Change Your Image
kellynchad
Reviews
Countdown to Looking Glass (1984)
An excellent portrayal of an impending apocalypse
I first watched this presentation on TV in 1984 - I'm thinking it was aired in Canada first before it was shown on HBO in October. At the time I could only appreciate it as a film about nuclear war; some thirty years later, however, I've come to appreciate it as an extraordinary masterwork of television drama.
Patrick Watson, a well-known broadcaster in Canada, does a superb and almost surreal job straddling the line between actor and anchor, bringing a gravitas to Don Tobin to rival any U.S. news anchor on the air in 1983-4. Helen Shaver is perfect as the world-weary Dorian Waldorf, whose one shot at preventing the crisis from escalating and at boosting her profile as a journalist is blown by the tardiness of a would-be "Deep Throat". And then there's Scott Glenn: as the embedded Middle East correspondent Michael Boyle, he predates Arthur Kent's "Scud Stud" persona by a good six years and perfectly demonstrates the gritty glamour of foreign-assignment journalism during the 1980s. Any of them would have fit in on an actual news broadcast: all of them together make the presentation frighteningly realistic and compelling.
The production, though certainly low-budget, was extremely tight and took full advantage of its limitations to lend verisimilitude to the scenario of a TV station's news department. It also took advantage of the format to bring in real players on the national political stage, adding a degree of depth and organic exposition to the presentation that would have made Orson Welles green with envy. The combination of tight production and a commitment to realism presents a different kind of response from that to be felt watching _Threads_ or _The Day After_: instead of the predictable horror of the result of nuclear annihilation, we have instead the gut-churning, half-in- the-mind terror of the unknown but inevitable.
There's the glimmer of hope extinguished halfway through the program as the one piece of data that could provoke cooler heads to prevail is rejected for broadcast. Later, there is the confirmation of a nuclear exchange taking place, without showing, or the need to show, more than a flash of light and a garbled image in static of what might be interpreted as a mushroom cloud. We are so caught up in that point of no return and its implications that any technical shortcomings in its exposition are utterly absolved. The ending of that report, and what follows, fill viewers with a dread and terror that lingers long after the end of the program - most of it created in the imagination of the viewer.
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Icons of the New Western Mythos
Much already has been written about _Bubba Ho-Tep_ as a commentary about the poor treatment of the elderly, as though the film was an overt political statement about Medicaid. While that interpretation does work,it sells short the film's true power to reveal our tendency to create an epic to validate the lives of those who seem larger-than-life to our consciousness.
The dilapidated and forgotten rest home in Mud Creek, Texas, is home to no fewer than three icons of Western culture - the Lone Ranger, Elvis, and John F. Kennedy. Given their tremendous statures and the mysteries surrounding their fates, one can readily imagine another room down the hall in which a forty-something scarred-up British blonde sends $20 a month to some Third World charity, contemplates what her sons must think of her and imagines a future married to her Latino physiotherapist.
This is the rest home of the gods - the slow, disturbing march of time into decline for those we can neither acknowledge as dead nor imagine as anything less than the vital, brilliant, courageous and beautiful people they were the moment they left the stage and didn't answer the cries of "Encore!" What becomes of them after they slip from public life through death or disappearance is no longer our concern: we accept them as dead (or not), talk endlessly of conspiracies and what might have been, and let it go at that. They cease to be human, cease to be loved for being worshipped, cease to be dignified for being deified. What becomes of their souls after the public has ceased consuming their images and personae is irrelevant to the cult of personality. Quite literally, their souls can be eaten by an Egyptian mummy and digested, sent to the visitors' toilet in a run-down rest home, and nobody would care; they already have what they wanted. The rest can go to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, or the garbage, or worse.
This is the world of _Bubba Ho-Tep_: the horror of the movie lies in the danger of death without a soul; the tragedy, in the fact that such deaths occur daily. Dying alone, dying without validation of one's true self, dying without having lived to one's full potential or to that expected of us by others; this is the fate of far too many of us in general, and certainly of many to whom the term "icon" is attached. Only in the face of a palpable danger do Elvis and JFK (for not to believe them will weaken the meaning of what happens) achieve and deserve the heroism ascribed to them for so long. Indeed, the climactic battle with the mummy and its aftermath smacks of the quest for the Holy Grail, with Elvis transforming from a Fisher King to Christ figure by the end credits. The comedy of _Bubba Ho-Tep_ lies solely in its premise; the power of the movie lies in its treatment of uniquely American myths.