Category: Television

It might seem faintly sacrilegious to cast a skinny Irish actor as American legend Elvis Presley, but misgivings turn out to be groundless. Only a few minutes into Elvis, the powerful new CBS movie biography, actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers ceases to exist — and the King is born again.

Rhys-Meyers gives a moving and meticulous performance in a film that tells the Elvis story in a way it has never been told before — not just with new details about his life and loves but with a more palpable demonstration of his talent, his idiosyncrasies, and the joy he brought into the world — a joy he didn’t take with him when he left it.

As usual with its two-part movies, CBS has scheduled Elvis in a way seemingly designed to confuse viewers. Part One aired Sunday, and Part Two doesn’t materialize until the following Wednesday.

The production is lavish, but, when it comes to depicting Presley’s concert appearances, not really spectacular. The big letdown is that the producers (who number in what seems like dozens) make the glaring error of tossing in newsreel clips of the real Elvis at certain points in his career — when he is drafted into the Army, for instance. This tacky cinematic shortcut can’t help but undermine Rhys-Meyers, who is doing such a splendid job of making him and Elvis almost indistinguishable.

Elvis’ story has, of course, been told many times and in many venues. ABC did its own Elvis as a one-night, three-hour event back in February 1979. (Like May, February is a ratings sweeps month.) That Elvis aired opposite Gone With the Wind and the TV premiere of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kurt Russell, who as a child kicked Elvis in the shin in Presley’s movie It Happened at the World’s Fair, did a pretty good job playing the grown-up Elvis, but the movie was anything but definitive.

The CBS Elvis was made with the cooperation of the Presley estate; Elvis Presley Enterprises is listed in the credits as “creative consultants.” One might fear a homogenized version of the King’s reign with such credentials as those, but the movie hardly lacks for candor. Elvis, for all his intrinsic ingenuousness, is shown as undisciplined and impetuous, a dreamy-eyed kid who never grew up and a mama’s boy whose devotion to his mother was, like so many things in his life, strangely excessive.

Although it is touched on lightly, we do see some of Elvis’ latter-day reliance on medication — drugs to wake him up and cool him down. But much of the bizarre Presley behavior, like fried banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches in the middle of the night, isn’t shown. The movie stops almost a decade short of Presley’s 1977 death, closing in 1968, the year of Elvis’ triumphant comeback on television, the medium that enabled him to become a national sensation in the first place.

Many fine actors spin around convincingly in Presley’s inner circle. Camryn Manheim, almost unrecognizable, is a provocative maternal aberration as Presley’s weeping and worrying mama. Robert Patrick, best remembered as a metallic monstrosity in the second Terminator film, is surprisingly effective as Elvis’ moody father, who clearly ran a distant second to Mama in the Presley pantheon of valued advisers.

The chief contender for mama’s mantle is the conniving, money-mad tyrant Tom Parker, who insists on being called “Colonel” and is played with a ferocity that is somehow poignant by Randy Quaid — next to Rhys-Meyers, the most commanding presence in the film. Parker confesses to Elvis at the outset that he doesn’t even like rock-and-roll, but he knows the music business and convinces Elvis to trust him in virtually all things, often to the frustration of others who know better.

The second half of the movie is unfortunately bleak and morose as it shows Elvis in decline. Musical numbers grow way too scarce. But overall, Elvis, written by Patrick Sheane Duncan and directed by James Sadwith, has to be ranked a success, depicting Elvis with insights and subtleties that have eluded some other biographers. He’s often depicted as an icon of the ’50s, next to Marilyn Monroe and Howdy Doody, but Elvis transcends his own time and defies attempts to dismiss him as kitsch. He was the American dream incarnate — its proverbial dark side, yes, but the glory of it too.

The last song he sings in the film is “If I Can Dream.” He could, and he did, and he lives on to seduce and inspire other dreamers everywhere. Elvis is true to the man, the dream, and the legend — perhaps as true as Elvis was to himself. •

A big fat tear is already forming in the CBS Eye, with the scheduled shed date Monday, May 16th. That’s the night the network and the nation say goodbye to Everybody Loves Raymond, airing its final first-run episode after nine rollicking, profitable years on the network.

Raymond will remain a nearly bottomless gold mine in syndication, but its network prime-time reign will be over. Inevitably, that leads us to wonder if this is also the End of an Era — a question that gets asked about once a week in TV these days. Eras end at the drops of hats.

From the beginning, situation comedies, which had started in radio, were a staple if not the mainstay of prime time, and the classic prototype was I Love Lucy, a weekly look at the adventures of a wacky Manhattan clan and its subordinate satellites.

