Coup de Chance (Stroke of Luck)

 Woody Allen's Coup de Chance (2023) is an old man's movie.  The picture exemplifies what is sometimes called a "late style" in art -- the film is radically simplified, economical, and lucidly constructed.  Four characters interact to dramatize a parable that seems alternatively trite and obvious but also profound:  the film's thesis is that chance and accident control the world and that, for this reason, life is meaningless.  Notwithstanding the movie's bleak thesis, the picture is beautifully shot and replete with images of people enjoying the pleasures of food, art, and love.  Allen's mise-en-scene reverts to the earliest film grammar:  the picture is composed in short, decisive scenes each devised to make a plot point; at the film's two climaxes, that is nodes of greatest emotional intensity, Allen crosscuts between his characters -- it's a technique that Griffith and Murnau perfected.  Consider, for instance, the scenes in Nosferatu in which Murnau cuts between a young woman's growing sense of discomfort and anxiety and shots of the vampire, a thousand miles away, menacing her fiancee.  Coup de Chance is autumnal in appearance, content, and texture -- there's no preliminaries, no scene-setting, no throat-clearing; the jazz music on the soundtrack, Nat Adderly and Herbie Hancock among others, proceeds in a manner that is independent from the action on-screen; dire episodes are scored to jaunty jazz riffs.  There is no excess to the film and the movie seems impersonal, almost post-dramatic (if that is a thing); Coup de Chance is decidedly non-novelistic -- it's cast is stripped to a bare minimum, plot points are sometimes made by a sort of antiphonal chorus of upper-crust gossips, and there are no detours and digressions; Woody Allen's film form was always based on the short story -- Coup de Chance is not even a short story, but rather a lean, minimalist anecdote.  (It appears that Allen, the great poet of Manhattan, now lives in Paris.  Coup de Chance is shot entirely in French, although all of the characters, it seems, have lived in New York City in the past.)

Allen's magisterial simplicity is demonstrated in the film's opening scene:  a woman is walking along a busy Parisian street.  The camera in a Steadi-Cam shot follows her at a discrete distance.  As is the case with big cities, the pedestrians keep to themselves and scarcely glance at one another.  The viewer immediately notices an exception:  a handsome young man approaching the camera (so we can see his eyes and face) looks closely at the woman who we are trailing -- her face is not visible to us.  He seems uncertain for a moment, passes the woman who doesn't pay any attention to him at all, but, then, calls out her name.  It is a chance meeting on the street between old high school acquaintance, the accident from which the film derives.  The woman, Fanny Fournier, is beautiful and waifish -- she looks a little like Mia Farrow.  She works at an art auction enterprise and is married to a handsome, doting husband named Jean.  Jean seems a little domineering; he seems to have purchased his wife and gives her expensive gifts -- although she doesn't want to be regarded as a "trophy wife", in fact, this is what Jean's upper-crust friends call her.  Jean is said to be like the Great Gatsby -- he is very wealthy but there is a surmise that his money was acquired through criminal means.  (Jean's partner vanished in mysterious circumstances ten or fifteen years before the action in the film and there a group of three or four acquaintances in his circle who suspect him of having murdered the man -- these friends provide a counterpoint to the action and comment like a Greek chorus on the action; they are petty, malicious, and backbiting.)  The young man who chances upon Fanny on the street is Alain Aubert, a novelist who had a crush on the woman when they were in High School together.  Alain is writing a novel about the role of contingency and chance in human life.  In High School, Fanny carried around Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; she is now reading Appointment at Samarra. (Allen isn't subtle and makes his points with literary references.)  Of course, Fanny and Alain embark on a love affair.  Jean suspects that something is wrong with his marriage.  He hires a private eye to surveil Fanny and, within an hour or so, the truth is known.  (The gumshoe is a haggard, sinister older woman who melts into the background and effortlessly documents the affair -- she is a convincing minor figure in the film, carefully and indelibly characterized but without a single line spoken.)  Jean, who seems to have a screw loose, has a room in his lavishly appointed townhouse in Paris, devoted to his model trains -- it's an effect a little like the artificial forest in the loft in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, a symbolic terrain that establishes Jean as obsessive, a control-freak, and, even, a little pathetic.  Jean has a home in the country, a rather lavish chalet in the woods, and, most weekends, he and his wife retire to that place, something that she dislikes as dull -- she says she's not an "outdoorsy girl."  There are hunting rifles on the premises and deer in the woods, both aspects of the chalet that will figure in the film's later development.  Jean is savagely jealous of Fanny's lover and hires a thug to dispose of him. A crime is committed.  A fourth character enters into this situation -- Fanny's mother.  This middle-aged woman reads novels by Georges Simenon and she begins nosing about.  

