For as long as this write-up may be, I don’t personally have a whole lot to say about Starz’s “Spartacus,” mostly because Starz didn’t have a whole lot to offer up about “Spartacus” except a lot of talk from the show’s creative team.
Executive producer Rob Tapert describes it as “our reinterpretation of the famous Stanley Kubrick movie,” calling it “a hard-core, testosterone-driven action drama unlike anything on television right now” and “a totally R-rated, hard, hard show that still has all the things that you need in storylines but that delivers the action component that theatrical audiences expect from their entertainment.” Sounds great…but it would sound a lot more impressive if they actually had anything at all to show us or, indeed, had even cast Spartacus yet.
“Goddammit, I said I’M Spartacus!”
Granted, it’s promising that the show is being produced by Tapert and his longtime associate, Sam Raimi, and to have Steven S. DeKnight as head writer and show-runner is certainly good news for those who’ve followed his work on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” and “Smallville.” (He’s also a major player in Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse.”) But you’d be a fool to be but so optimistic when you’ve not seen a single frame of the series, and the fact that it’s going to be extremely CGI-heavy makes me a little nervous, but here are a few quotes from the creative team to help get your hopes up.
Compared to that other famed desperate housewife of world literature, Tolstoy’s sympathetic Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary is, well, kind of a…word that I’m too well brought up to use. Especially as portrayed during Isabelle Huppert’s perfectly minimalist performance, she is more than a little superficial, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and horribly unable to asess the consequences of her own actions. On the other hand, she’s no Paris Hilton, by which I mean she is still very recognizable as an actual human being, all to similar to anyone one of us (her creator, author Gustav Flaubert famously declared, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”). Still, the flavor of the story is dry – almost satirical. So, France’s ultra-prolific master of ultra-dry melodramas and tales of suspense, Claude Chabrol, makes perfect sense as the writer-director to bring Flaubert’s revered, frequently filmed novel to the screen. This 1991 production takes a worm’s eye of the tale, which has Emma coldly marrying a goodhearted but deadly dull doctor (Jean-François Balmer) simply to get out of the house. Bored literally to tears, she cuckolds him with a cold-blooded womanizer (Christophe Malavoy) and a seemingly more goodhearted law student (Lucas Belvaux), while literally spending the good doctor and herself to destruction. Yes, this is an evergreen story with a contemporary ring to it – and Chabrol’s cool, dispassionate, and not merely cynical eye is an appropriate counterpoint. This is no tearjerker, but it’s also impossible to stop thinking about this underplayed tragedy of a family destroyed by pretension, materialism, and self-involvement, with innocent victims all around.
Kevin Bacon’s a really underrated actor. We so often hear people refer to the whole “six degrees” thing that I think we sometimes forget just how talented a thespian he is…which is a little odd, really, given how often he offers us proof of his abilities. If you should happen to need another reminder, however, HBO’s “Taking Chance” fits the bill nicely. The film is based on the first-person narrative of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, USMC (Ret.), and chronicles Strobl’s journey as the volunteer military escort officer assigned to accompany the body of 19-year-old Lance Corporal Chance Phelps, USMC, who was killed in action in Iraq, across America to his hometown of Dubois, Wyoming.
Given that American forces remain in Iraq even as the film makes its network debut, it will certainly hit home to a great number of viewers, particularly as you experience the sad reminder that the soldiers dying over there are people’s friends and relatives. At the same time, however, it’s also a testament to how we can loathe the war but still respect those who are forced to fight it.
“One of the things that’s really interesting to me about the film,” said Bacon, “is that you really get back to the fact that…you can of read an article, and you can say a certain amount of Marines were killed in this city, when you see a body count coming up, but it doesn’t really hit home in the same kind of way as it does if you actually see what happens to the actual remains. You see the preparation, you see the respect, and you see the tradition and the honor that is involved with actually returning them to their final resting place. And the story is really a very, very simple one in that it’s really just the story of this man and this person, Chance, that he’s returning. And it’s almost completely unembellished with anything to make it more cinematic or dramatic or to somehow force us to feel one way or another based on what our preconceived notions are about Iraq and whether or not we should have been in there or whatever. It’s just the simple telling of what this process is like and, in its simplicity, I think, becomes an extremely profound kind of comment on the casualties of war.”
This is the third time Bacon’s played a Marine in his career, the other two occasions being in “Frost/Nixon” and “A Few Good Men,” but we shouldn’t infer any sort of military aptitude from these repeat performances. “There is no part of me that ever considered being a Marine or could make it in the Marine Corps,” he said, with a laugh. “I am definitely not that guy. I’m not the guy to throw myself in harm’s way. I would never make it through boot camp. It’s all acting.”
The actual Lt. Col. Strobl was on the panel as well, and he was asked if he thought it was a disservice to the memory of American servicemen that we rarely see their final farewells and are so often forced to remember them as numbers rather than names.
“Perhaps it might be good if we saw or thought more about them than just a line in the newspaper and went on with our day,” said Lt. Col. Strobl. “Hopefully, this movie will make people realize…I know we all know, but that there have been 3,400 combat deaths so far, and there’s a risk that they all run together. This movie will remind us all that they all have families that love them. They all had vibrant lives up to that point. So, yes, I suppose there is a risk, but maybe this movie will address some of that.”
“Taking Chance” premieres on HBO in February 2009.
Tell a film buff that HBO is getting ready to air a new movie called “Grey Gardens,” and watch their smug expression as they try to one-up you and say, “That’s not new! That came out back in 1975!” Well, they’re half-right, anyway. There was a movie that came out in ’75 called “Grey Gardens.” That, however, was a documentary about Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. This “Grey Gardens” tackles much of the same material but offers up a fuller picture of their lives, and this time the parts of Little Edie and Big Edie are being played by Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.
It’s funny how differently the two actresses reacted to the challenge of playing their characters. Lange was rather casual with her description of the experience; although she referred to it as “the most difficult role I’ve had in a long time,” she also said that it was good for her, describing it as “a fascinating exercise.” When listening to Barrymore talk about it, however, her desire to come through with nothing short of the performance of a lifetime was palpable.
Here’s a cool “behind the scenes” video about Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Kubrick allowed his then-17-year-old daughter, Vivian, to make a documentary about the production of the film. There’s some great footage of Jack Nicholson and the rest of the cast. In one scene Shelley Duvall discusses being a little jealous about the extra attention that Nicholson received due to his celebrity status.
