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The Inside, Fox Wednesdays at 9pm
Created by: Tim Minear and Howard Gordon
Starring: Peter Coyote, Rachel
Nichols, Adam Baldwin, Katie Finneran, Jay Harrington
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| Who's the black guy? There're only crackers in the pilot! |
When I first heard about “The Inside” a few months ago, I was very excited. Created by Tim Minear (executive
producer of “Angel,” “Firefly” and “Wonderfalls”) and Howard Gordon (“The X-Files”
and “24”) and starring Peter Coyote, Adam Baldwin (“Firefly” and “The X-Files), and Katie Finneran
(Tony Award winner, co-star in “Wonderfalls”), it seemed like a slam-dunk.
But in the weeks leading up to the show, when Fox began running previews, I started to become nervous. What's this pale “CSI”
looking stuff? Why would Tim Minear, so talented with deeply embedded characters full of darkness and wit, create something
so potentially dry and uninteresting? Certainly, it must be Fox's fault-they're selling it wrong.
Flash to this past Wednesday evening, and it turns out Fox was hitting the nail on the head. The first episode of “The
Inside” is so flat and derivative that I found myself looking forward to the commercials when I would turn to “Dancing
With the Stars.”
“The Inside” stars Rachel Nichols as Rebecca Locke, who was scarred as a child when she was kidnapped, tortured,
blah blah blah, who's brought to Los Angeles from D.C. by Virgil Webster (Peter Coyote), a sadistic F.B.I-er who picks agents
based on their mental problems. Let's pause here. Nichols, who should be a young, wide-eyed but tough prodigy (if it sounds
familiar, there is a Clarice Starling joke in the pilot), is more like a mouse in a power suit. From two guys who helped
to craft such characters as Dana Scully and Jaye Tyler, I would expect a scrappy young ingénue. Nichols, though plenty cute
and likely a very nice person, is all wrong as Locke, and she and the usually enthralling Coyote-who's dour, wooden, and one-note
here-drag the show into that boring “CSI,” “Law & Order” thumb twiddling. There are like 20 shows
with those two titles alone; we need no rip-offs.
Finneran and Baldwin are the likely saviors here, but they're left, at least in the pilot, to such dull devices as scouring
and quipping. Jay Harrington, who plays Paul Ryan, is fine as the one agent who takes any interest in Rebecca, but, it seems,
that's all the character is. There's a lot of navel gazing about Webster's motives and promises of character developments
to come, but a pilot should make the audience want more. It should introduce engaging characters that foreshadow depth and
sophistication. All the characters on “The Inside” feel like types, the kinds often written by students in a
screenwriting class, not season pros who've worked on some of TV's greatest shows. So far, “The Inside” is beneath
nearly everyone involved in it.
Minear is best when he's working with the humor that comes with the darkest parts of humanity. Dark is here, sure. In the
pilot, the woman Locke replaces kills herself by peeling off her own hands and part of her face (she's copycatting the killer
she's been profiling because she's bi-polar and apparently off the meds). That's gross. But that's only plot stuff. There's
nothing inherently interesting in it without character development to make it important. But all anyone on “The Inside”
can seem to do is stand around and bitch. These characters are the most miserable people ever tossed together on one screen,
and though misery works nicely in season five of some shows (though not, apparently, the ridiculously bad new season of “Six
Feet Under”), it's not great for a pilot. A little misery, sure. Who doesn't love that? But an hour of whining and
bitching? That's what family gatherings are for, and most of us only do those once or twice a year, not every week.
Crash
Director: Paul Haggis
Starring: Various
In 1999, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a professor of psychology and military science and former Army Ranger, wrote an
essay for the Saturday Evening Post called “We Are Training Our Kids to Kill.” In it, he posits that the
only new variable in a collection of over a dozen countries in the world in which violence has quintupled in the last fifty
years is “media violence presented as entertainment for children.” He goes on to make a rather convincing case
that the same methods of desensitization, operant and classical conditioning used to train soldiers to kill are used on kids
by the media. His methodology is seamless; however, his one flaw seems to be the assumption that only media has changed.
