EDITOR'S NOTE:This review of Cowboys And Aliens contains numerous spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.
By Ian Grey
Press Play contributor
Only Jon Favreau would have a plot-defining female character tortured by cruel aliens, lasered to bits, and burned to a crisp, and have none of it have any emotional effect on you. That he succeeds is not failure—it’s what he wants. It’s typical of a method that’s brought Favreau riches in summer-film pop-genre cinema.
If it seems I'm implying that Favreau is a bad filmmaker—anything but. He’s a fabulous manipulator. He knows, for example, that if you fill your Panavision image with a prone woman’s body shown from the clavicle up, you will of course become very anxious regarding what the hell is going on from the clavicle down. Especially when that woman is manacled to a high tech table in an alien experimentation lab deep beneath a mountain in The West where westerns happen. And something seems to be pulling on her and then letting go. And pulling again. And then the director cuts away lest we fall into the land of horror with its deep emotions and noisome subtexts. Because if there’s one thing you have to give Favreau credit for, it’s not dwelling too much on anything.
Because dwelling—that’s where the drama is, and so that’s where Favreau’s camera isn’t. Favreau, the undisputed king of flatline date movies. Nobody failed to get lucky because his or her partner couldn’t stop thinking about a Favreau Saturday night.
Anyway, Cowboys and Aliens. It seems to be about Jake (Daniel Craig), who wakes up in the desert on a scalding hot day minus his memory but with that cool high-tech wrist bracelet you see in the ads that blows the hell out of things and has this tiny projection 3-D guidance system that totally rocks.
But where was I? Oh. Jake. Jake goes to a pioneer town and he’s promptly thrown in the hoosegow. It seems he’s a robber and possible murderer. Or not. Suddenly, Paul Dano, playing a young asshole, shows up to shoot things up because that’s what assholes do in Westerns. (Yee-haw!) Dano’s character does not matter, nor do those of a terrific character actor cast whose existence is a series of fake-outs. (Walton Goggins as a near-retarded criminal, or Clancy Brown as a priest, Keith Carradine as squinty sheriff, etc. All show up, say some lines, disappear. The union is sending your checks as we speak, thank you.)
Anyway, Dano’s character’s father is named Woodrow. He's played by Harrison Ford as a cussed asshole, thus creating a family resemblance. While Woodrow is causing his own social disturbances, we get a look at Olivia Wilde — and not a moment too soon. Smashing in clinging flower-print gingham dresses and anachronistic Marc Bolan-y top hats, Wilde plays the mysterious Ella, who just lurks around the back and sides of frames for a while, as though weighing the wisdom of being in this movie. Then oily-looking alien crafts that look like super-sized malevolent moths attack. They throw out nano-ropes that whip around humans and corral them into the ships like so many cattle. Jake and Woodrow lead a posse to the mountains and the alien lair. If you don't like spoilers, stop reading now.
Unlike the Iron Man movies, which were pretty much entirely bifurcated enterprises — part live action, part manga, with little effort to blur the transitions — Cowboys and Aliens endeavors to create a single world to house both its pioneer town/Wild West reality and its buried-under-the-desert, super-mothership CG showdowns.
Unfortunately, Cowboys and Aliens cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Black Swan) offers us a prairie that differs from other western prairies only in how it accentuates the desert elements. (That the images sometimes suggest cowboys in Iraq—now there’s a movie title!– shouldn’t be misconstrued for anything other than an aesthetic choice, one that unfortunately looks too much like simple overexposure.) And after Deadwood, it’s hard to accept such a rote assemblage of storefronts as The West. This could be yet another manifestation of Favreau’s fiendishly in-reverse way of doing things. A Deadwood-style pioneer town would be teeming with texture, color and visual drama, and thus anathema to Favreau way; thus the choice to go with the brown-on-brown, backlot look of a late Gunsmoke episode.
As for Craig—he’s on angsty-Bond default, trading in the tuxedos for singlet, boots and revolvers. It’s always a pleasure and fascination to explore the lines in his face, to look into those impossibly blue eyes, to watch his panther/thug moves. There are a fair number of laughs in the film, many of them from Craig and Favreau perfectly timing the hero's clocking of sundry idiots. Go Team Craig.
