Judgment Day: Some New TV Favourites Bite the Dust

A scene fron NBC's Outsourced

When you love television, the threat of a show’s cancellation comes with the territory. Whether it’s because of middling ratings, skittish sponsors, quirks of network schedules, or a main star with eyes on the big screen, you know that a beloved TV series isn’t going to run forever. Nor, to be perfectly honest, should you want it to. Creatively speaking, in my opinion, some of the most fruitful consequences of the cable TV revolution are shorter seasons and shorter runs of shows. Thirteen brilliant episodes of a series like Terriers are worth more than 218 episodes of Smallville (which, after 10 seasons, recently aired its final episode). This is not to say that I wasn’t – and am not still – quite a bit upset about the untimely end of Terriers this past winter, but I’ve become a lot more philosophical about the lifespan of TV shows. Ironically, what made the cancellation of Terriers somewhat less upsetting for me was how well-constructed the series was, from start to finish. The writers and stars seemed to know exactly what the show was, and who the characters were, right out of the gate. What is more frustrating are shows that get cancelled just as a series is beginning to figure out what it is: you can see how good it’s going to become, only to see that future cut short. Every television season comes with a few heartbreaking announcements, and (with the cancellations of Outsourced and Traffic Light) the 2010-2011 season was no exception.

Some Good, Some Less So: A Look at the New Sitcoms of 2014

John Cho and Karen Gillan star in Selfie, on ABC

Amid the high profile dramas that are debuting on the small screen this season (Gotham and How to Get Away with Murder), comedies are flying a little under the radar. Last year saw well over a dozen new network comedies launched, and a year later we've had a few heartbreaking cancellations (Trophy Wife, The Crazy Ones, and Enlisted) and one break out, consistently deserving hit, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. (The Andy Samberg comedy premiered with such a strong comic voice and sense of itself that its eventual success was visible in the first 5 minutes of the pilot. So far, its sophomore season has continued in the same vein.) This fall the networks are offering only a handful of new sitcoms, and today I'll be taking a look five new comedies, in order of their relative promise: Black-ish (ABC), Selfie (ABC), A to Z (NBC), Marry Me (NBC), Mulaney (FOX).

Once Upon A Time and Grimm: Fairy Tales Go Prime Time

Jennifer Morrison (far right) and the cast of ABC's Once Upon A TIme

Fairy tales are the new vampires: this is what a friend of mine told me a couple of months ago after she saw the new fall TV schedule. And indeed, fairy tales do seem to be enjoying a real renaissance of late. Three years into our apparently unending economic downturn, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that popular culture is turning to more and more fantastic and otherworldly settings to tell their stories. And if fairy tales seems destined to displace teen vampires in our cultural zeitgeist, Snow White herself seems fated to be their poster child. Next year alone, Hollywood will be releasing two live-actions retellings of her familiar story: Tarsem Sitongh’s as-yet-untitled project with Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen coming out in March, and Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman with the Twilight saga’s Kristen Stewart playing a Snow White meets Joan of Arc incarnation of the character. And in 2013, never to be outdone, Disney will be releasing Order of the Seven, another live-action adventure which tells the story from the perspective of the dwarves and re-sets the action to 19th-century China.

But we don’t have to wait until 2012 to experience the fairy tale revolution: over the past two weeks, two new shows have premiered on the small screen, each with its own revisionist take on the familiar stories we all grew up on: ABC’s Once Upon A Time and NBC’s Grimm. But even though both shows operate generally on the same, perhaps familiar conceit – bringing storybook characters into our contemporary world (see 2007’s Enchanted for a recent movie example of this) – the two shows could be hardly be more different in their particular takes on the idea.