Coup de Chance is exquisitely made and suspenseful -- it's a kind of crime-thriller and not a comedy except to the extent that it satirizes the affectations of the Parisian upper-class.  Allen is highly reticent; like Clint Eastwood in his late films, he implies violence but doesn't show it.  Similarly, the film's sex scenes are also restrained and, as in the case of Hollywood's classic era, Allen cuts away when things grow too intense. The cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro (he's now in his eighties) and the picture is astonishingly beautiful -- Paris glows in an amber, honeyed light; in one scene with rain outdoors and glowing rooms inside a Paris apartment, the picture channels Storaro's incredible work in Last Tango in Paris, a movie that I recall not so much for the explicit sex scenes with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider but for the contrast between warm interiors and cold, dispassionate rainy weather outside.  Storaro makes everything elegant --he's a film cameraman par excellence; there's nothing showy about his compositions but the style isn't "invisible' as in the classic Hollywood films; rather, there's a distinct texture to the light and you can feel the air intervening between lens and flesh.  Coup de Chance is a minor film but it doesn't aspire to anything pretentious and, in its own unostentatious way, it's pretty much perfect.  

You Tube tour: mostly animation

 In the early '30's, Fleischer Studios produced three Betty Boop cartoons featuring songs by the "Hi-de-ho" man, Cab Calloway::  Minnie the Moocher. Snow White, and The Old Man of the Mountain.  Minnie the Moocher and the The Old Man of the Mountain are essentially the same movie:  both pictures feature Betty Boop accompanied by sidekicks Koko the Clown and Bimbo, a sort of black puppy-like creature.  In both movies, there is film footage of Cab Calloway, swaying eerily and dancing as if he has no bones in his body at all. Calloway shuffles about, performing a sort of moonwalk in which he moves without seeming to lift his feet and writhes his hips and shoulders like a snake.  All three pictures show ghastly and monstrous apparitions -- eyeless cats, heaps of bones from which globular, mucousy ghosts spurt, strange skeletal duck-billed creatures and the like.  Of course, everything transforms into everything else, figures morphing and shifting shape.  Betty Boop runs away from her home where she is bullied at the supper table by her fat German emigrant parents -- he father's head turns into a mindlessly ranting gramophone.  The real world outside turns out to be worse than her home with its bickering, haranguing parents -- there's a ghostly walrus who sways like an undersea plant (mimicking Calloway's weird swaying in the opening shot -- his image has been rotoscoped) who leads Betty and her friends into a cave filled with monsters.  At the end of the cave, there's a horrible banshee who appears in the darkness and flies toward the camera:  the banshee's mouth opens to swallow the camera and we see her tonsils animated as small ghostly figures at the back of her throat that also grow mouths and howl at us (and the heroine).  Betty flees, diving into her bed at home -- she has left a message about running away from home, now ingeniously torn into a scrap of paper that reads "Home, sweet, home" on the fragment resting on her pillow.  The lyrics of the song are bizarre, something about a prostitute or "hootchie cootch" dancer who takes cocaine and "bangs the gong" (apparently, meaning uses heroine), thus motivating the grotesque visions in the banshee's cave.  The Old man of the Mountain reiterates this plot -- Betty goes up a winding mountain road with her sidekicks and encounters an old man with a long white beard and long white hair.  The old man is lecherous and seems to chase Betty Boop in order to rape her.  (Betty is a weird figure in her own right, all curves packed into a tight, short black dress with a kewpie face, big eyes with big eyelashes and shapely gams that come to a heeled needle point.  She is sexualized from her spit-curls to the pointed stiletto tips of her shoes.  She talks a strange lingo, some kind of "White jazz" punctuated with nonsense syllables:  Boop-boop-de-boop.  This gibberish aligns with Calloway's spectacularly fast and intricate scat singing in the songs.) Snow White involves the fairy tale story with an ugly stepsister preening herself in a sentient mirror.  Koko and Bimbo are told to take Betty out and kill her -- she cries and, while they are sharpening their swords and axes on a whetstone, they are moved by her tears, ignore the task ay hand, and grind their weapons to a dark pulpy substance..  Betty escapes into the grave dug for her which seems to be about a mile deep.  She falls through the shaft and ends up fleeing into a cavern labeled "Mystery Cave."  Koko and Bimbo follow with the witch also in hot pursuit.  In the cave, the characters encounter stalactites and petrified monsters of various sorts, the same creatures recycled from the other two cartoons:  in this cartoon, Calloway doesn't appear on film but sings "St. James Infirmary".  As far as I can ascertain, the tune of "St. James Infirmary" is the same melody played in Minnie the Moocher and  The Old Man of the Mountain:  the wailing lyrics with the skat interludes reminds us that White people originally perceived the Blues as a sort of unearthly, eerie howling -- this is very much the premise of these three short animated films.  The concept seems to be that there is a brutish world of European (German) emigrants -- their domestic arrangements rest, however, on the backs of an underclass of ghostly spooks symbolizing I suppose some sort of repressed sexual instincts. Sex here equal death -- monster ghost walruses and the amorous apparition of the Old Man of the Mountain with his prehensile orangutan arms. The middle class bourgeois, it seems, are perched atop a teeming and comically grotesque underworld that is black -- the color of night, spooks, and African-American musicians who provide the bourgeois with access to that world.  Ascribing meaning to these specimens of what Bob Dylan called "The Old Weird America" is a pointless task -- on their face, the cartoons are meaningless, a jazzy improvised melange of figures fluidly changing into other figures but the themes of these animated films:  a white woman, drawn as a baby-whore, slipping off the straight and narrow path and, then, being pursued by various ghouls and monsters, I suppose, means something -- although it's hard to articulate what this is.  