And Ford? He glowers. So that leaves Olivia Wilde. I worry for her career. She owns a beauty so dazzling, so absolute in its porcelain perfection that it seems she’ll be doomed to always be cast as supernaturals, which is obviously the deal here. Thing is, she’s a very good actress. Her Ella, distastefully designed as fanboy bait only, revolts in depths and color. There’s something just the tiniest bit weary and aching when she sees Jake remembering really bad things (or what would be really bad things if Favreau didn’t use his filmmaking skill to mute them). And other times there’s something fascinatingly hermetic in her affect: she’s so into her own quiet strangeness that you watch more closely, waiting for the human tell. Favreau smartly favors very close close-ups when filming Wilde, and she never lets him down.
Which leaves us with aliens. Imagine if someone took grey leather and stretched it over a Terminator’s skeleton, made heads that are too small with huge black-blue crystalline eyes and arms that are too long and end in oversized bio-swords, then threw in chests that split open to reveal incredibly gross combination mouths/arms. The creatures are strong, super-fast, sadistic, and bloodthirsty, and they look cool getting blown up. Favreau may approach the the Western part of the movie with a whiskey bottle of don’t-care, but for the aliens part — the part that will attract our cineaste nation of boys — he went above and beyond. For the rest of us, there’s Wilde. While Woodrow and his Indian friends impotently shoot six-shooters and arrows at these fast bastards, Ella guides Jake through the electric blue intricacies of the creepy mothership’s innards. While everyone is falling off horses and/or rocks, Ellen performs one act of heroic selflessness after another.
When the dust settles, a major character actually has the temerity suggest that another not feel too bad about another character dying. And so Favreau’s anti-feeling aesthetic hits its apotheosis — but not before the movie's only non-white character can expire with a beatific remembrance of living his life’s dream of serving under the white man who hated him.
Seriously.
Normally this sort of thing might get me all worked up. But I think Favreau’s low-impact brand of magic has worked on me. The film began dissolving from my memory the instant I sat down to write about it. In a week, I doubt I’ll recall anything but those cool aliens.
Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out/New York.
Sleep Furiously is the second time a film’s distributor, in this case 
the schoolís closing. You’ll hear children rehearse music over images of a farmer gathering bales of hay. A downpour won’t stop the judging of a dog show and the pooches, some wearing raincoats, will receive ribbons. You’ll see lots of dogs, though I admit I was disappointed to only see one example of the corgi breed that my late Leland was since Wales is her breed’s ancestral home. Often, you’ll just gaze at the beautiful imagery such as a time-lapse sequence when we watch the clouds move across the horizon, changing the shadows being cast across a lakeshore.
The featurette by Gideon Koppel, A Sketchbook for The Library Van, works almost as the exact opposite of Sleep Furiously. Koppel filmed it in 2005 as he was seeking funding to make Sleep Furiously.
The one detail both films have in a common is the focus on The Library Van, which is interesting, considering what a small, rural area John Jones continues to service, bringing books, in both Welsh and English, to members of the community to read. The synopsis may say the feature’s emphasizes the dying of a way of life, but both Sleep Furiously and the short may have agriculture in their hearts, but they have reading on their minds and that’s always a good thing, and while some modernization inevitably occurs, at least they know nothing of a Kindle and read the way you should.
But there was something about the series that was intrinsically at odds with a huge swath of the people living in the part of the country where the show was set. Yes, NBC screwed the pooch from the git-go, marketing to teen boys a show that often centered on Tami giving birth control tips to girls. Then it tried selling at steep discounts online, adding desperation to the mix. Then NBC announced that reruns would appear on ESPN and the female-friendly Bravo network after which it debuted a killer new tagline: “It’s about life.” Finally, NBC struck a co-financing deal with DirecTV. Which meant that at various times, the show might be available on DirecTV only, or DirecTV and then NBC.
Yet FNL was still, for five years running, a continual pop culture presence via new or repeated episodes. For five years it was just kind of, like, around. If you followed TV at all, you knew about it, you knew it was worth watching and having an opinion on and it wasn’t hard to find out where and how to see it. And still, beyond a wonderfully passionate fanbase, the prospect of roping in an even moderate following remained a chimera. Hats off to Peter Berg and his collaborators for having the skill, the vision, the steel-plated balls to create five seasons of simple, messy truths. And there may be more: as I type this, there’s tentative news on the FNL front. Following in the footsteps of 
Now, it’s admittedly a sketchy business performing cultural obituaries and looking for meaning in failure. But this is all kinds of different. This series failed to become even a modest hit, despite being ludicrously, specifically good, and having multi-corporate media muscle pushing it (however ineptly) directly but warmly with things that are now driving a country collectively off the rails. Maybe we should look at what’s rusting those rails.
