Mimsy Were the Borogoves

“Girl, nothing in this world fixes itself.”

John Sayles¹ directed this movie that got good word of mouth and then went nowhere fast. About a black alien landing in Harlem and running from the precursors to Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. A very strange, somewhat disturbing story about assimilating into a new and strange culture.

A small spaceship carrying a frightened pilot crashes at Ellis Island. The pilot crawls out of the steaming sea with the Statue of Liberty in the background. He lost one foot in the crash, sheared right off. He lays glowing hands on himself and hops away on his one leg.

He hears the voices of the past in everything he touches. Which makes it difficult to sleep on the benches in the empty immigration center. So he sleeps on the floor. By morning, his sheared foot has returned.

With three toes.

He’s hungry; he learns to talk to a cash register so that he can exchange the cash inside for a pear. He understands machines far more than people: he figured out from watching that if he wanted a pear he needed to exchange the green slips of paper for them, but didn’t know where they came from or their significance. So he guessed, and guessed wrong.

That’s all in the first few minutes of the movie. Eventually the guy ends up in Harlem, in Odell’s, a bar that’s sort of the black mirror to Cheers. Everyone knows everyone’s name (Steve James, who plays the owner and only bartender, even bears a striking resemblance to Ted Danson) and they trade jokes and bullshit.

Fly: “Come back here, it’s all ‘dangerous’.”
Sam: “I never lived here, Fly.”
Odell: “Sam’s from Englewood.”
Fly: “Where’s that?”
Sam: “It’s in New Jersey.”
Fly: “You let people know that?”

When the unnamed slave on the run walks into Odell’s, Fly is playing the arcade game Astro Chase while the rest of the bar “discusses” space diseases.

As the movie progresses, he learns more and more about the people and the culture he’s crashed into—in effect, he assimilates as any immigrant needs to do.

Leroy Green is out of place in both Harlem and the eighties.

Seeing martial artists fight over the petty fiefdoms of the slums was just brilliant. This is a deliberate cartoon reality, what director Michael Schultz called “a living comic book”. But despite that, it’s also somewhat real, in that the people within it recognize how out of place, and even silly, Leroy and the Shogun are.

There’s a lot of deliberate poking at stereotypes. An Asian using his ethnicity as a weapon against non-Asians; Asians acting blacker than black and running a fake-wisdom fortune cookie factory. An Asian martial arts master leaving town on a journey—to see his mother in Miami. And a couple of feuding black warriors running around Harlem dressed as Chinese and Japanese.¹

Leroy Green, son of a black entrepreneur, dresses as a Chinese peasant and eats popcorn with chopsticks, and idolizes Bruce Lee. His younger brother calls him a “chocolate-covered yellow peril”. Sho-Nuff—we never find out what his real name is—dresses, as well as he can, as a samurai, and styles himself “the shogun of Harlem”. They’ve got a bit of a feud running: Sho-Nuff wants everyone to know he’s the master of martial arts in this town. But Leroy’s quiet confidence has got a lot of the kids thinking he’s at least as good as Sho-Nuff. But Leroy won’t fight: one of the tenets of his dojo is “May God help me if I ever have to use my art.”

Which can be taken two ways, but, at least for the first part of the movie, Leroy takes it as a prohibition on fighting.

The feud between the two martial artists blows up when a Jersey-born mobster, just as silly in his own way as the two warriors and with a penchant for picking up losers, gets involved. He wants dance club host and owner Laura Charles—played by Vanity—to highlight his artist’s music videos on her dance floor.

That rounds out the three main characters: Leroy, Sho-Nuff, and Laura. They all have one thing in common: they’re very good at what they do and they’re confident in their own abilities. Sho-Nuff knows he’s the best; his feud with Leroy is a tactical one: he needs to prove to the community that nobody can outfight him, so that he can command their obedience as the master of Harlem. That’s why he can’t just beat Leroy up. Leroy has to fight back or some people might still believe someone could be better than the Shogun.

If you expect to see The Adjustment Bureau, don’t read this review. I’ve got a lot of spoilers here, but I don’t think they matter, because you aren’t going to like this movie. If you enjoy the first part, you won’t enjoy the second; if you enjoy the second, you’ll find the first part annoyingly weird.

