The Dark Knight reviewed

It seems that you have to love the new Batman picture, or risk the hatred of throngs of fanboys. Well, I didn't. "The most disappointing movie of the year," I say over at Popdose, and it doesn't get much better. Come and get me.

Grab some Couch Karma

Like Batman, I have a secret identity: away from entertainment I write about design for Array magazine. The folks behind the title have launched a new site, Couch Karma, dedicated to following the design current, wherever it leads. Whether you lust after the hottest furniture, or have never really appreciated the sex appeal of a chair, this site's for you.

Emmys lost in space

The Emmys were announced this morning, and there's no joy in Caprica yet again as Battlestar Galactica, which was teased as a "pre-nominee," failed to secure a Best Series nod (er, well, not quite, but I own up to my mistakes--see below.) No surprise, I guess, given the overall antipathy by awards panels to anything that smacks of sci-fi, but the show (and the similarly snubbed The Tudors) is surely better than nominees Boston Legal and Damages (how I hate lawyer programs) and the loathsome Dexter, whose moralizing and nihilism I find repellent.

I'm a little shocked that the much-acclaimed The Wire never brought home the bacon, nominations-wise, in its run on HBO; then again, I've never really seen it myself, outside of a stray episode or two. We still have the lauded John Adams miniseries sitting on our DVR. Perhaps both these programs will act as backup babysitters later this summer.

I don't follow the Emmys (and have never watched the ceremony, which must be a real mish-mash given the sheer tonnage of categories) but it seems like there are a fair amount of new shows getting attention, as the organization finally discovers basic cable. All eyes will be on the second season of AMC's excellent Mad Men, which starts July 27, to see if QC has been maintained (my guess is yes, but that naysayers will pounce on any dropoff from this critics' darling). Meanwhile, Emmy (which I congratulate for nominating Sharon Gless' Nip/Tuck crazy, who could stomp on Dexter's ass) has a half-season left to get it right on Battlestar Galactica (pictured).

Baby boom

Child advocacy groups are getting diaper rash, but we're riveted to Baby Borrowers, the first reality show I've paid any attention to since the salad days of The Apprentice. (HGTV, the home design channel, is usually on in the background, but there's only so much renovation and staging I can take before I tune out.) There is no game in this BBC adaptation, or, rather, there is one very important one--the game of life, as five teenage couples are obliged to figure out and cope with the demands of infants, pre-teens, young teens, and the elderly, in a weekly progression.

Most parents our age tune in for the laughs--the caregivers and the cared-for do their share of bozo things--and the opportunity to feel relieved that, hey, we're not doing such a bad job after all. For us, it's a kind of training exercise. As the notion of round-the-clock child care becomes very real to us, we feel the teens are getting a bad rap; How does anyone, at any age, in this situation know this stuff on the first go-round? There are plenty of books, and lots of received wisdom, but much of it comes down to high-wire improvisation learned on the job. The show calls itself "the ultimate in birth control," designed to dissuade the feckless teens to reconsider sexual experimentation, early marriage, and unplanned pregnancy (not in so many words, as NBC doesn't want to put off viewers to the right or left of mass audience tastes).

The strength of the show is that the kids (who spend three days in each parenting role, with the actual parents watching via closed circuit TV) continually frustrate our low expectations for them--after all, no one expects anything from teenagers, who operate in a fog of hormones and variable self-esteem. Somehow, they cope, sometimes wisely, and sometimes cunningly. The trained nanny who is standing by is rarely deployed, at least on the telecasts. The theme seems to be: Whatever works, within the boundaries that the teens come to set as suddenly responsible authority figures. (Kelsey and Sean are pictured.) Amusingly, when the teens fall out amongst themselves, they regress to the level of their charges, turning sullen and obstinate and locklng themselves in their rooms--bad behavior that, come to think of it, can be repeated at any age.

At the end of each show, the real parents meet the faux parents for a heart-to-heart. There are no bad guys on the show; even the worst children are adorable when silent and not throwing pillows. What the parents, who are our age and tend to lecture in a schoolteacher-ish way, don't seem to grasp is that their little darlings will someday soon be teenagers, with their own sets of challenges. Their attempts to "relate" are a little clueless; in tonight's episode, a white father gave a black teen "props" for helping his daughter with her math homework, a friendly yet somehow tone-deaf expression of solidarity. They would do well to look at the teens, who manage to curb their laziest impulses and do the work, as good role models for the future. We sure do!