By the finale, Tim Riggins has rejected a college scholarship in order to work in his garage business and build his dream house. We see Luke, son of an unstable, Bachmann-esque mother, getting on a bus for service in the Army—but there’s a sinking feeling regarding the wars started by the regime that was in power when FNL premiered. Better to focus on Tyra, whose hard road to education has paid off. She’s in college. Her lovable dork of an ex, the indie-guitar-playin’ Landry, is in college, too. Ditto that picture of soft-spoken Texan gentility, Matt Saracen (
Thankfully, after this rocky introduction, Cornish proves to viewers that Attack the Block is not as thoughtless and condescending as he initially makes it seem. In a matter of minutes, the filmmaker’s storytelling chops rise to match his skill at baiting viewers. While the film isn’t always as clever as it is boisterous, Cornish does a decent job of disproving the vapid stereotypes and assumptions he puts in our heads. 
Admittedly, Cornish takes plenty of time to show us that his kids are so wet behind the ears that they don’t have the perspective to realize just how ridiculous they look. They can throw their weight around well enough (“You’d be better off calling the Ghostbusters, love”). But when things get too heavy for the group, one of them mewls, “Right now, I feel like going home and playing Fifa.” They’re young punks and Cornish even over-strains himself trying to prove that the responsibility of fighting aliens effectively sets these kids straight (“I won’t do anything bad again, I promise.”). 
So it comes as a bit of a surprise when Moses self-seriously tells his gang about his theory about the aliens: they were created by the government to kill ghetto residents. “We ain’t killin’ each other fast enough so now they’re speedin’ up in the process,” he intones gravely. This raging paranoia explains why Moses wants Hi-Hatz’s approval just as much as the 9 1/2 year-old Probs and Mayhem (Sammy Williams and Michael Ajao), two tiny wannabe thugs, want his approval. According to Cornish, Moses is just caught up in a vicious cycle of “Who’s the baddest one of all.” 
I saw him in four shows between 1994-97. In addition to Passion, I saw Aldredge as Rev. Jeremiah Brown in the revival of Inherit the Wind with George C. Scott and Charles Durning. I got to see him perform Solyony (the Captain) in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, replacing Jerry Stiller in the role. Finally, I saw him play Stephen Hopkins in the revival of the musical 1776 with Brent Spiner and the late Pat Hingle. 
Tom Aldredge’s New York stage career began in 1957. He landed his first Broadway show in 1959 in the musical comedy The Nervous Set which also featured Larry Hagman in its cast. It took seven years to land another Broadway role but when he did, what a cast he got to work alongside. The original comedy UTBU was directed by Nancy Walker and had an ensemble featuring Cathryn Damon (Mary Campbell on Soap), Margaret Hamilton, Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter. Alas, it only lasted 15 previews and seven performances. Fortunately, Aldredge was back on Broadway the next month in Slapstick Tragedy, which was an evening of two new Tennessee Williams’ one-act plays. Aldredge appeared in the first, The Mutilated. The second one-act was The Gnadiges Fraulein.
Back in New York, before he returned to Broadway, Aldredge took part in two of Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park productions in the summer of 1965. First, he played Boyet in Love’s Labors Lost. Then he played Nestor in Troilus and Cressida, whose cast included James Earl Jones, Michael Moriarty and John Vernon. Throughout his career he would return to the Delacorte and Shakespeare. He played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet in 1968, Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night in 1969, the title role in Cymbeline in 1971, the 2nd Gravedigger in Hamlet in 1972, Lear’s Fool in King Lear in 1973 and John of Gaunt in Richard II in 1987. Ironically, the only time Aldredge received an Emmy nomination, it was a Daytime Emmy nomination (which he won) for playing Shakespeare in a 1973 episode of The CBS Festival of Lively Arts for Young People titled “Henry Winkler Meets William Shakespeare.” Aldredge appeared in many off-Broadway productions, but two to take note of are his role of Emory in the original production of the landmark play The Boys in the Band and the Joseph Papp production of David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones, which transferred to Broadway and earned Aldredge the first of his five Tony nominations.
back in a different way. Ron's wife Ilene (
it's ONE YEAR LATER and Larry sits across from his divorce attorney Andrew Berg (Paul F. Tompkins) making the final arrangements on his divorce. Larry is going to get to keep the house and it sounds as if he's getting a pretty good deal. As he emphasizes to Berg, Larry wants to look like he's being a good guy, but he doesn't want to be a good guy. I do wonder if this episode marks Cheryl Hines' swan song on the show. In the closing credits, she's listed as also-starring as usual but in the following two episodes in which she doesn't appear, her name is absent. At the same time, Susie Essman's name remains in the credits though Susie Greene doesn't appear in the second episode. Even though Larry David plays a fictionalized version of himself, you have to think that Hines has become a victim of circumstance given David's real-life, well-publicized divorce from his wife Laurie.