There Are No Happy Endings: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’s Feel Good 9/11 Spin

Ten years after 9/11 and Hollywood filmmakers are still not sure how to handle cinematic depictions of the tragedy. They obviously and understandably won’t excuse the terrorists for their horrendous crimes. Nor will they blame the United States for what happened that fateful day as one ignorant Toronto film writer did when she wrote that America was both the victim and architect of 9/11. But they also can’t handle dealing with the raw emotions still evoked from that horrible day on Sept. 11, 2001. Excepting for United 93 (2006), Paul Greengrass’s emotionally powerful depiction of the occurrences on board one of the doomed flights, they’ve been content to stick to simple emotions such as were on display in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). American independent filmmakers have been more forthright on the subject, but generally have used their platform rather myopically, either assailing supposed Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11 (Civic Duty, 2007) or to criticize American attitudes towards immigrants post 9/11 (The Visitor, 2007). None of the films on the subject, however, have tried to gloss over what happened then or put a positive spin on the tragedy, until now, with the unfortunate release of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. And feel good movies about 9/11 are no more palatable or less offensive than feel good movies on the Holocaust like Life is Beautiful (1997) or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008).

The House that Tina Fey Built: Women Take Charge of the New Fall Sitcoms of 2011

Tina Fey

We are now firmly in the second week of the new fall TV season, and so far one thing seems clear: quirky and complicated women seem to be taking over our airwaves. Beginning in mid-October, ABC will offer two new comedies with a male perspective, Last Man Standing and Man Up – both promising to look at the modern beleaguered man. But for now, September is awash with new sitcoms boasting an array of strong, funny women: Zooey Deschanel in New Girl on Fox; Kathryn Hahn in Free Agents, and Whitney Cummings in Whitney on NBC; and Kat Dennings in 2 Broke Girls on CBS.  

Strong female characters are of course nothing new in the history of the American sitcom: Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs) and Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) basically invented the situation comedy in the early 1950s, playing women who were brazen, funny, and regularly willing to make themselves the joke. But as the TV mother and wife evolved through the decades, fallible and funny women characters were generally replaced by the long-suffering and inordinately pretty wives of fallible and funny men – roles like Mary Richards, Maude Finlay, and Roseanne Conner became the exception instead of the rule. No doubt emboldened by the critical and ratings successes of Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation), executives have clearly decided that perhaps it is time to return to their roots. And generally speaking, the viewers are all the better for it – though as usual, not all the new shows are equally worth our time.

Oh, The Poor Bird: Daniel Handler's We Are Pirates

Daniel Handler's novel We Are Pirates was published in February. (Photo by Christopher Seufert)

We have left the land and have gone aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us, nay, more, the land behind us! Well, little ship! look out! Beside thee is the ocean; it is true it does not always roar, and sometimes it spreads out like silk and gold and a gentle reverie. But times will come when you wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Alas, if home sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there, and there is no "land" any longer!

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Aphorism 124) 

There is little I look forward to more than a new book by Daniel Handler. Handler remains most famous, and rightly so, for his Lemony Snicket books (the gothic-themed 13-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, and most recently his noirish, not yet completed, 4-volume prequel series All the Wrong Questions). The highest compliment I believe can be paid to a contemporary children's book is that deep and warm-hearted regret that you are too old to have read it as a child – and the Snicket books generate that for me with every page. Handler's voice as Snicket is uniquely clever, passionate, and intimate. As explosively unique as Unfortunate Events were, the new series – told from the point-of-view of a 13-year-old Lemony Snicket – are perhaps even stronger: as morally complex, starker in their themes, and even more often laugh-out-loud funnier. When the final volume of ATWQ is published by Little, Brown and Company this fall, I will return here and say more. But for now, let me say this: Handler knows how to tell a story, and his books – perhaps like the best of literature, children's and otherwise – are lessons on how to hear one.

In February, Bloomsbury Press published We Are Pirates, Daniel Handler's first straight up "adult" book since 2006's Adverbs. Adverbs is a difficult book to describe but an easy book to love. It was hands down my favourite book of that year, and rather than try to explain why, it was much simpler just to tell my friends to read it themselves. (I gifted more than a half-dozen copies of Adverbs over the next two years.) We Are Pirates shares a lot with his earlier book, and though it isn't likely to displace Adverbs either in my heart or my bookshelf, I nonetheless relished every page.

