Casablanca Deconstructed: Sending Up Table One

Released in 2000, the film Table One strips the glamour from Rick’s iconic nightclub—and reveals strippers galore.  Set in that denizen of pretenders, the Great White Way of New York, this wry comedy introduces a whole cast of males who deliver every line as if it were Bogart’s secret to life—and female surrender—including “Everybody wants to be Rick from Casablanca.”

The film announces its intentions when one pretender after another claims the honor of running the joint the slick way—right into the ground.  Standing in for Bogart’s fascists, small-time hoods compete for sophistication beyond all their means.  Chief among the competitors, the balding fiery Frankie “Chips” (Burt Young) throws food and the truth—with guns to back him up.

So, is the audience of this film, clued to falsehood from the get-go, supposed to laugh or burp on their way to a fantasy climax?  Pretense is as pretence does. The plot requires the total fool in the lot to realize that his pop’s money alone will NOT get him—as they say—a life.  Every circuit of the club brings viewers back to Norman (David Herman).  Call him Norman Normal NOT.

The primary normal trait which Norman demonstrates is what is known as The American Dream.  But that mirage never appeared so far overseas that it took a plane to carry it off in the person of an innocent blonde—or did it?  Standing in for Ingrid Bergman, a ditzy girl waltzes her way into—and right out of—a seduction scheme, launched by Norman, who ends up, of course, throwing up.

Can more ways be discovered to stand the glamour of the forties on its head?  This movie goes for broke.  A lengthy discussion of the joint’s cuisine reveals that Frankie “Chips” doesn’t eat shrimp, which he considers “bugs.”  Norman might have a chance with the girl of his dreams if he could recall his pretender’s name, which he can’t, even after practicing before a mirror.  

Perhaps Norman’s chances would improve, if the girl in question (Mary Hammet) were not also on the make.  She sells chairs for a living, but Norman cannot even throw her out of “his” Casablanca because, when the “chips” are down, Frankie “Chips” owns the place—kit, caboodle, and dames. In her perfectly innocuous way, she actually explains that each chair goes for “$4,900”!

Who can picture Ingrid Bergman hustling chairs while turning her short blonde curls into an admiring camera? But then, who could imagine Frankie “Chips,” the thug of the moment, collapsing in laughter as a gay stripper’s designer (Luis Guzman) shrieks when his face suffers a ding?  And how about that former actor, known as “Jimmy,” (Stephen Baldwin) stealing the show by courting Norman’s girl?

If send-ups are your thing, this thing is made for you!  Get inside the glam that comes and goes faster than World War 2.  Remember those times when a fish landed in your lap just as you thought you owned some stupid thing, too!  But the future is always for the foolish—and that plane can take you to Casablanca any old time—just don’t ride Southwest!   

Politics at the Movies: Rutger Hauer Goes Feminist

Partners in Crime offers that unusual experience:  Politics underlies its script and characters, but Art triumphs here, even hauling political correctness.  Released in 2000, this film begins with a timeless sequence: a snow-covered rural landscape saddled with an abandoned vehicle.

The setting asks the question which the movie will resolve.  Who abandoned this vehicle on his mysterious quest through life?  The director of this work knows exactly how to engineer the cinematic experience, with not a scene wasted on excessive rhetoric or red herrings.

A body emerges later, AFTER the audience absorbs its meaning.  Following the critical theory of Edgar Allan Poe, that master of mania, the killer stands before us all along, unrecognized and apparently guileless.  Viewers can watch this film repeatedly, and still be seeking giveaways.

Rutger Hauer bestrides this movie like the poor schlep’s John Wayne.  Outspoken and macho, he confesses early on that his “personality” has crippled his law enforcement career.  Too forthright for administrative positions, and too astute for gumshoe plodding, Hauer captures Everyman’s Wannabe.

Hauling his past around has left him cynical but not bitter—no small achievement for a man whose dream career landed in his ex-wife’s lap like the proverbial bowl of cherries.  Both applied to be FBI agents, but only one stayed home to become a dedicated family man.

He could have ended up hating women, accusing them of stealing his birthright.  He doesn’t.  He could have ended up resenting his daughter, the legacy of a second go-round on the marriage circuit.  He doesn’t.  Instead, he dives headfirst into loving that child like the most important man in her life.