David Norris is a New York congressman running for United States Senate. He’s a young man with a promising future and a bit of a reckless past. Nothing major, but it’s enough to derail his Senate bid when his frat party photos are published the morning of the election. It’s pretty obvious from the first returns that he’s not even going to win on his home turf, so he retires to a hotel bathroom to write his concession speech.

After working for a long time on the speech, he realizes he’s not alone in the bathroom. Turns out a woman is in one of the stalls. She’s hiding from hotel security because she crashed a wedding party. They immediately bond; they are clearly meant for each other. And then hotel security finds her and she runs and he is never going to see her again. All he knows is her first name, and there are a lot of Elises in the world.

He scraps his speech, and gives an impromptu Jerry Maguire-style speech about how marketing has taken over politics. From the snippets we get to see, it’s a very good speech. It’s a speech that would be very difficult to deliver without a teleprompter or divine inspiration.

He doesn’t have a teleprompter. His giving that speech is part of the divine plan, both for him and for Elise. Elise was inspired to dare herself to crash the wedding party, so that she would inspire him to tell important truths in his concession. He would then go on to make a successful run for the Senate in the next go-round, make a name for himself there, and eventually win the presidency, and his brand of truth would push the world a little bit further from world war and nuclear destruction. Elise would lead an emotionally troubled life but this would inspire her to become one of the world’s great dancers, and then pass on her inspiration to others as one of the world’s great choreographers.

That’s the divine plan for both of them.

The problem is that this isn’t the only divine plan. There’s an older plan in which they were meant for each other. They complete each other, and when they meet they live a quiet, loving life together in which each of them fills the need of the other for greatness. He doesn’t become a great politician, and she does not become a great dancer. They live for each other instead of for the world.

“She runs towards the danger… the oil execs approached her and said, you don’t know who you’re messing with… And she looked ’em in the face, stared ’em down… she took it on because she knew it needed to be done… she was a champion… to hell with the establishment, because the establishment has put us in this position in the first place.”

Wow. I’ve held off commenting on this movie because it had real potential for going very wrong. But this trailer is very powerful.

William A. Jacobson posted a snippet from Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech this morning, and listening to it, I can’t but remember the notion that Tolkien was heavily inspired by the events of the second World War for some of the things in The Lord of the Rings:

What General Weygand had called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in these islands, or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed, and the life of the world may move forward, into broad, sunlit uplands.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves, that if the British empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say, “this was their finest hour”.

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949. There’s some controversy about how much he was influenced by World War II, but very little controversy that he was. However, Tolkien clearly isn’t the only one to take inspiration from World War II for The Lord of the Rings. The movie’s dialogue seems to be a conscious effort to invoke not just the war, but this one influential segment of one of Churchill’s great speeches.

That line isn’t in the book, as far as I can tell. And it’s not the only time the writers pull from this one speech. They use the word “the enemy” often, as Tolkien had the characters do in the book when they wish to speak of Sauron without naming him. Replace “Sauron” with “the enemy” in this little soliloquy of Galadriel’s:

“Ask me about my Gulch.”

“The only power any government has is to crack down on crime and criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, then one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kinds of law that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you can cash in on their guilt.”—Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

I saw Atlas Shrugged last Friday. While I’ve heard bits and pieces of the story, and have long had that quote from the book in my quotefile, I’ve never read the book. I’ve only read one Ayn Rand book, The Fountainhead. It was very enjoyable, taking a world to extremes to make a point, but not to unreasonable extremes. And for the most part, the characters in the book were believable with human flaws, and they succumbed to human temptations. Having gone forty years only hearing about Rand rather than reading her, I was surprised by how good a book it was.

That said, my pile of books to read is huge, and I haven’t added any more to it yet.

With the exception of one Mysterious Guy wandering around at the fringes, the movie was uniformly well-acted. The politicians and other smarmy beltway hangers-on were very well-acted and frighteningly close to real life, and the two main characters were very natural, and their lines were translated well to the movie.