Over the years, there were comedies about talking cars and talking horses, visitors from outer space and visitors to outer space. But the hearty perennial was always the family sitcom, realistic in setting and premise, presenting a family that reminded viewers, however remotely, of their own.

The death of the domestic sitcom has been declared many times — in the 1960s, for instance, when the topsy-turvification of America seemed to warp and reorder the values reflected and shaped by TV. But along came producer Norman Lear and All in the Family in 1971, and the family sitcom was back and in frank new fettle. In the ’80s, domestic sitcoms “died” again — until Bill Cosby brilliantly reinvented and rejuvenated them.

Raymond wasn’t particularly revolutionary, but it was a rock-solid example of a genre that’s as integral to network TV as the evening news. But now — oh, no! — even the evening news is on the operating table, or at least undergoing cosmetic surgery. It’s time to ask again if the family sitcom is out-of-date and due for extinction.

A new magical buzzword has been buzzing around TV for years now: “Unscripted,” sometimes gussied up as “reality-based” or just, with stunning inaccuracy, “Reality Television.” Audiences, it appears, are tired of the formulas used to concoct assembly-line sitcoms populated with recycled stars.

Unscripted or partially scripted shows can come across as less packaged and less predictable, and viewers don’t seem to care where “unscripted” ends and “scripted” begins.

At HBO, scripted and “un-” have been successfully cross-pollinated. On The Larry Sanders Show, Garry Shandling played a talk-show host with an unmistakable resemblance to Garry Shandling; guest stars played themselves in talk-show segments that were largely improvised.

The experimentation was taken a giant step further with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry (Seinfeld) David’s inspired comedy series in which David plays an exaggerated, bumbling version of himself, a bumbling social-misfit. Much of each script is written, but some of the scenes are just sketched out by David and fellow writers and then, when filmed, depend on improvisation from the actors.

Television’s longest-running comedy is about a family, of course: The Simpsons, Fox’s seemingly indestructible classic, so topical that it changes with, and adapts to, the times, even though its characters don’t get any older. Several other family sitcoms remain on the air, but they’re either terrible or just passable; they don’t add anything new to the format and conspicuously lack surprises.

What television needs now and network executives breathlessly await, is a new Raymond — a show that (virtually) “everybody loves” and which keeps the authentic family sitcom alive, even perhaps advances it a step or two into untried territory.

It would be a loss, the family sitcom. TV and its audience have become so segmented and fractionalized, but here is a program type that has the potential to bring the family together again. There’s something warmly reassuring — in an increasingly shaky and uncertain world — about hearing that simple yet immortal phrase, “Honey, I’m home!”

“Lightweight” may be the last adjective one would use to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger, physically anyway, but See Arnold Run, a new cable movie about the muscle-bound social climber, is a lightweight pure and simple. Especially simple. It’s as substantial as a snowflake, though hardly as fascinating.

The film was made by Paramount for the Arts & Entertainment Network — seemingly on a low budget and brief shooting schedule. This thing is less a movie than an Etch-a-Sketch doodle, a sloppy pop biography of the bodybuilder, movie star, and now California governor that largely ignores the “movie star” part and Arnold’s unlikely reign as a box-office powerhouse.

Perhaps dressing up an actor to look like the Terminator, in scenes dramatizing the making of that movie, would require more legal work than the producers could afford, what with copyrights being the big cans of worms that they are. In any case, the film — which premiered on A&E January 30th and will replay February 2nd, 3rd, and 6th — gives us Arnold in his bodybuilding phase and his political spree, and we all know he was a movie star anyway.

If Arnold’s “reign as a box-office powerhouse” was “unlikely,” so was just about everything else the hulky-bulky Austrian-born optimist did. If there is a point to his story as the movie tells it, it’s that nothing is really unlikely for anybody who is determined enough about making it happen. At least — in America.

The screenplay cuts back and forth between parallel watershed moments in Arnold’s life — his attempt to win the title of Mr. Olympia for a fourth time in 1974 and his battle to become governor of California nearly 30 years later. Both feats were formidable; however silly-looking a “sport” bodybuilding is, winning the Olympia title four times in a row was unheard of.

Arnold’s bid to become governor did not come about in the normal way. In California, the freak-show state, few things come about in the normal way. Arnold was one of a field of candidates seeking the office when the electorate demanded a chance to recall its governor, dull Gray Davis. The movie streamlines the election and reduces the competitors to two: Arnold vs. flinty feminist Arianna Huffington.