Some other highlights from "The Divorce": A classic Susie Greene moment when Larry, the Greenes and the Funkhousers have brunch together and Jeff tells her that if they ever split up, he'd just divide everything 50-50 and give her the best of everything to which Susie replies, "What are you fuckin' kiddin' me? You think we're gonna have a nice divorce if we ever get divorced? I'm takin' you for everything you've got, mister. I'm taking your balls and I'm thumbtackin' them to the wall." Bob Einstein always has been a delight as Marty Funkhouser when he has appeared, but he's hitting it out of the park in all three episodes so far this season. In "The Divorce," he announces at the brunch that he's going on a business trip to London and Larry innocently asks why his wife Nan isn't going, only to get the dirtiest look from Marty when Larry sells Nan (Ann Ryerson) how wonderful London is this time of year. Later, Marty confronts Larry about how he's ruined his getaway because all they do is stare bored at each other or she'll talk over him. Larry asks why he doesn't get divorced. "I'm lazy," Marty admits. Later, he drops by Larry's elated as Leon (J.B. Smoove, still hanging around), Larry and Jeff are playing pool to announce that he's getting a divorce too. He asked Nan for one and she said yes. Leon suggests he tie strings of cans to his car like you do when you get married that say JUST DIVORCED. Jeff is terribly jealous — Larry and Marty are getting divorces, Leon doesn't need one and he's stuck with Susie. It's just a warmup for what Einstein gets to do in the second and third episodes.
That second episode, "The Safe House," ramps up the laughs even higher. So often, Larry ends up getting punished for his actions or his "rules" as how society should function. Too often what gets overlooked is that Larry either has good intentions or he's just right. The opening scene of "The Safe House" offers a perfect illustration of this. Larry is minding his own business, walking down the wide aisle of a grocery store to pick up a carton of a certain ice cream he wants. In front of the case holding the flavor he seeks are two women — one (Miriam Flynn) comforting the other (Tymberlee Hill) who is crying and visibly upset about something. The aisle contains no one else but the three of them and Larry tries his best to coax them to move over just so he can get his ice cream and be on his way, but the woman doing the comforting turns on him — insisting she's done her best to be polite and ask him to give them a minute. Larry appears to leave and the woman tells the bawling woman not to pay any attention to"that jerk" then we see one of the best sight gags ever as Larry's arms creeps through the freezer as the women continue to stand there. Of course, Larry was right. Why should anyone have to wait to get one item when the other two, one of them upset or not, could have easily moved elsewhere? Later in the episode, Larry arrives home in time to catch the woman (Michaela Watkins) who has been walking her dog and letting him go on his yard. Larry yells at her for not bringing a plastic bag with her. "A dog without a bag is incomplete," he tells her. She claims forgetfulness, but he counters that she forgets every time. "You didn't have to yell," she says. "I'm not just yelling for me. I'm yelling for society!" Larry shouts. Honestly, don't we all want to yell for society sometimes? It turns out that both the crying woman and the dog walker are battered women who now reside in a "safe house" a few doors down from Larry which he learns when the other woman knocks on his 
door and introduces herself as Margaret. She wants Larry to come to apologize to the women to give them "a positive male" image. Larry doesn't think he has anything to apologize for, but agrees to do it anyway, though he's puzzled when one of the women living in the house, Dale, turns out to be a big gal that he thinks is pulling a scam because she looks as if she could take care of herself. If she looks familiar, she's played by Jen Kober, with a different look and demeanor than her role as Melissa Leo's friend Andrea on Treme.
launched by Funkhouser in a scene where he's a veritable one-liner machine. He informs Jeff and Larry over a meal that Richard Lewis has yet another new girlfriend and that she's a burlesque dancer with quite impressive breasts. Lewis joins them briefly, but says he has an audition that he is running late to because of a phone call. Lewis finds it annoying that Funkhouser told the others what his girlfriend did for a living and denies that her breasts were the attraction, going on to defend the tradition of burlesque, saying that without burlesque we wouldn't have Charlie Chaplin. "Chaplin was a great pole dancer," Funkhouser comments. Lewis swears that it's her inner beauty and spirituality that attracted him. After a pause, Funkhouser asks him, "Have you set a day aside when you're finally going to look at her face?" Jeff and Larry can't stop laughing and since this is an improvised show, who knows if that laughter was in character?