In World War Two, a series of cartoons featuring the Sergeant Snafu character (Snafu --  service jargon for "situation normal all fucked-up") were used to train recruits.  Snafu is a wretched soldier and makes mistakes that often turn out to be fatal for him.  (The character is voiced by Mel Blanc and sounds like Porky Pig).  In Booby Traps, Snafu is warned not to fall for the enemies tricks.  He narrowly evades various explosive devices, but makes the mistake of wandering into some kind of brothel.  Here motionless, naked women beckon.  A bomb has been wired to a piano, set to explode if a certain ivory key is tickled.  Snafu sits down to play "All those Endearing Young Charms" on the piano but keeps hitting the wrong note and, therefore, avoiding depressing the key that will blow him to pieces.  He fondles a curvacous mannequin whose buttocks are black globular bombs.  (The figure is literally a bombshell.)  The spherical bombs shift over to become her breasts.  As he gropes her, Snafu discovers that he is about to be blown sky-high.  He escapes and celebrates by playing "All those Endearing Young Charms," this time correctly, resulting in an explosion.  The cartoon ends with Snafu sitting on a cloud with a harp on which he plucks out the same melody.  In another cartoon, Snafu has failed to properly maintain his carbine and machine gun  -- the muzzles of the weapons are filled with black goo.  A brutish-looking Kraut crawls up to attack him with a hand grenade (the Hun looks like a Fred Flintstone with a pronounced beard-line).  Snafu's weapons misfire.  A machine gun on a tripod literally melts like wax when fired because the water-cooled mechanism fails.  Snafu is captured and, as the villainous Kraut gloats, we see him cowering and naked in a cage.  

Sally Cruikshank was an animator in the seventies and eighties.  She made three psychedelic cartoons that are famous among animators:  Quasi at the Quackadero, Be a Psychic, and Face like a Frog.  As with the trilogy of Cab Calloway cartoons made by Fleischer studios, these short animes are all alike.  In each, a trio of figures (like Betty Boop, Koko and Bimbo) venture from their dwelling to some sort of hallucinogenic fairground -- there they are menaced by monsters who seem to be inspired by Brueghel.  Quasi is a sort of tuxedoed duck with a flattened head and "face like a frog" -- he has an enormous mouth and little bulging eyes.  Anita, the dominant figure in the trio, is tall lanky figure, ostensibly female who speaks with a southern accent, muttering mostly nonsense -- she wears a kind of night gown qua evening dress.  The third protagonist is Rollo, a deformed face on a bean-like body who moves  around in a wheeled contraption.  These cartoons are bright with day-glo Peter Max-style colors; the fairgrounds consists of crowds of worm-like figures and creatures that look like the old Mr. Potato-Head figures, globular heads with monocles and button noses embedded in them.  The fair grounds feature strange tents that are shaped like tiaras -- some of the imagery looks like its derived from Saul Steinberg cartoons, calligraphic scrolls that broaden into figures, and caricatured men and women reduced to one or two salient features.  In the tents, you can see yourself in "100 years" -- you look into a mirror in which there is an endless line of prancing skeletons; machines spool back and forth in time.  Quasi ends up among dinosaurs pursued by ravening, if toy-like, predators.  These cartoons also feature jaunty hipster tunes, a little like the music produced by the enigmatic Leon Redbone, a gent with a white panama hat ,sunglasses, thin as a rail, who sand diddy-wah-diddy tunes from the twenties.  (His stage persona was that of a Jazz Era pimp.) Face like a Frog has a good song by Oingo Boingo (Danny Elfman's band here called "The Mystic Knights") -- it's "Don't Go Into the Basement", a mock-ghoulish ditty that, of course, accomplishes exactly what it purports to prohibit --Quasi and Anita go into the basement where all sorts of dire things befall them. 