I hear that the Mysterious Guy is the director; I hope that he either gets a lot better or gets a better actor for part 2. He wasn’t in this movie for more than a few seconds at a time a few times, but my understanding is that he has a bigger role in the next part. I’m guessing it’s going to be important that he have believable dialogue and acting. It wasn’t just the wooden acting; the dialogue, which I suspect worked great in writing, could have been a lot smoother without changing its meaning.

Despite his acting skills, his directing was good. I don’t think you can get this natural of a delivery from actors without being a good director.

There’s a beautiful sequence with a train; very enjoyable. I could quibble with the direction a little bit—I thought the shots were more appropriate for an older, Hogwarts-style train than for the ultra-modern, sleek train they used—but it was a good bit.

I just got back from Battle: Los Angeles. This was an amazing movie. I hadn’t originally planned to see it—the trailer just didn’t make it look that great. But I kept hearing that it was extremely good, so I went to see it. And the trailer lied. It practically made a different movie. Some of the stuff going on in the trailer is clearly bullshit seen in the context of the movie.

It’s very tightly edited. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit through an entire movie without going to the bathroom, you’re going to hate it, because there is no scene in this movie that isn’t clearly critical. There’s no filler.

I first saw Aaron Eckhart in Thank You For Smoking, which was also a very good movie; and it was nice to see him come up again in The Dark Knight.

The goal of the film was apparently to make as realistic a depiction of an alien invasion as they could, assuming that aliens used military hardware¹. They’ve got advanced technology; we’ve got a supply chain and familiarity with the battlefield. And we live here.

Something else we have is a 24-hour news culture that expects experts to know what’s going on the second it starts happening. We see bits of complete bullshit coming in over the news as the parts of the country not invaded try to understand not just what but why. This is one of the ways that the trailer lies: in the trailer, it sounds like these mean something, but in the context of the film it’s obviously a bunch of talking heads who have no idea why the invasion is happening or what the reason for it is. They’re just as reliable as anything else we get from the news seconds after it happens, which is to say, not at all. What they’re saying doesn’t matter to the marines trying to get civilians out of Los Angeles, except that what the marines see on television is a connection to an uninvaded, still naive, civilian population. And one they’d like to get back to.

It’s been out now for a couple of weeks, so if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend getting on the ball.

I’m generally a private person; one thing you won’t find much of on this site are photos of me. But I’m going to make an exception for this one, partly because it’s twenty years old and I don’t look anything like that any more. Although I probably still have the shirt.

For one year in the late eighties, I lived in Hollywood, a few blocks from the Chinese Theater. For part of that time, I hung out with the extras crowd, and was an extra in a handful of movies. Most of them will be impossible to find even in the age of Google. The kinds of movies I was in didn’t have titles during filming, so all I have to go on are “period mob movie produced by HBO”.

One, however, I’ve been doing a Google search on every few years when I remember it, because there can’t be too many movies about a couch that eats people, and also because it’s the one movie where I could be fairly sure I’d actually show up: in one scene I was right next to the two main actors. Unless they cut the scene, I’m in the movie. One of the actors was from Taxi.

When IMDB first came online, I was able to search photos of the Taxi actors and remembered that the actor was Jeff Conaway. A few years later, a search on “couch that eats people Jeff Conaway” told me that the movie was titled “The Sleeping Car”.

That didn’t help much, though, because the movie wasn’t available. Cue to a few days ago and the search finally brought up a YouTube video—someone named Maynard Morrissey put the entire movie online in nine parts.

I watched the whole thing and didn’t see myself. But even with a bad movie, its easy to get caught up in watching the movie rather than looking for unlikely events such as yourself appearing in it. So I went back over the bar scenes, and, sure enough, there’s a young man eating the same fries over and over in a blue and gold shirt that went out of style in the seventies.

Seven minutes, 19 seconds, in part 4; it should start there automatically in the embedded version. No, I’m not the half-naked guy (for which you should offer thanks to your respective deity). I’m the guy they pan across immediately afterward who is drinking a pint of beer, before focusing in on David Naughton. Drinking beer and eating; it was probably typecasting.