themselves, that it throws me off when they are supposed to be a character. They've done this before with Michael McKean and Tim Meadows, here they do it with Larry Miller. As soon as I see him, I assume he's supposed to be himself so it takes a little acclimating to realize that he's playing a completely fictional character. The food at Al-Abbas' Original Best Chicken turns out to be as great as its word-of-mouth indicated, but it's definitely not a Jew-friendly place with lots of anti-Israel posters lining the walls. Larry tells Jeff that if someone who's Jewish wanted to cheat on their spouse, this would be the place to go because they wouldn't get caught. Larry spots an attractive Palestinian woman (Anne Bedian) and suggests to Jeff that perhaps she could be the next Mrs. David, but Jeff thinks that if she's going to get over her anti-Semitism, Larry wouldn't be the man to bring her around. Larry admits that is part of the attraction. "You're always attracted to someone who doesn't want you, right?" Larry says. "Here, you have someone who not only doesn't want you, but doesn't even recognize your right to exist."
When they have the dinner party where Ron's wife annoys with the "LOL" and Larry hits the Lexus, they finally learn where Funkhouser has been hiding. He tells them that he has had a midlife crisis and rededicated his life to Judaism, meeting with this new rabbi every day and wearing his yarmulke all the time. The Greenes have puzzled everyone by bringing daughter Sammi (Ashly Holloway, the same actress who has played her since the second season classic "The Doll" in 2001). During the dinner, it comes up that Al-Abbas plans to open a second location — next to Goldblatt's Deli. Susie decides to organize a protest. Some argue that they have a right in the U.S. to open where they want to but, as they've done before, Curb has sneaked some parallels to a real controversy, in this case the whole Ground Zero mosque brouhaha, into a story, but for laughs. I'm not going to spell out in detail all the twists and turns in this week's episode just so you can enjoy it all the more, but I have to say that they do give Sammi Greene more than she has ever had to do before and, as Larry says to her, "Boy, you're really your mother's daughter, aren't you?"
I still remember it like it was yesterday: I must’ve been four or five, popping the heavy VHS tape into the gigantic contraption that we called a VCR, and being taken aback by the serene, sensuous, almost angelic way the movie begins. As we fade in on a country club course at dawn, a four-part harmony forms, reverberating all over the soundtrack. As sprinklers (I’m assuming the sound effects are provided by maracas) are set off on the greens, another melodious voice jumps in, singing the words “own heart beatin’” several times. (When I was a kid, I thought it was “ol’ heart beatin’.”) Even at that age, when I first saw the film after begging my mom to pick it up at the video store, I thought that was a peculiar way to start off a movie I only knew as that comedy where 
The harmony eventually dissolves as the aforementioned gopher (memorably billed in the credits as “Chuck Rodent”) pops into frame and begins happily getting his groove on to the bass-heavy beat. I was quite surprised by what I heard next: 
Still, of all the protagonists in Gordon’s class-conscious fantasies, Space Truckers’ John Canyon has more in common with Edmond’s Burke than either Stuck’s Tom or King of the Ants’ Sean Crawley. Like Burke, Canyon has standards that he expects to be met both in his business dealings and in his personal life. Naturally, these standards are not met. For instance, Canyon wants to be paid for hauling square-shaped mutant pigs across the galaxy at the same time that he hands his cargo over. He doesn’t get that professional courtesy. Instead, he gets a punch thrown at him when he refuses to take a 75% pay cut (he does arrive two days late but his employers also knew full-well his rig was slow). The punch doesn’t connect. But the punch he responds with does.
That prison cell is Burke’s Hell, a fact that he eventually gets used to. He asks his cellmate, who rapes him when they first meet, if he thinks they’re in Hell. No answer is necessary because just asking that question is enough to tell us that, in Burke’s mind, he already knows where he is. All the pseudo-revelations he experiences while bleating about how important it is to be open about one’s own personal prejudices and how he needs to just ride out his “self-indulgent” flight of “madness”—all of those experiences were just precursors to the final circle of Hell Burke finds himself in at the end of Edmond. Burke was never in control of his life, and now that he’s gotten used to that idea, he just lies there and takes it. He’s well and truly stuck inside his head and nothing can ever really save him now.
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