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 and Bent: Comedy is Alive and Well in the Midseason

Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23

With the television season running year-round these days, the midseason is no longer the networks’ dumping ground for shows not strong enough to make the cut in the fall. Today I’m looking at two new, but very different comedies which more than prove the point that great television doesn’t always begin in September. (Let’s not forget that Parks and Recreation and even All in the Family were midseason replacements when they were first launched!) ABC’s Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 will premiere on April 11, and NBC’s Bent is already more than halfway through its short, six-episode freshman season.

Fall Slump: When Good Comedies Stumble

Jake Johnson and Zooey Deschanel in New Girl, now airing its third season on Fox

Many television shows drag on far too long, but there is something especially unsettling about watching it happen to a sitcom. While no less upsetting when a favourite drama goes awry, (see: Battlestar Galactica, circa Season 3), the best of dramatic television often succeeds and fails in taking the story in new directions, which means a viewer can easily parse where and how it goes wrong. With ever-growing regularity, TV dramas have enthusiastically embraced television's rich storytelling potential, working in shifting themes, character growth and evolving situations into their long stories. To single out just one current series: FX's Justified has had four strong seasons – even if one or two stand out more than the rest – and it has done this by allowing its main characters to go in and out of new situations, interacting with different and often stand out amazing new actors who come on board for a single season's story alone, leading (for example) to Margo Martindale's Emmy-winning turn in Season 2. As a result, Justified can not only survive the death of main characters and the moral decline of others, it can thrive because of it. But mainstream situation comedy is, well, still largely dependent on its situation – even the best and most accomplished among them are often by necessity static. Static doesn't mean stagnant however. (Bart and Lisa Simpson's perennial and perhaps even purgatorial childhood is still the exception and not the rule.) Having established its fundamental tone, central characters, and key relationships, there are innumerable and endlessly creative situations to work within. ABC's Modern Family, now its fifth season, is perhaps the best example of how strong writing and acting can do amazing stuff within clear and largely preset parameters. 

I tend to return weekly to many of my favourite network comedies as much for feelings of comfort and familiarity as anything else. But when you begin to suspect that the show itself isn't living up to its side of the contract, that trust can often only stretch so far. And this puts even their biggest fans in a particular bind – a feeling not unlike when a close friend has overstayed their welcome on your couch. While some returning shows have been having exceptional fall seasons – CBS's Elementary is simply rocking its sophomore season – some returning comedies are making me eye the door for the first time: How I Met Your Mother, in its ninth (!) and final season; New Girl, in its third year; and most disappointingly, The Mindy Project, growing tired only in its second season.

Cinéfranco 2011: French comedies run the gamut of quality

The 14th edition of Toronto's Cinéfranco film festival recently ended, offering, as per its mandate, a glimpse into the commercial reaches of French language cinema, showcasing mostly movies from France, of course, but also from Switzerland, Belgium, Morocco and the French-Canadian province of Quebec. That commercial emphasis is deliberate on the part of the festival's founder and executive director Marcelle Lean, who recognized that French genre pictures are usually shortchanged at the Toronto International Film Festival and in regular release, which tend to the art house end of things. That does present something of a qualitative problem with Cinéfranco in that the best films from France are usually art house movies, like Summer Hours (L'Heure d'été) and A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) , and not the country’s genre pictures.

That said, some art house movies that shade into accessible psychological thrillers, such as Fred, La moustache, Le petit lieutenant and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté), have played Cinéfranco in the past demonstrating that even within the confines of Gallic genre pics, quality can be found. The festival’s comedies this year ran the gamut from quality to crap, but almost all of them displayed enough thought and intelligence to make them worthy of your time.

TV’s Revenge: Trashy But Zeitgeist Phenomenon

The cast of Revenge, on ABC

Note: The following contains SPOILERS

It’s a telling thing that although the American public TV networks are ostensibly devoted to appealing to their audiences, they rarely reflect back the viewers' realities. And that’s never more apparent than in terms of economic facts and figures. It’s the rare TV show that is actually about working-class blue-collar Americans, though significant ones from The Honeymooners through All in the Family to Roseanne did endeavour to portray that way of life. Mostly though, especially in popular sitcoms, like Seinfeld, Friends and even How I Met Your Mother, making a living and worrying about paying the bills isn’t on the agenda; in fact, the lavish apartments and spacious rooms the folks on the above TV shows live in were and are laughably removed from what New Yorkers actually put up with. (I know people who have to live in Hoboken, New Jersey, even though they work in New York City, because they can’t afford to shell out thousands of dollars for a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Big Apple.) But even in escapist, adverting-heavy network television, the gloomy headlines of foreclosures, unemployment and debt have, increasingly, been creeping into the plotlines and premises of the shows.