In addition to those two main story lines, both of which involve Arnold defying skeptics in triumph, there’s a third — hazy and subsidiary (and in black-and-white) in which Arnold is a wee little boy trying to defeat another kid in some sort of competition, with Arnold’s imperious father standing by. In their superficial way, the makers of See Arnold Run ask “What made Arnold run?” and answer with that corny standby, “His daddy didn’t love him.”

See Arnold Run breaks with one old movie tradition but not very sensibly. It used to be that when real people were portrayed on the screen, they were played by actors who looked much better and more glamorous. That’s flip-flopped here. The real Arnold certainly outshines Jurgen Prochnow, the grim and scary creature chosen to play him in this film. Prochnow does avoid doing another Arnold impersonation, but his attempts to seem playful are grisly.

Similarly, Mariel Hemingway, though she certainly has looked beautiful on the screen, seems a frowsy substitute for Maria Shriver, Arnold’s press-wise wife and ambassador to the Kennedy clan. “Politics is hell — worse than hell,” she warns Arnold when he thinks about running. “I know. I am the media!” Do you think she really said that? (Shriver did have a solid career in network news.)

We follow Arnold through his various gaffes and crises as a campaigner. He puts down old suspicions about his father, Gustav, being a Nazi and tries to dismiss stories about his womanizing youth on the bodybuilding circuit. In one of innumerable flashbacks, a sexy groupie decorates Arnold’s chest with chocolate syrup and then licks it off. Oh, the decadence!

The guy playing the young, partying Arnold, Roland Kickinger, is more handsome than Arnold at any age and actually projects real magnetism, unlike Prochnow and his burnt-toast persona. Some of the flashbacks are perky, but too much of the movie’s running time is given over to scenes of tedious strategizing sessions by Arnold’s political advisers. Few things in life are more boring than watching a meeting.

Some day there might be a smart, savvy political movie made about Arnold and his insistence on overachievement, but See Arnold Run is not it, and it’s not awful enough to be fun either.

Orson Welles said a movie studio was the greatest set of toy trains a boy could ever have. Much later, David Letterman epitomized that same gleeful philosophy, but his toy-train set was an NBC television studio. Now, at CBS, Letterman still drops pumpkins off rooftops and sends camera crews out on ridiculous romps, but the new king of naughty boys is Conan O’Brien, proprietor of Letterman’s old Late Night show and the tallest, funniest, most sickly looking wit on television.

O’Brien had a rocky start as Letterman’s successor. He was met with hoots, boos, catcalls, brickbats, rotten tomatoes, and day-old Danishes. Critics petitioned the State Department for his immediate deportation. Actually, some of that stuff never happened. But we’re trying to make it more dramatic.

His early failure makes it all the more flabbergasting that O’Brien held his ground — Letterman’s old studio in Rockefeller Center — and not only survived but looks as though he’ll live long and prosper. Hence the Late Night with Conan O’Brien Tenth Anniversary Special, a fat and splashy 90-minute extravaganza which aired late last year and is now available on DVD.

Near it on video store shelves is another commemorative DVD starring one of the most memorable characters to be introduced on Conan’s show — more memorable even than Vomiting Kermit (yes, the frog, but in a state of constant spew); Little Jay Leno, a pint-sized version of the comic whose Tonight Show precedes Conan’s hour; and even the infamous, inimitable, inexcusable Masturbating Bear, one of the show’s more dubious yet irresistible inspirations.

Just as vulgar in various nefarious ways is Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a show-biz monster dreamed up by the brilliant Robert Smigel, who also created such modern-day myths as the Ambiguously Gay Duo, a pair of cartoon do-gooders who rescue good guys while bad guys try to figure out if the heroes are homosexual lovers or Just Good Friends. Villains stare confounded at the team’s suggestive behavior and end up in the clutches of the law, which they seem to find preferable to the clutches of the duo.

Unfortunately, the Ambiguously Gay Duo does not appear on either of these DVDs. Perhaps they’ll get their own one day. But what is there is choice, from the rowdy and surrealist Late Night to the scandalous antics of Triumph, who twice visits the Westminster Dog Show mainly for the purpose of sniffing other dogs and sizing up the female entrants.

His vulgarity is impeccable and unrelenting; the shamelessness of it part of its hilarity. Smigel works the hand puppet, does the voice (in an unidentifiable East European accent), and comes up with many audacious ad-libs. Most of Triumph’s material is written by the brilliant Late Night writers.

Triumph’s visits to the dog show are in the best spirit of guerrilla journalism. Jeff Ross, who executive-produces Conan’s show with Lorne Michaels, says that footage of Triumph being thrown out of the Westminster event — not once but twice — is absolutely authentic. Stuffy officials from the show commit the unforgivable sin: They cover the camera with their hands or big note cards. The shame of it! Surely the First Amendment applies to dogs too, as long as the dogs can talk.