You can also see John Fahey playing "In Christ there is no East and West", the screen split to show his fingering on his guitar -- he produces a symphonic sound from the instrument.  Sister Rosetta Tharp, drenched in sweat sings "Clean Train" -- it's the train to Salvation on which no gamblers, nor boozers, nor even tobacco chewing, cigar-smoking sinners are allowed.  There's a video showing documentary style shots of General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, illustrating Charles Ives' spooky and majestic "General William Booth Enters into Heaven", another artifact of the Old Weird America.  Shot in extreme close-up, Lightning Hopkins performs a keening Blues song.

And that makes a night of it.   

Anselm

 Grandiose, monumental, and a bit inhuman:  these words describe both Anselm Kiefer's art and Wim Wenders' laudatory documentary about the artist.  This last description is inaccurate:  Wenders' 2023 documentary is really about the artist's works; we learn next to nothing about the artist and his motivations.  The movie is spectacularly beautiful and, notwithstanding it's rather austere premises, compelling. I saw the picture streaming on Amazon Prime.  Viewed in a proper movie theater, in its authentic format (the movie is shot in very high definition video and designed to be projected in 3D), I presume the visual spectacle would be overwhelming.  As with his 3D film about Pina Bausch (Pina), Wenders assumes, reasonably in my view, that a documentary about an artist should be about his or her art almost exclusively and that the artist's biography, opinions, and personal affairs are, more or less, irrelevant.  This approach assures a glorious and detailed accounting of Kiefer's enormous art works viewed from an Olympian altitude, a bird's eye perspective (often literally since the picture makes extensive use of drone footage) that treats the work as abstract manifestations of nature.  The film doesn't show us anyone examining or reacting to Kiefer's work; we see the artist striding through his vast ateliers but there are no talking heads, no critics, no gallery-goers --  it's as if the artist works solely for himself, making environments and objects for his own personal delectation.  Of course, Wenders eschews any crass interest in the commercial aspects of Kiefer's enterprise -- on the evidence of the movie, Kiefer is fantastically wealthy, financially equipped to acquire huge landscapes that he stocks with his art and, obviously, employs a small army of assistants, librarians, accountants and the like.  None of this is documented:  we see Kiefer lying on his back, half naked in one of his studios and, later, he reclines on a tiny bed in an ascetic-looking garret, but these are metaphoric or symbolic images:  how Kiefer lives and where, his companions, wives, girlfriends, friends, children -- all of these things are completely absent from the picture.  This approach is rigorous and conceptually valid but a little astringent -- we really have no sense of what the artist is like; he is, Wenders posits, defined entirely by his work.  The film is a companion to Wenders' Pina, a documentary about the famous choreographer's works, also made in 3D and similarly remote and reticent in tone-- the first name titles of the movies suggest that they are intrinsically related, bookends as it were.  And despite the first name titles ("Pina" and "Anselm"), the pictures are clinically remote, respectful, even hagiographic.