The 2009 quickly-cancelled Kelsey Grammer series Hank was centred around a boorish Wall Street executive who loses his job and has to move back to his hometown to re-connect with his family and the small town values he left behind. The characters on CBS’s The Good Wife are uniformly well off, but the law firm at the centre of the action suffered some economic difficulties last season and had to lay off staff so as not to go under. And on the finale of the second season of ABC’s Happy Endings, the series’ arguably most successful character, Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.) was fired. (It’ll be interesting to see how much the series’ third season will delve into Brad’s dire situation, the first time he’s been unemployed since he finished university.) Even Penny’s (Kaley Cuoco) job as a waitress on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory has always carried with it the awareness that she barely makes enough money to scrape by. (The apartment complex the main science nerds of that show live in, with its perpetually out of order elevators, also looks authentic.) But of all the shows currently on TV, it’s the ABC drama Revenge which may be the most plugged into what’s actually coming down in the United States, even though at heart it’s pulpy, trashy and more than a little soapy.

Separation and Deliverance: Revisiting Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)

The horror of the Holocaust and the fate of its survivors has been depicted from just about every conceivable perspective, but Mark Jonathan Harris's Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000) found another story seldom heard. Harris had already been acclaimed previously for The Long Way Home (1997), which depicted the flight of Jewish refugees and how it lead to the state of Israel, but here he examines the fate of the children who were separated from their parents and sent into exile during the war, in many cases forever. For nine months, just before the Second World War, Britain organized an extraordinary mission of mercy. It transported and opened its doors to more than 10,000 Jewish and other children from Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. The children – or Kinder, as they came to be known – were placed in foster homes in the hope they would be reunited with their parents. Many of the children never saw their folks again. Amassing some stunning archival footage, Harris interviewed dozens of surviving Kinder where, now nearing the end of their lives, they finally got a chance to tell their story. In one scene, a woman recounts the moment she was torn from her mother at the train station, while another describes the dislocating estrangement of living in a foreign country and not knowing the language or customs. Into the Arms of Strangers provides numerous epiphanies that reverberate such as the story of the child who is questioned about his lofty position, because he owns a violin, but then surprises and moves his inquisitors by playing an impeccable version of "God Save the King."

London Calling: Curtain Up in the UK

Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams, “In a Forest Dark and Deep”

Six plays in nine days proved to be a brilliant means of ignoring royal wedlock during a recent trip to England, while also fulfilling a longtime dream to immerse myself in London theater – or theatre, as the locals prefer. April was sunny in the often rainy city, enhanced by a sudden heatwave that felt more Mediterranean than Thames. But I enjoyed the resulting lush vegetation primarily en route to sit in darkened venues, watching four grim dramas, one partially comedic take on serious global tensions and a single farce.

Christmas Musicals: Into the Woods and Annie

Meryl Streep and Mackenzie Mauzy in Into the Woods

Rob Marshall’s new movie of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine Into the Woods has an insurmountable problem: the show it’s based on. The appeal of this musical, which mixes several fairy tales, has always eluded me. It contains an ingenious opening number in which Sondheim sets all the narratives in motion, and a couple of other songs (Cinderella’s interior monologue, “On the Steps of the Palace,” and “Agony,” a duet between Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes) are OK if somewhat overworked. But the  whole thing is too damn clever by half, with lyrics that tend to make the characters sound as if they’ve been reading self-help manuals.  And by the time the show picks up again after intermission and the characters go back into the woods because their happy endings have begun to fray, the same fate has befallen Sondheim’s inventiveness. The very concept is stupid: if taking to the woods is a metaphor for coming of age, then no one gets to do it twice. And you don’t have to darken a fairy tale dark in order to modernize it; the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen originals are plenty dark enough. Moreover, Sondheim’s idea of “dark” is, to my ears, merely homiletic: “Children Will Listen,” “No One Is Alone.” If I have to pick a revisionist fairy-tale musical, I’ll take Once Upon a Mattress. Revue-sketch comedy trumps pop psychology any day of my week.