Outcasts and Exiles

Reviewed this week at Popdose.com: Two big-studio, well-publicized movies you may have heard about. One of them is surprisingly good.

Was I surprised to read a review this morning of a picture, Death Defying Acts, that had flown completely under my radar. I'm pretty up on these things, and a new Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, Oscar and Lucinda), with Guy Pearce as Houdini and Catherine Zeta-Jones, is hardly on the fringes, like one of those "mumblecore" offerings that cost $10 to make. This saleable film is getting as marginal a release as possible. Even Houdini couldn't find it. Now, it looks slight and may not be any good, but you'd think it would attract a smidgen more interest.

The best picture of the week is also obscure, and has been for 47 years. Thom Andersen's fine documentary L.A. Plays Itself got me interested in seeing The Exiles (pictured), an "anti-theatrical" portrait of Native American life relocated to the anonymity of the big city that had pretty much become an outcast itself over the decades. Andersen, Charles Burnett (whose outstanding Killer of Sheep had also languished), and Milestone Films have nicked Kent Mackenzie's classic-in-waiting from the archives and are giving it a proper release, at Manhattan's IFC Center. (DVD will bring it to a wider audience.) See it if you can. The extraordinary black-and-white cinematography (by co-producer John A. Morrill) captures a subculture at its vanishing point, as the lower-class Bunker Hill neighborhood (a film noir staple, distinguished by its funicular railway) was leveled a few years later, forcing another diaspora of its residents. Bunker Hill was recreated for the 2006 film Ask the Dust, but here is the real deal, circa from when a gallon of gas cost 27 cents. Perhaps the DVD will answer what happened to the people whose struggles the film observes.

Roman Polanski gets a fairer hearing in the documentary Wanted and Desired, which is getting theatrical dates after an HBO run last month. While not absolving him of the statutory rape that led to his flight from the California, it argues, convincingly, that the star-struck judge had it in for the filmmaker, a view supported by both the defense and the prosecution. The director, Marina Zenovich, leans a little too heavily on film clips to pop-psychoanalyze Polanski (or what she had access to; Macbeth, which is not shown, seems the best evidence of a psyche under duress) but she has done her homework on the case, and lets the victim in the case speak eloquently for herself.

Uptight with Dassin and Dee

I hadn't seen Jules Dassin's Uptight, until the Brooklyn Academy of Music showed it yesterday afternoon as part of its Afro-Punk Festival. Nor had the rest of the audience. Nor, in fact, had its co-star and co-writer, Ruby Dee, who was present at the screening. She recalled seeing a version of the film, which Paramount let escape at the tail end of turbulent 1968, but not in its final form. "As we were finishing the shoot, Dr. King was assassinated, so Jules took his cameras down to Memphis and Atlanta and incorporated some of that footage into the beginning of the film," Dee said. "We then rewrote and reshot some of the film to reflect what had just happened."

Revisiting Uptight (the title on the print, not Up Tight!, as I have seen it in reference materials) is like opening a time capsule. Some of what's inside has faded away, but much of it has a surprising, close-to-the-ground vitality. Dee and co-star Julian Mayfield, a novelist, playwright, and political activist, knew the black power movement from the inside, and their observations--sharp, hopeful, and critical--shaped Dassin's idea to remake John Ford's 1935 classic The Informer in 60's America. This was Dassin's first U.S. production since 1950's Night and the City; the Communist witch hunts that seized Hollywood sent him into European exile, where after a period of assimilation he made the hits Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday, for which he was nominated for two Oscars in the blacklist-breaking year of 1960, and Topkapi (1964).

Dassin's post-Topkapi features are fairly difficult to see, and the received wisdom is that they aren't worth the effort. But Uptight encourages renewed exploration. It was filmed in Dee's hometown, Cleveland, in the Hough neighborhood, which had experienced racial unrest in July 1966. The shattered city, shot in morose color by the great Boris Kaufman, is as much a seething presence in the picture as New York is in Dassin's Naked City and the London of Night and the City. (With no photos from the film available online, I borrowed this image, taken during the location shoot, from Cleveland.com.) The image, suffused by the jangled soul of Booker T. and the M.G.'s that courses through the soundtrack, has a weary, morning-after texture that fits the aftermath of the assassination.