The world has changed in many ways that go beyond this, even cause the kinds of violence we see on the screen. By this I
do not mean that art imitates life; rather, media mega-corps have figured out that violence translates easily in any language
(humor, for example, does not). Therefore, they can sell their films and TV shows without worrying about things getting lost
in translation. The motivation is not a market that demands violence; in every country the opposite is the case-people abhor
the level of violence in media (though they do, admittedly, continue to consume it). The difference is corporate inability
to care what people want. Greed motivates all decisions, not actual consumer desire. I see the source of this
problem not as media but as people's desire to separate ourselves from one another. This dynamic is seen nowhere more clearly
than in Los Angeles.
Paul Haggis' Crash compellingly studies that it is our isolation that causes us to fear each other. Certainly, media
is part of this, especially TV news; however, our willingness to soak up the fear tactics seems based on our pre-existing
condition of mistrust. In the first moments of the film, Don Cheadle's character, an LA detective, muses after a small fender
bender that we spend our lives behind metal and glass, crashing into each other to afford ourselves basic human contact, even
if that contact is contentious. From this moment, the film plays out in snapshots. Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock, the
DA and his wife, have their Lincoln Navigator carjacked by two young black guys, played by Larenz Tate and Ludacris, and she
knew it was coming the second she saw them, her knee-jerk racist assumptions realized. Terrence Dashon Howard and
Thandie Newton, a black TV director and his wife, are wrongfully stopped in their Navigator by Matt Dillon, a racist
cop, and his reluctant partner, played by Ryan Phillippe. Don Cheadle, a detective having an affair with his Latina partner,
played by Jennifer Esposito, has to solve a murder, find his brother, and deal with his druggy mom, all while rubbing shoulders
with the white political elite who wish to win the black vote. Shaun Toub plays a Persian storeowner whose business is hit
with a rash of anti-Arab violence. His daughter, played by Bahar Soomekh, often works as translator for her father, whose
broken English gets in the way of full communication. This is just one of the ways people in the film can't communicate,
though for this man as well as the other characters, it is not even the most crucial way this ability breaks down. The final
character, played by Michael Peña, is perhaps the flim's most sympathetic. He plays a young Latino dad who works as a locksmith.
His position in the world is built to be contentious-people are prone not to trust those who control their security, and many
are prone not to trust young, tattooed Latino men. All of these lives, those that intersect and those that don't, are tied
together by the relationships caused by a city in which interaction between strangers is almost always fraught with anger.
In this way, I wonder whether this film is perhaps most effective when shown right where it takes place. Racial tension,
bigotry, misogyny-all of these things exist in every corner of this country. But there are few places where these people
live inches form each other without having to actually communicate. In New York or Chicago, you can't help but physically
bump against those you might otherwise fear. Interaction is forced. Here, cars keep us isolated, and, as Ludacris' character
thoughtfully points out, the big windows on buses are so that everyone can see the underprivileged passengers inside. Cars
are our most telling symbols of status and space. The film's dualing Lincolns, both driven by wealthy owners, are not only
symbols of money but of entitlement. Those who drive them value their space-the urban frontier is the giant SUV, allowing
the driver to look down upon those of us putting around in our economy cars. When outsiders enter, the outcome is a questioning
of the safety of that space; it forces the driver to both reevaluate and reinforce that metal-bound isolation. Sandra Bullock's
character tells a disinterested friend during a phone conversation that waking up afraid and angry the morning after having
a gun to her head was, she realized, not a new feeling. She feels that anger everyday. This is the conundrum, what this
city is best at. In our isolation, we are always ready to give in to road rage or queue fever. We just need to rub
elbows with someone and the gloves are off. Otherwise, we ignore each other, averting our eyes, presumably to allow others
their space (this is the myth of Los Angeles), but really to avoid unpleasant interaction, as all interaction for the truly
isolated is assumed to be unpleasant. This is not to say that people are not nice here. I bond with dog people at the park,
chat with the guy behind the supermarket counter, know the names of my favorite breakfast waiter and bartender. But these
situations are not random; they are controlled. When someone tries to eek into your lane, the assumption is automatically
that they are trying to get away with something, take something away, not that they simply made a mistake in getting in the
right turn lane or being too far to the left on the freeway to make their exit. Crash deals adeptly with the fallout
from such intense assumptions. It juggles a dozen characters, and though only a few moments are spent with each, they are
very very real. Perhaps this is because, despite our isolation, we do pay attention to the problems we create, waiting for
an accident to force true interaction.