Post Mortems: Frequency, Making History, and Emerald City

Leighton Meester, Adam Pally, and Yassir Lester in Making History.

Perhaps the biggest event of the television season is the one that didn't happen earlier this month, after an 12th-hour deal between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the major networks and studios averted an imminent writers' strike. True, a WGA strike threatens every decade, but the memory of the 100-day strike of 2007-2008 still looms pretty large, and with television's continually evolving face, the content of these regular negotiations always offers the rawest insight into the state of the industry, as years-old collective agreements hit headlong with new norms: 2007 revolved mainly around the surge of web-streaming, and the most recent almost-strike focused on the now-established shorter seasons of some of television's most prestigious shows. To add to the general anxiety, this year the talks also fell at roughly the same time that the networks were making their final decisions on which shows would be returning for another season and which would be axed. While some of my favourite shows (like ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which sat on the bubble for most of its impressive, often heartbreaking, 4th season) got last-minute pickups, there were a couple of painful casualties. Below are a few of my reflections on the 2016-2017 season that was, and won't be again.

New York, New York: Stepping Around the Heart of Scorsese’s Movie Musical

 The wonderful "Wine and Peaches" number in New York, New York. (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Martin Scorsese’s 1977 New York, New York, perhaps the only Big Band musical film after the collapse of the Big Band era, is about the meeting – collision is more accurate – of two young musical hopefuls in Manhattan on V-J Day, both newly out of the service. Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro, at the end of his astonishing early career – the year after Taxi Driver) is a relentlessly confident saxophonist and Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli, in her least-known great performance) is a vocalist. He keeps asking her out; she keeps telling him no. But his persistence, obnoxious as it sometimes gets, is inseparable from his charm, and though she tries to resist she ends up acceding to every one of his demands. She does go out with him, she lands him a job by performing a duet with him at an audition – it’s “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” and they’re a knockout together (Georgie Auld, who plays a supporting role, dubs Jimmy’s sax) – and they become lovers, then husband and wife. You’d have to be De Niro to pull off this part. The marriage is a disaster, because Jimmy is demonically focused on his career and professionally competitive, and when Francine doesn’t – or can’t – do exactly what he demands of her, he steams. And he cheats on her. The divergence in their careers – she becomes a star of stage and movie musicals, he becomes one of the inventors of bop – operates as a symbol for all the ways in which their relationship is unworkable.

The Tempest: A.R.T.’s Magic Show

Nate Dendy, Tom Nelis, and Charlotte Graham in The Tempest  (Photo: The Smith Center/Geri Kodey)

The American Repertory Theater’s new mounting of The Tempest is part nineteenth-century-style theatrical spectacle, part magic show – overlapping entities). The adaptors and co-directors are Aaron Posner and Teller (of Penn and Teller), and the magic, which includes card tricks, cheeky bits of business like a kinetic hankie with a will of its own, and real stage sorcery (Prospero levitates a sleeping Miranda in act two), is witty, ticklish and occasionally dazzling. The idea of Teller working on a production of this particular Shakespearean romance, with its sorcerer protagonist, struck me as irresistible, and I was high on him after seeing his documentary Tim’s Vermeer, in which an inventor deconstructs and then reproduces the Dutch master’s particular brand of magic – his process for developing his distinctive approach to realism. So I had high hopes going in. But this Tempest is more than I could have wished for.

Peripatetic In Cinematic Prose: Eat Pray Love

An Israeli woman once told a friend of mine that there is no Hebrew term for “alone.” The only equivalent phrase, she explained, translates as “I am with myself."