Dassin begins the picture with stirring footage of King's funeral procession (his casket, carried in a simple farm wagon, was drawn by mules), then cuts to the claustrophobia of the inner city, where revolutionaries sick of the repeated failure of his Gandhian tactics plot revenge. Guns are stolen, a security guard is killed, and agitator Johnny Wells (Max Julien, future star of The Mack) is on the run. Johnny is a friend of Tank (Mayfield), a laid-off steelworker, prone to drink, who is distrusted by most of the slicker, faster-talking rebels, led by the charismatic B.G. (Raymond St. Jacques). Tank, a symbol of black powerlessness and an anachronism in changing times, is pitied by his sometime girlfriend Laurie (Dee), a single mother at loose ends due to money troubles, and swayed by police informant Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne), who makes no bones about being "a nigger, a stoolpigeon, and a faggot." Spurned by the movement, Tank goes to the police with what he knows about Johnny, setting up a tense shootout and sealing his fate, the only black liberation he is fated to know.

Featuring a host of familiar faces in supporting parts (including Frank Silvera, Janet MacLachlan, Ketty Lester, Dick Anthony Williams, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, and Juanita Moore, kindly reproachful in a key scene) Uptight is a socially conscious neo-noir, a soul brother to Dassin's 40s and 50s pictures. The cast is fine, with Mayfield the reverse image of Richard Widmark's desperate slickster in Night and the City and Browne dignifying a stereotypical part (Dee mentioned that homosexual intellectuals like Clarence were also outcasts from the movement, though the movie segregates him a little too obviously.) Besides its portrait of the black community under siege by poverty and divisiveness the movie also offers Dassin's take on informants (clear-eyed and jaundiced in equal measure) and blacklisting, with a moderate figure (Silvera) warning of camps for dissidents should the revolution explode.

Uptight received sympathetic if unenthusiastic reviews from Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, and may have felt like salt rubbed into the open wound that was 1968 on its late December release. (Dee says Paramount was apprehensive about the movie, which in its brief release was as successful as Iraq war films are today.) Reviews mention an impatience with its dated, "with it" style, and I braced myself for a full-frontal assault of period camera tricks. But it never really came. The Informer had something of an Expressionist bent, and Uptight some correlative imagery. The credits unfold across an animated segment, a bleed of positive and despairing images etched in by Oscar-winning animators John and Faith Hubley. Death scenes are twinned with similarly spinning camerawork, one which cuts to a turntable in motion, and one sequence is filmed man-on-the-street style. The goofiest segment--where Tank teases caricatured white thrill-seekers in an arcade with a tirade about the forthcoming revolution, a scene shot in distorting funhouse mirrors--was warmly greeted by the audience, perhaps as a stylistic release from the nervous-making handheld and tracking shots prior.

Seeing Uptight after all these decades, in a 40th anniversary year rich with reflection and a new dream for America, proved a fitting epitaph for Dassin and Browne, both recently departed, and a happy ending for the 83-year-old Dee, who said tracking down the film had proved elusive till now (she mentioned another "lost" project, I believe a documentary she had produced about Joe Louis). BAM screens the picture (in an acceptable print) again this Tuesday, July 8, at 4:30pm. My hope for Uptight is that its distributor (or Legend Films, which has been putting some of Paramount's more obscure titles on DVD), will take on its first-ever home video release of Uptight as a not-so-far-in-the-future project.

More's the pity

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas More, martyred July 6 in 1535. You don't have to be a Catholic or an Anglican to celebrate, just a film or theater buff. You can rent the 1966 Oscar winner A Man for All Seasons (it doesn't look to be telecast anywhere, a good tie-in opportunity wasted) or the 1988 TV version, headlined by stars who passed away earlier this year (not by execution); figure out a day this fall to see Frank Langella in the Roundabout revival of Robert Bolt's play, its first on Broadway since the original production of 1961-1963; or go to Showtime on Demand and order up the fifth episode of the second season of The Tudors, where More (played by Jeremy Northam) meets his maker. More deserves no less.

Attend the Revolution

Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris will be presenting his acclaimed new book, Pictures at a Revolution, in a free program at the Donnell Library Center Auditorium (20 W. 53rd St. in Manhattan) on Thu., July 10, at 6pm. Subtitled "Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood," the book is an in-depth exploration of the very different films nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar, Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night. We cleared off a lot of space on our shelves this weekend and given how addictive the few pages I've read from this are I may have to restock them with a copy--or just borrow it from the library. Am I the only one who thinks Doctor Dolittle was robbed?