His ego suffers a knock-down nonetheless.  Twice now, women abandoned him to appear the inveterate loser.  Yet not once does this word escape his manly lips.  He plays the Chinese waiter to his daughter’s amusement in a scene which deserves trailer status.  No failures can kill his joie de vivre.

Encountering his first ex-wife as a superior in the professional environment tests his equanimity to the limits.  Will he stalk off, wounded beyond endurance?  Will he refuse to cooperate and dump the responsibility she sought completely in her unaided jurisdiction?  At every step of decision, the audience senses his deliberation.

“So, do you have any kids?” his ex-wife asks, delivering the turning point in the movie’s plot.  Obviously, if she’s gadding about on FBI assignments, she wouldn’t have been home long enough to foster an heir to a failed marriage.  Miraculously, the man of the house has produced this phenomenon without a petri dish.

Even while sewing—mending his errant life—the macho Hauer tucks into domesticity, without missing a beat.  Reading to his daughter demonstrates his faithfulness to his nightly duties.  No one can miss this fact, though:  Hauer’s character does what he enjoys, and he enjoys being a good man and father.

Will he mend more than laundry?  This film keeps the audience wondering and wishing until the last lovely minute.  Credibility is never at stake here.  Love is.    

Not Just Another Holiday Movie

As a setting for an Easter parade, Seville offers more than bunnies.  “Welcome to the Middle Ages,” one resident quips in the film Angel of Death.  There, age-old traditions saunter forth down byways cloistered with cheek-by-jowl medieval housing—and murders galore. 

One mystery piles on another in this feast for the eyes.  “Have you seen a dead body before?” another resident queries.  Americans hide bodies in readymade closets of all kinds, of course—and think nothing of it.  Apparently, civil sevillanos practically need a task force to deal with theirs.

So, a task force turns up, since this is Easter, and spring miracles keep springing out of nowhere.  As a wily detective, Mira Sorvino achieves miracle number one:  She practices critical thinking when every right-minded relative would be screaming at her:  “Get outta there!”

Sorvino’s talent in no small portion consists of curving her lips as if she’d just tucked away a chocolate rabbit and a dozen peeps.  Her hair glows; her heels click.  When encountering ANOTHER MURDER, she just demonstrates that Hemingway possessed no monopoly on grace under pressure. 

How little Americans know about Spain—with the exception of Hemingway, who wrote Death in the Afternoon, a classic on bullfighting.  The secret to this sport, he confided, lay in coming as close to death as possible, without letting the bull gore the innards.  Happy thought!

This sport, demonstrated in this film by a less than fortunate athlete, a la Hemingway again, grabs the spotlight here.  The gold in the sun glimmers not only on idyllic hills but also on the bullfighter’s shoulders.  He triumphs against the beast, but loses to fascist plotters, keen on revenge.

As in Spain’s Civil War, as Hemingway knew well, too, the citizens of Spain divided among La Pasionaria, Nationalists, and the Republicans, his heroes.  Treachery could be expected because the Catholic Church defended Mary but did not save the Jews from the death camps.

Miracle number two in this movie consists of ninety minutes of abridged Spanish history.  Miracle number three arises for readers of modern literature who know Hemingway front to back of every one of his novels, especially For Whom The Bell Tolls, whose heroine must be named Maria.

Why?  Because Hemingway’s world drenches readers in Catholicism, existentialism, and courage—the kind of courage it takes to face down killers, and saunter away from the medieval Dance with Death.  The telling connection between the two scripts screams imitation, if not icon-envy.

In fact, this film’s script begins where For Whom The Bell Tolls ends.  The key question at the end of Hemingway’s masterpiece remains:  What happens to Robert Jordan’s love interest? Maria spent three days and nights with him—long enough to conceive an avenger?

The world moved beneath Hemingway’s hero, when he discovered that even fascists cannot kill love, no matter their other talents.  But rape remains a kind of execution in this movie—and requires accounting.  The devil may get his due, but God doesn’t look the other way NOW.