I have no idea if it’s true, but what a brilliant concept. My friend is plagued by the fear of being lonely. The same could be said of author Elizabeth Gllbert in her 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love, now a film starring Julia Roberts. More in the book than on screen, the lead character has been waging a lifelong battle with personal demons. Anxious to flee a contentious divorce and unsatisfactory affair, she takes off from New York on a journey to find freedom from perpetual torment. Intended as a year of living without sex, her quest begins with the pleasure of great food in Italy, before moving on to spirituality at a guru’s retreat in India and renewal of passion in Indonesia. So much for celibacy.

The literary version of Gilbert has stopped taking her medications, under the assumption that the trip’s adventures would fill up the space usually reserved for misery. After ten days in Rome, the “Pinkerton Detectives” -- how she has anthropomorphized depression and loneliness -- once again track her down. The movie dispenses with such gloomy thoughts of clinical despair. Just as well. Julia Roberts has a cheerful persona, with a boisterous laugh that’s surely one of her most endearing attributes. The cinematic Liz feels guilty about breaking up her marriage to Stephen (Billy Crudup) and sad about her deteriorating relationship with David (James Franco). But that’s only boyfriend baggage, not the gravitas of chemical imbalance or family dysfunction or whatever keeps most depressives in its grip.

When the Real Pod People Intrude: Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion

In my last post, I talked about the two-dozen plus DVDs I picked up for a buck each at the Rogers rental shutdown. As I stated, a few of the films I grabbed I assumed would be pieces o' crap, such as Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007 - starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig) which I had heard nothing but bad things about. It was the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I bought it for $1 to watch at some point just to complete the “collection.” So imagine my surprise when, except for the completely destroyed ending and idiotic bits here and there throughout the film, I found The Invasion well-acted, credibly made and far more pointed than I was expecting it to be.

In the first two versions, the invasion was literally a space-born spore that came to earth (never explained in the Don Siegel's effective 1956 version; carried to our planet on the solar winds in Philip Kaufman's brilliant 1978 version). Abel Ferrara's weak 1993 Body Snatchers also left it unclear where the spores came from, but suggested environmental problems – not space spores – on a military base caused the pods to evolve and take over people. In Hirschbiegel's version, spores have attached themselves to a returning space shuttle which experiences a catastrophic failure. When the shuttle breaks up on re-entry, it spreads the spores across the US (especially around Washington, DC, where most of the film is set) attached to the shuttle's wreckage. 

Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

The Evil That Men Do: Chinatown and L.A. Confidential

Los Angeles has always had a knack for attracting men (and it's almost always men) who saw an opportunity to take the City of Angels and try to remake it in their own image. These self-made men also didn't get to that position by being kind, or by doing the right thing. In fact, they rarely possessed any kind of moral compass; often they were sociopaths if not downright psychopathic. I'm speaking of people like William Mulholland, William Randolph Hearst and other 'captains of industry.' These titans, these monstrous icons, would later have streets, buildings and cities named after them, but their crimes, the terrible things they did, would largely be forgotten. Of course, this is a familiar story of any big city. Toronto, for example, has a street and various schools named Jarvis. But you wouldn't want to pull back the veil of the Jarvis clan in the 18th and 19th centuries because you might not like what you would find. The hothouse climate of LA, though, seems to attract an inordinate number of them.

Inevitably, when these guys went about their business, other people, often innocent people, paid dearly. It is even said by some that the tragic Elizabeth Short may have been killed by famous men who used her for their own ends and then disposed of her. (Short, whose nickname was Black Dahlia, is a famous-in-death young woman who came to Hollywood in 1946 looking for fame and all she found was murder by dismemberment in 1947. Short's murder has never been solved and has become the basis of many books and films, including Ulu Grosbard's interesting, but flawed 1981 picture True Confessions and Brian De Palma's reviled 2006 The Black Dahlia.) Besides the Dahlia story, Hollywood has rarely had the cojones to tackle stories about these men right in L.A.’s own backyard. But over the years, filmmakers like Philip Kaufman – in his 1993 film Rising Sun – and Robert Altman – in his 1973 picture The Long Goodbye – have all addressed what these legendary giants do either directly, or indirectly. But it wasn’t the prime focus of those works. Two great films, however, both of which I consider masterpieces, have confronted these men straight on: Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997).