Triumph can talk and talk and talk, especially to the “bitches” competing at the dog show. Triumph’s lechery is a more explicit version of Harpo Marx’s and his readiness with sarcastic remarks and obscenities parodies, sort of, the illustrious and indefatigable giant Don Rickles. And yet when Rickles meets Triumph in a guest appearance on Late Night, Rickles acts utterly baffled by his wacky acolyte. It’s a generational gap, not a conflict of species.

Which of the two DVDs is funnier? Since Triumph appears on both, he can be happy with either answer. Even though O’Brien’s show includes appearances by Will Ferrell, former Conan sidekick Andy Richter, and a heckling Ben Stiller, Triumph triumphs with crude humor that’s funny over and over. His favorite joke is repeated mercilessly: “That’s a great show — for me to poop on.” Pooping and having sex are his two reasons for living, and in that, he resembles not only millions of dogs but millions of men as well.

Triumph is at his most vicious at the premiere of a Star Wars sequel, dismissing those waiting in line as pathetic nerds and lonely losers. To one young man in costume he asks, “Have you ever talked to a woman without having to give your credit card number?” Triumph combines old-time show business with new-time candor. If he continues on his current path, he will eventually satirize everything and easily live up to his name. •

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, for those who do not know the play’s history, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for its first installment, Millennium Approaches, and both it and its sequel, Perestroika, won back-to-back Tonys for Best Play. Angels in America was a Broadway sensation and helped to re-usher political philosophy into contemporary (and commercial) theatrical discourse.

A movie script had been floating around Hollywood for some time, with Robert Altman attached to direct. However, with a total running time of about six hours, no major studio would commit to a controversial three-hour epic and its necessary sequel.

Thank God for HBO, which aired Angels on December 7th and 14th.

The plot is labyrinthine, but here it is in a jiff: Justin Kirk is HIV-positive Prior Walter, who early in Millennium Approaches reveals to his partner Louis (Ben Shenkman) that he now is showing symptoms of AIDS. Louis can’t handle death or imperfection, and once Prior is in the hospital, Louis leaves him and ends up having an affair with the married, Mormon chief clerk of a high-powered New York Supreme Court judge. This Mormon, Joe (Patrick Wilson), is married to Harper (Mary-Louise Parker), who is herself married to her Valium addiction. With her closeted, distant husband at work (and on long, lascivious walks) all day, Harper has nothing to do but indulge in hallucinations with an imaginary travel agent, Mr. Lies (Jeffrey Wright).

Meanwhile, hubby Joe is moving up politically, under the guidance of father-figure Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), the real-life baddie who had the same father-son relationship with the even baddie-er Joe McCarthy. Roy is up a creek with an ethics committee that wishes him disbarred, and he enlists Joe’s help as an insider to get him cleared before he himself dies from AIDS. A drunken phone call to Joe’s mother (Meryl Streep as Hannah) in Salt Lake City brings her to New York for an unexpected intervention, and an angel crashes through Prior’s roof proclaiming him a prophet.

If it sounds complicated, it is. Angels in America is nothing if not comprehensive in its attempts to intertwine theology, political ideology, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and nationalism into a great big stew, with human relationships tossed in where convenient and appropriate. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that there is a string of fascinating human relationships upon which these ideologies are attached — like clothes on a clothesline. Half the time, these characters (each rich and gorgeously drawn) are dealing with the complicated emotional issues at hand: Prior dealing with his sickness and with Louis leaving him; Harper suspecting her husband is “a homo”; Joe deflecting the love of his wife, the concern of his overbearing mother, and the unethical insistence of Roy.

Meanwhile, the other half of the play’s dialogue is the spouting of social philosophy. Louis and Belize (Jeffrey Wright again), Prior’s best friend and Roy’s nurse, sit in a coffee shop and debate racism and anti-Semitism when their real conflict is Louis’ crappy treatment of Prior. Louis and Joe forgo much of the excitement and scariness of an affair and Joe’s first homosexual experiences in favor of chitchats on Reaganomics. Belize and a hospitalized Roy exchange racial epithets and stances on class issues every time Roy needs a pill. This is the language of Tony Kushner, an academic among activists whose plays weave in and out of interpersonal issues just long enough to make grand and grandiose political exclamations.