Hot Topic: Meltdown

A defense of Charlie Sheen is getting easier by the minute.  Who doesn’t wish that the calendar could roll back to those Happy Days—not starring Ron Howard and Henry Winkler—when a meltdown meant a star going viral?  When a star going viral begat no explosions besides a shaking head and a middle-part hair style that made viewers forget Farah Fawcett’s 70s and 80s masterpiece?   

Viewers hadn’t seen a middle-part masterpiece since Vidal Sasson carved hair into wings and turned American girls into British birds.  Ah, the past!  Once upon a time, men didn’t go bald for fun, either.  Charlie never did that, did he?  Go, Charlie!  Now, even astronauts go bald; even teenagers go bald, and not one of them looks like Yul Brynner or could hold his own with Deborah Kerr in The King and I.

Now, it would even be fashionable to say, “The King and Me.”  But does anyone hear Charlie murdering grammar that way?  What an old-fashioned guy!  He even talks about Adonis.  What star but Charlie Sheen has done a plug for the Greek classics recently?  Wherever he got his inspiration, he got Adonis right!  That guy went around with two goddesses, too!

The best part of Charlie Sheen’s star act, though, comes down to Hamlet.  What other actor has done his own father-son royalty drama as improv?  To be Hamlet meant to be King Hamlet, of course.  To be a Sheen, likewise, Sonny Sheen’s gotta outdo Daddy Sheen, whose TV sheen still awes the lower stratospheres of Hollywood’s faithful. 

Just like Hamlet, too, Charlie Sheen as Charlie Harper got in his digs at society’s cougars, without once mentioning You-Know-Whom.  Ah, what taste!  What savoir-faire!  And that gentleman fought with his best friend, and he drove the women mad, thinking he was crazy.  And, if he hadn’t gone crazy, would we even remember some Danish prince named Hammy? 

So, what was America watching in those wonderful days of yore—a great long try-out for another off-Broadway classic?  Or does Charlie Sheen yet expect to bring Hammy TO Broadway?  He’s got the hair.  He’s got the athletic grace.  And he’s got the mad scene down by memory, calling the lords names and picking fights with people behind curtains. 

In fact, he’s so good at convincing people he’s nuts that he’s made us forget all about Brando, who wouldn’t even pick up an Oscar, because he was conducting his own little demonstration.  And he’s wiped Tiger right off the front page of every media sensation.  Charlie hasn’t had an auto run-in yet, has he?  Cheers for saving everyone on auto insurance, too!

Now, he’s chosen his own format, and his own one-man show, just like a rock-star.  He’s giving concerts which sell out faster than Americans can learn to pronounce locations going crazy because they don’t have Sheen on hand to keep human focus where it belongs:  on one man with enough talent so no show can hold him to a straight-jacket contract—because, just like Elvis, wherever he goes, Charlie’s a star.    

Charlie Sheen: A Victim of Women?

Charlie Sheen can wrap his fictional Mom, played perfectly by Holland Taylor, around his finger and get off with a zinger.  Does that neat plot mean the rest of the female population doesn't know how to short his sheets, and throw him out the door?  Why isn’t he residing in a doghouse, without a bone to keep him warm? 

Why haven’t the writers of Two and a Half Men deposited the Charlie Harper character in a dump with no air conditioning—and no heat in the winter, either?  Why doesn’t he ever run in to the Queen of the Human Species?  It shouldn’t take Lydia Kamakaʻeha Kaola Maliʻi Liliʻuokalani, the last Queen of Hawaii, to take him down a peg—or 1.8 million.  

No, instead, the fictional Charlie Harper gets an overweight maid to do his bidding, plus underdressed chicks running all over his neighborhood.  Where does this man live—Los Angeles, or a new location for that famous collection by Ernest Hemingway, Men Without [Real] Women?  Even Disney never laid it on this thick—and Prince Charming was in the shoe business! 

If Charlie Sheen has startled his audience with his recent erratic behavior, what must it have been like playing Charlie Harper for the last eight years?  He never gets to grow up, never gets to portray sorrow, never gets to be more than Peter Pan—and he doesn’t even get to wing over the stage with Tinkerbell fast behind, lighting the way for the rest of the Lost Boys! 