In an early scene, shot from an aerial perspective (Kiefer's studios are cathedrals that seem to contain rooms a hundred feet high), we see the artist, a bald, lanky and athletic old man, tugging a huge work mounted on a dolly into his warehouse.  He nonchalantly shoves the vast object -- it's not really a canvas but a 20 by 40 foot surface all cauterized by fire, a landscape made from burnt reeds, gallons of excrement-colored paint applied impasto, and heaps of congealed lead -- across the floor toward a half-dozen similarly monumental 'paintings.'  It seems hazardous to simply let the object roll across the concrete floor -- what if it were to slam into one of the other paintings?  But, then, you think, what if it did collide with the other works?  all of them have similarly ravaged surfaces and any damage inflicted would just be part of the work's allure -- these things look like they have gone through volcanic eruptions.  In his current warehouse, somewhere near Paris, we see Kiefer riding his bicycle, touring a factory full of art objects and enormous stacks of industrial materials, a place that seems to be about the size of a rural Minnesota county.  The place is endless, dauntingly clean and well-organized, a vast storeroom extending to the horizon. The film commences with crickets chirping and huge exteriors -- Kiefer has made life-size armatures of women's clothing, spectral white figures without arms or legs and mostly headless (some of these apparitions have wood stacked up where their heada would be or are equipped with metal rings and loops like the orbits of sub-atomic particles.)  In the distance, towers rise, weird haphazard structures made from stacked concrete boxes, irregularly shaped artificial ruins.  The structures look like campaniles and the skyline is eccentric, dilapidated, a forest of towers like those in San Gimignano -- archival footage relates these buildings to the ruins of German cities devastated by aerial bombardment:   in several scenes, we see armies of women digging through rubble fallen from buildings whose facades have collapsed exposing the naked insides of the rooms in the wrecked structures -- these campaniles are similarly open, as if the sheathing that covered the tower has collapsed to reveal the interiors of the chambers stacked one atop another.  (Kiefer was born in 1945 and the film posits that much of his art is conspicuously post-war, that is, obsessed with the ruins of Hitler's Germany -- this is a commonplace about Kiefer's work and, certainly, there's nothing surprising or interpretatively innovative about Wenders' depiction of the art.)  The movie proceeds in a generally chronological fashion organized around imagery of Kiefer's studios, places that became progressively larger and larger.  There's a nod to the controversy surrounding the artist's Venice biennial pavilion, claimed by some to be proto-fascist or neo-fascist.  (Kiefer says that his work certainly is not anti-fascist because this would be a libel - Beleidigung -- impugning those who were legitimately anti-fascist in the war and paid for their political opposition with their lives; at this early stage in his career, Kiefer espouses some modesty about the role of art in life -- by the end of the film, Kiefer has constructed elaborately vast landscapes and enormous ruinous structures that blur any rational distinction between art and life.)  All of the familiar touchstones influencing Kiefer are glanced-at:  we hear the poet Paul Celan reading Todesfuge, his famous concentration camp poem, and. later, we see another poet, Ingeborg Bachmann reciting verse -- Kiefer has inscribed many of his art works with phrases from both writers, inscriptions scrawled into the magma-like surfaces of the painting, neatly handwritten.  Heidegger's famous encounter with Celan is duly mentioned and there are several shots of the famous philosopher at his cottage in the Black Forest or walking pompously in the woods.  Beginning in 1992, Kiefer set about creating a massive environment at Barjac, France.  The film tours the premises consisting of clay catacombs, some of them flooded, campanile towers, and what seems to be an elaborate rococo villa with its walls seared and charred with Kiefer's murals.  Underground colonnades and ruinous cloister walks on the surface extend to vanishing points hundreds of feet away -- Wender's 3D camerawork features steep perspective shots along seemingly endless arcades and walkways.  In one scene the camera moves through an aerial conduit, hundreds of yards long, suspended over the mangled red earth of the compound.  Gigantic mazes open to our view -- sometimes, the camera tracks behind the tall figure of Kiefer, clad like Frank Lloyd Wright, in a sort of cape and black hat.  Huge amphitheaters are full of "petrified" fighter jets and silos open onto crumbling clay missiles that seem kin to the forests of bell-towers on the hillsides.  Kiefer never makes one example of a thematic motif, but rather constructs hundreds of the things -- we see football-field size galleries full of bicycles with wings, or plane wings snapped off the fuselage and strewn around like the rotors of vast windmills.  Some sequences show Kiefer slapping mud-like pigment onto his works, raised high over the studio floor on a scissors lift.  In other scenes, the artist sprays fire from a torch onto his canvases while an assistant trails along splashing the burning surfaces with water from a hose.   Kiefer spills buckets molten lead onto canvases while a couple helpers admonish him to not let the lava splash -- "but I want it to splash," he says.  The film ends with a Kiefer marching around the Piazza San Marco in Venice.  He has an installation there in some sort of renaissance structure, his mangled surfaces seem to coexist with immense paintings by Tintoretto.  Although he now enjoys "old master" status, Kiefer says that he feels banned, always in exile, always "on the way"-- a formulation that cites Heidegger.  Wenders stages a dream sequence.  Kiefer walks a tightrope above a landscape of bombed-out ruins, several of his own campanile standing in the rubble.  To balance himself on the tightrope, Kiefer holds an eight-foot stem of a sunflower with a blackened blossom on one end.  This is a reference to Kiefer's youthful travel to Arles following the footsteps of Van Gogh -- the German has always been famous; in High School, he won an international award that financed his travels in southern France where he is said to have made over "300 sketches and paintings" of sites significant to the Dutch painter.  (Apparently, this exploit was covered in detail by the media in his home city of Duesseldorf.)  In one picture, we see him next to Joseph Beuys, both wielding scary-looking lances -- with a hundred other art students (under the leadership of the charismatic Beuys), this was a protest about the destruction of the German forests, that is, an environmental protest.  The film's penultimate shot is a landscape at Barjac, a site now abandoned, more or less, by Kiefer, with a huge statue of wings mounted on a pedestal on a ridge top.  Kiefer is standing next to the statue but, then, vanishes.  After the titles, we see a last work by the artist:  it shows a glowing golden void like a movie-screen in an empty excoriated auditorium with rows of seats like geological formations facing the illumined wall.  

