

In Cocoon, Ron Howard tackles the subject of old age and death, which haunts every one at some point or the other in their lives, and the perpetual longing for immortality in the human heart, with a great deal of sensitivity. The film is a celebration of the indefatigable human spirit. Though classified as a sf film, it could pass off as a fairy tale — charming all in all.

Walter (Brian Dennehy): I want you all to consider what I am about to suggest to you. You people seem to want what we've got. Well, we have room for you. We have room for you and about 30 of your friends. You would be students of course, but you'd also be teachers. And the new civilisations you would be travelling to would be unlike anything you've ever seen before. But I promise you, you will all lead productive lives. 

Ben Luckett (Wilford Brimley): Forever? 

Walter: We don't know what forever is. 

In case you missed, I wrote a small piece titled The horror of horror films on June 30, 2012.

Charles Dickens on copyright

English author Charles Dickens had strong views about copyright and its infringement by publishers and newspapers, as evident from this letter he wrote his close friend and brother-in-law, Henry Austin, an American architect and artist, on May 1, 1842. Not much has changed since Dickens’ angry outburst against “scoundrel booksellers” and “detestable newspaper(s)” a hundred and seventy years ago.

“I am glad you exult in the fight I have had about the copyright. If you knew how they tried to stop me, you would have a still greater interest in it. The greatest men in England have sent me out, through Forster, a very manly, and becoming, and spirited memorial and address, backing me in all I have done. I have despatched it to Boston for publication, and am coolly prepared for the storm it will raise. But my best rod is in pickle.

“Is it not a horrible thing that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard, and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery door-mat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? 

“Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country who only ask to live by writing? I vow before high heaven that my blood so boils at these enormities, that when I speak about them I seem to grow twenty feet high, and to swell out in proportion. Robbers that ye are, I think to myself when I get upon my legs, here goes!”

[The above section has been excerpted from The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol.1 (of 3), 1833-1856, edited by Georgina Hogarth, his sister-in-law, and Mamie Dickens, his eldest daughter, under Project Gutenberg License.]

JUKE BOX

Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
by The Four Aces

Love is a many splendored thing
It's the April rose
That only grows in the early spring
Love is nature's way of giving
A reason to be living
The golden crown that makes a man a king

This is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. The lyrics and music are soulful. The song, which first played in the 1955-film Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, was written and composed by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain respectively. The music duo collaborated on the original score for several films including "Secret Love" in Calamity Jane, 1954. They won the Oscar for both these songs.

Since the song played out in the William Holden-Jennifer Jones romantic film, set in Hong Kong, it has been recorded by various singers like Nat King Cole, Engelbert Humperdinck, Andy Williams, The Four Aces, Frank Sinatra, Ringo Starr, Neil Sedaka, and Connie Francis who sang it in Italian. 

So far I have only heard two versions, those by The Four Aces and Engelbert Humperdinck. Though I have loved nearly every song of Humperdinck and though he sings this number well, I like The Four Aces version more. They sing it slowly and the chorus by the American quartet blends in really well with the music, the gentle highs and lows at just the right pitch not to mention the element of Chinese music in the beginning. Humperdinck sings Love Is a Many Splendored Thing in his trademark deep voice which somehow didn't work for me. 

Love Is a Many Splendored Thing belonged to my parents' generation and yet I can easily identify with the song and the era it was recorded in. It reminds you of the innocence and simplicity of life back then and kind of makes you homesick.

The horror of horror films

Which horror films scared you the most? I was fourteen when The Exorcist chilled me to the bone. I saw the movie at an aunt’s place one late night. It was raining heavily and I had to return home through a dark and narrow alley running through a high-walled home for the aged and a deserted home for the mentally challenged. I made it home safely but swore never to watch a horror film again. It’s now more than three decades, the possessed face of Regan is still fresh in my memory.

Back then, morbid curiosity got the better of me. A couple of days after I saw Regan wrestle Father Karras on the floor and to his death, I watched Friday the 13th and The Omen series over two days, both in the dead of night – when the sands of time trickle slowly through the hourglass of horror.

I have a vague recollection of the many-parts Friday the 13th in which a mysterious entity murders young campers. It was a well-made thriller. 

The Omen was scarier because there was no hideous face to Damien, the antichrist, unlike in The Exorcist. I remember a few scenes from The Omen, most especially the end when a young Damien, having destroyed his family, stands at the top of the stairs of a building, looks in the distance (or at his chauffeur down below) and smiles. At least I think that’s how it went. Damien Thorn was a cute kid who won many hearts; you couldn't believe he was also the devil incarnate.

Incidentally, The Omen was directed by Richard Donner who also gave us the Superman and Lethal Weapon series – a trilogy of supernatural, superhero and super-crime films.

These horror flicks were soon followed by The Entity whose ultimate scary proposition lay in its stalking music, like Jaws. Shut off the sound and you might as well be watching Mel Brooks tickling you to death. Two scenes were spooky – when the invisible entity slaps Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) in front of her dressing table, throws her on the bed and molests her, and when the front door slams in the end, indicating the demon has left for good. Has it really?

Yet another film that freaked me out was An American Werewolf in London, the terrifying metamorphosis of a young tourist from man to beast and beast to man. I saw parts of this cult film a few weeks ago but, thankfully, it didn’t hold.

In the mid-1980s, I saw quite a few horror films that bordered on the ridiculous, like Evil Dead that had a tree raping a woman or something like that, and A Nightmare on Elm Street that didn’t make much sense either; though, it had twenty-one year old Johnny Depp making his dream debut in a nightmare of a film.

Around this time I also saw The Fly on VCR. The 1958 original gave me the creeps, particularly the end scene where the wife of the half man-half fly scientist is forced to destroy it. I think the scientist, played by Vincent Price if I’m not mistaken, pleads with his wife to kill him after she recovers from the initial shock of seeing her husband’s face appended to the body of a fly, perched on a plant in their garden. I’m writing this straight from memory and I hope it’s the way I remember it. 

So, these are some of the horror films that scared the pants off me. How about you?