Sin City
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, and special guest director Quentin Tarantino
Starring:
Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Nick Stahl, Alexis Bledel, and a dozen others
In Sin City it's always night, and the law is every man for himself. It's a story we've seen before, mostly in the pages
of Dashiell Hammett novels and on screen with Bogey and Fred McMurray. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City
is a classic noir in which the men are all killers and the women are all beautiful and dangerous…and sometimes killers.
And in a remarkable attempt to bring Miller's graphic novel characters from the page to the screen, the film's two directors
(okay, three - Quentin Tarantino directed bits, too) bring the comics' black and white world soaked in brief splashes of color
faithfully to life in a film that is both delightfully derivative and amazingly fresh.
My complaint about Robert Rodriguez has always been that, though he is a technical visionary and wears more hats on any one
film than other filmmakers wear over a lifetime of work, his stories are always a bit lacking. They're kinetic and stunning
and fun (well, From Dusk Till Dawn is just bad), but the characters are never fully realized enough to grab on to.
But with Miller's eye for character and story at his side, Rodriguez is able to bring three stories and over a dozen characters
to life with true pathos. The film's three heroes, Marv (Mickey Rourke), Dwight (Clive Owen) and Hartigan (Bruce Willis)
are all fully realized and completely sympathetic, even as they drudge through the violence and moral ambiguity of a lawless
urban frontier.
Since I've only leafed through the pages of Frank Miller's graphic novels for these stories, I was unsure what to expect from
Sin City, the film. However, I'd been led to believe through what I'd read that most of the characters were unsympathetic
and amoral, which is very much not the case. I was also led to believe that the film was incredibly violent, which, okay,
it sort of is, but not in the way one might expect. The violence is both startling and cartoonish, but not filled with the
sense of absolute dread that comes with the cartoonish violence in, say, Pulp Fiction. In Sin City, it's the
accepted side effect of a cold world, and by the time the opening credits role, the audience is secure in what's to come.
In this way, the film is not cringe-inducing in the way that some of its violent acts, described out of context, might be.
This is largely due to the stunning visual style of the film; so much of it looks like an acual comic book, like panels off
the page, that my own response to the graphic violence was much as it would be to the same violence displayed on the page.
It's stark and horrible, but beautiful in its perfect artistic execution.
Marv, Dwight, and Hartigan are all typical noir heroes, misunderstood men who live by their own strict code of honor, despite
their positions (Marv and Dwight particularly) as killers. Hartigan is an ex-cop who was framed for a heinous crime that
both he and the purported victim, an eleven-year-old named Nancy, know he didn't commit. He is the best kind of hero - one
bent on both self-sacrifice and revenge. This does not diminish the heroics of the other men by comparison; Marv especially,
goes to great lengths to avenge a women he barely knew. They all set out to save, protect, or avenge women, which is absolutely
a noir construct. Not that the women they're out to care for can't take care of themselves; but each man has let a woman
down in his own way, and each man is hero enough to set things straight.
Which brings me to my beef (which is based wholly on heresay). A couple of film schoolers I know were talking about their
take on the film and, somewhat obviously, mentioned that all the women in the film are objects of the male gaze.
Whenever I hear these words, they're said in my friend Gus's voice - twinged with the sounds of both teacherly knowledge and
recognition of the silliness of the concept when applied to a world that is subject to the male gaze.