  

Do Americans need to practice Fung Sui just to send women running away from Charlie Harper’s residence, wherever the writers pretend it is?  Charlie Sheen may contend that he is Adonis, but Charlie Harper looks like a front for the real estate business.  All that panoramic footage of beachfront properties does not include their current value, does it? 

In place of beachfront advertising, here is a fantasy interview for Charlie's replacement, set on a foreclosed farm, about to be sold to Two Men for Half Its Worth: 

1.  Do you believe that women were born to make you happy, no matter what you do? 

2.  Did your mother make you stand in a corner until you could make sense? 

3.  Did your father threaten to beat you because he said men could take pain--and inflict it? 

4.  Did your parents require you to raise a calf or goat successfully to adulthood? 

5.  Did your parents require you to raise a plant successfully to edible fruit or grain? 

6.  Have you had vaccinations against the following:  Yes or No?

A.  Temper tantrums

B.  Narcissism

C.  Bowling Obsession

D.  Football Concussions

E.  Motorcycle Madness

F.  Addictions, especially to My Mother the Car

7.  Name your current employer:

8.  Name your current extracurricular activities:  (Beer Pong doesn't count.)

9.  Name your favorite TV shows:  (Brothers and Sisters would be good.)

10.  Do you know who Qaddafi is?  (Yes, spelling counts.)

11  Are you planning a vacation in Mexico?   (If Yes, don't explain.)

12.  How do you spend the bulk of your day?  (Don't say, Fantasizing.) 

Thanks.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac welcome your input.
 

Missing Johnny Carson:  Defending Charlie Sheen

By Meg Sonata

Johnny Carson's ghost haunted the airwaves last week.  Like Charlie Sheen, Carson had his go-rounds with network executives.  Famous talk show hosts including Letterman, Leno, Conan, and Rivers could have spoken up and admitted:  This business pays talking heads to act crazy.  What do you expect from Charlie Sheen?

Carson's comments were reliably funny, however.  No children were dragged from his house.  No psychiatrists testified that he was crazy for talking past bedtime.  Nevertheless, Johnny regularly indulged in fantasies involving his appearance in multiple bedrooms every night.  He ogled every female guest who appeared on his set.  Double entendre was his stock-in-trade.  On his show, "taste" meant his tongue stayed in his cheek--not in his guest's ear. 

By contrast, Sheen's highly successful comedy, Two and a Half Men, invites comments regarding sanity from the get-go.  Charlie and Alan’s mother clearly needs a shrink for taking out her hostility toward the grown men who run in and out of her life on her children.  In another context, her behavior would be labeled "abuse,"  Nary a word on this subject escapes media critics usually . 

Meanwhile, sibling rivalry characterizes the relationship between the grown sons who compete with one another to put Mom in her place--so long as six feet under remains unavailable.  The Half Man in the sit-com clearly joins his father(s) in gradual initiation into Sons Without Respectable Mothers, Inc.  The title of this show should really be Three Sons, No Mother, No Father, Either.

Most remarkably, the cast of Two and a Half Men even includes a female trained in psychiatry, who never appears in a rocking chair because, without a doubt, she is off hers.  The infamous Rose climbs up his balcony to find her Romeo, her personal obsession, only to dive down over his home's balcony when each conspiracy to glue him to her fails--when he's lucky.  In short, if an audience seeks "normal" characters, they don't go there.

Instead, however, if they seek a satire on modern life, they will find themselves right at home at Sheen's fictional address.  There, juvenile men rule.  There, females hand out favors of every kind with no thought to their real power.  The Child in the House must compete with his elders, every single time, for bed-space, nutritious meals, and sex education lessons.  Even obesity receives ridicule, as the hired housekeeper accurately lampoons her skinny bosses.

In this context, Sheen's recent public comments achieve bizarre propriety.  They serve as heat-seeking missiles which always reach their targets.  His fictional domicile left planet Earth many episodes ago.  Hyperbole demonstrates radical rhetoric at its best.  Personal attacks come with the territory, and his lease on life always hangs in question.  America, don't look now, but every attack you make on Charlie Sheen only circles back to bite you You-Know-Where.