This is great television. Give HBO a little credit for reinventing the medium as a bona-fide stay-at-home event and not just a junkyard of pleasant time-passing. Other intelligent fare can be found on the networks, but only HBO has managed to bridge the gap between TV and film with its own production efforts. The effort here — $60 million in budget and sweeping in scope — is rewarded with careful guidance from director Mike Nichols, who is no stranger to adapting great plays into great movies. Nichols also gets excellent performances all around. Pacino’s accomplishment is almost invisible because of his typecasting as the kind of articulate, controlling blowhard he perfected in Scent of a Woman. But he is wonderful and even tricks some sympathy from the audience as he lays dying. Streep does great turns in a handful of roles (look closely for her as the elderly rabbi), and Emma Thompson makes a hell of an angel.

Angels‘ lesser-known players are no less distinguished. Kirk, mostly unknown, holds the film together, matching the script’s jump from humor to politics to pain with effortless dedication. Wilson, as the chilly, unsated Joe, is unsettling — as beautiful and as distant as a statue in a book about statues. Parker satisfies as the batty Harper.

There is, years after its 1990 debut, some question as to the immediate relevance of this play and what it says about today’s America. Now that the corruption of the ’80s, the reality of AIDS, and the secrets of the changing millennium have been revealed, is there a place for this film in meaningful contemporary dialogue? Or is this entirely a look back? The last line of the play is “The new work begins.” Was this Kushner’s way of saying, “Okay. That’s enough talk. Let’s get to work.”? I can’t say. I lack the philosophy. What I can say is that this is, indeed, fantastic television, and again: Thank God for HBO.

With various parts of the world at war, more or less perpetually but particularly now, it might seem trivial to complain again about violence on TV. But if warfare represents the failure of humans to coexist peaceably, violence in TV and movies represents a failure to come up with something saner, more imaginative, and less debasing than brutality and call it entertainment.

Violence reminds us we are animals. Art tells us that at least we are among the higher forms of animal. You see a lot more violence than art on television these days.

Although the Academy Awards made it look like movies are going through some sort of humanistic golden age, that’s hooey. Movies are more violent than ever. And since television has become the principal medium for marketing them, the violence in movies infiltrates and pollutes even the most nonviolent TV shows.

In Washington, Philadelphia, and many other major cities, reruns of Seinfeld, Roseanne, Home Improvement, and other off-network sitcoms air during the early evening hours, between the news and prime time. These are, for the most part, family shows, but at any given moment the show will stop and a commercial break will burst forth — and “burst” is just the word because many of those commercials are for vicious, brutal, R-rated movies.

Obviously, some episodes of Seinfeld are strictly for adults, but the fact is, kids are attracted to the show by the presence of Cosmo Kramer, the hilarious doofus played by Michael Richards. Some of his comedy is wacky slapstick.

When you sit down to watch such shows with young children — let’s say 12 and under — you’d better have the remote in hand, because Seinfeld also attracts affluent young adults, and movie studios see them as major moviegoers — people from puberty on up to about middle age (after which nobody cares about you — movies or TV shows).

Bang, crash, boom — the screen and soundtrack are filled with violent images: 12 guns a-shooting, 10 windows shattering, eight cars a-crashing, six monsters leaping — and, believe me, no partridge in a pear tree. If there were a partridge in a pear tree, a monster would be about to pounce on it or Arnold Schwarzenegger would be taking aim at it with a portable missile launcher.

Those who make these movie ads pack as much pure “pow” as they can into a punishing 30 or 60 seconds. Just unrelenting mayhem and aggression — blam, blam, blam.

While it’s true the commercials do not usually show actual gore from the films — flesh being riddled with bullets and that sort of thing — the ads are still odes to brutality of every imaginable kind. No matter how diligently parents may try to shield their kids from excess violence, these commercials come along and blast their efforts to smithereens.

In recent weeks, syndicated reruns of family comedies like The Simpsons have been interrupted by horrific pitches for such films as Panic Room, with women huddled trembling while bad guys armed to the teeth try to kill them; and Resident Evil, an Alien-like thriller in which the good guys battle vicious dogs who want to rip their throats out. Plus a whole new array of war movies glorifying violence of that kind.

A half-hour comedy may contain several ads for movies that are rated “R” for gore, brutality, and nightmarish peril. The result can be nightmares, all right — for little kids who see these images. The sitcoms often air five or six nights a week, and simple multiplication tells us that children will see dozens and dozens of violent images during that otherwise peaceful time.

There ought to be a sanctuary, a haven, a safe place in every broadcast day — a period during which parents can feel safe about their young children watching TV. Violent imagery should be kept off the air, in programs and commercials, until the later hours. Cruel, disturbing, potentially traumatizing movie ads shouldn’t air when children are likely to be watching. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, yes, but, more to the point, a young mind is a terrible thing to assault. To paraphrase an old Christmas song: Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with what children are exposed to on television.