Anyhow, I contend that the film's collection of hookers, strippers, waitresses, and one parole officer are women making their
way in a world unlike that of Trixie, Alma Garret and Calamity Jane of Deadwood. Their position as lesser citizens
in a world of men is certainly assumed, but they can rise to a level of freedom (some of them) and certainly a level of integrity
that surpasses the strict world the men are forced into. Men are police, government, mafia, outlaws. They are the caught
in a constant power struggle between good and evil, and there is no assumption of loyalty. A cop might be an upstanding guy,
but he just as well may be crooked and there are no tell-tale signs. However, the hookers who run Old Town are a well-organized
militia, and their truce with the mob and the police allows them to dole out justice as they see fit. Of course, truces are
made to be broken, but the morality of these women is anything but loose, and they represent the film's best example of truly
effective law and order. There is no indication that they are prostitutes because they have to be, and they have no pimps.
They make their cash off of the weaknesses of men, and while the men have a hard time deciphering the good guys from the
bad guys, the women of Old Town seem to have it pretty much sussed out.
The power of women in a world that dismisses them is perhaps most typical of the magic of Sin City. It's a place so
imperfect that it fulfills every dirty, nasty town stereotype, and this is exemplified further by the noir language of cops
of dames. Marv and Hartigan rattle off the kinds of mouthfuls that would almost read as ridiculous if the black and white
comic book world of the film didn't beg for a language as stylized as its visual imagery. Sin City, like all great
films, shows us something we've seen before, but does it in a completely new way, one that is likely to be mimicked, but will
never be matched.
Wonderfalls on DVD
Starring: Caroline Dhavernas, Katie Finneran, Tyron Leitso, William Sadler, Diana Scarwid,
Lee Pace and Tracie Thoms
Created by: Todd Holland and Bryan Fuller
By far the best reviewed new show of the 2003-2004, Wonderfalls was cancelled after only four episodes aired. Go Fox.
We can always count on them for knee-jerk reactions, especially against smart shows they are unsure how and to whom to market.
But like so many too-soon cancelled greats, Wonderfalls has found a second life on DVD where, unsurprisingly to those
of us who like thoughtful TV, it is doing quite well. Now the audience, free of questions of demographics and marketing,
can enjoy all thirteen episodes as well as some rockin' commentaries.
But it's the show itself, even without any extras, which deserves your attention. Wonderfalls follows the random escapades
of Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas), an over-educated under-achiever whose current aspirations, at the age of 24, include nothing
more lofty than her job at the Wonderfalls gift emporium in her hometown of Niagara Falls, where she works under a teenage
mouth-breather. At this job, Jaye only has to engage in cursory contact with other humans, and it gives her the cash she
needs to pay for her retro trailer home.
Jaye's family, mother Karen, father Darrin, sister Sharon and brother Aaron, is very well meaning, but they're all a little
nuts, and they're totally out of touch with Jaye's life. She's isolated herself in any possible way, only hanging out with
her best friend Mahandra, until a magical force challenges her studied misanthropy.
Animal figurines - stuffed, bronzed, made of wax - begin telling her what to do. She wants to ignore them, but they're really
really annoying. Against what she perceives to be her own nature, Jaye begins accidentally helping other people get their
lives on track, but with no small price to her own. All she wants to do is drink at the bar, tended by the hot new boy in
town, Eric, who begins thinking she's someone she thinks she's not - all because of those stupid talking animals.
This all could be very touchy-feely, and as a comedy, many of Wonderfalls' endings are happy; but this show walks the
line of wit without pedantry and irony without cynicism in a way that's truly rare on television. Wonderfalls is over the
top and silly when it's called for, but it can also be deeply moving. When it's appropriate, the drama is played honestly
and guilelessly in a way that subverts the normal sappy shtick attributed to half-hour sitcoms.
What's more, none of the characters are perfect; none are even close. It's a show about family and love and friendship, but
it's not about always making the right choices, and it doesn't forget that the right choices are sometimes very painful.
Sometimes we wish we'd made the wrong ones and saved ourselves some grief. This is a constant conundrum for Jaye as she learns
to deny her own desires for the big picture, and learns that the big picture can really suck. This is probably why, according
to show creators Todd Holland and Bryan Fuller, had Wonderfalls continued to a third season (which, of course, implies
a season two), we would have seen Jaye institutionalized. Being Joan of Arc is not easy, especially when believing in anything
- a higher power, the human race, oneself - is completely off the menu.
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