Wenders stages some scenes from Kiefer's youth using the artist's son who is now middle-aged.  Wenders own child or grandchild appears as a spooky-looking urchin wandering around the artist's installations or reading poetry.  The little boy looks like a lemur, a nocturnal creature.  The film is fascinating and like Kiefer's late works built on an enormous scale.  It exudes a fatal magnificence -- it's not a critique of the Fascist architecture of Albert Speer (his designs are frequently alluded to in Kiefer's work) but a revival of Speer's work in another context and by other means.  As far as the picture is concerned, Kiefer does nothing but make art; he has no other existence and, on the evidence of insanely prolific creativity shown in the film, this seems to be a truthful characterization of the old man's life.  In one scene, we watch him wandering through a library of art books -- the library seems to be about the size of train-station.  Kiefer gets down a book and carefully studies it.  Many of the books are as big as a man, creations by the artist -- in one, there are yard-long pictures of Greenland, images of the Arctic landscape taken from the air.  The book is bound in leather and it takes a forklift to move it:  "here," Kiefer says, "we have the skin of the earth."

(Around 1986 or 1987, Kiefer's work became famous in the United States, primarily through a big retrospective mounted at the Chicago Institute of Art.  I planned to go to the show with my son, Martin, who was then about seven.  But things had gone wrong in my life and I was in the middle of a divorce then and had no money.  I couldn't afford the gas and lodging to drive to Chicago.  I recall wondering if I could come up with enough cash to make the trip.  Ultimately, I decided that it wouldn't be prudent to travel at that time.  I was sad about this and, when I walked out to my car, having concluded that I couldn't attend the show, I slipped on the ice, flew through the air, and landed on my back hard on the sidewalk -- the wind was knocked out of me and, for some reason, I always associate Anselm Kiefer with my bad fall.  I solaced myself by buying the catalog of the exhibition which I read several times and studied fervently.  Kiefer is so insanely productive that he has initiated about a dozen new schools of work since that time and, it seems, that every collection in the United States has one or more of his grandiose objects -- for instance, there is a great Kiefer in the contemporary wing in the art museum in Des Moines, Iowa.  Viewed in reproduction, Kiefer's work is impressive but lacks the monumental "wow" factor that the objects induce when seen in person.  I attended a show of paintings by Otto Dix and his followers at the Deicherhalle in Hamburg.  There was a floor-to-ceiling Kiefer, forty feet tall, showing a pour of lead running down the surface of the canvas at the center of a pale, cream-colored shaft of light -- the thing literally took my breath away.)

American Fiction

American Fiction (2023, directed by Cord Jefferson) is a witty, warm and generous, and, above all, civilized.  It's a cautious, intelligent movie about race and family. The movie is pretty good and quite entertaining. If it seems that I am damning the picturewith faint praise, this is intentional.  

There are three (possibly four) separate movies fused together in American Fiction.  More than half of the film is a family drama with romantic comedy elements -- this aspect of the movie is conventional and sentimental.  The domestic melodrama, involving several tragedies, grounds the the picture:  the African-American protagonists are almost exactly like the target demographic for the movie:  well-heeled, with complicated sex lives, and the sort of prosperity that includes a servant and a beach house.  (The characters are like the elites that we used to see in Woody Allen movies -- money is not a problem for them and so they can brood instead on romantic entanglements.)  Alongside the family drama and the rom-com, there is a parallel plot that involves race-relations and the media.  This aspect of the picture is satirical and angry, although it's sharp edges are blurred a bit by the other warmer elements in the movie.  Finally, there is a fourth strand to the picture that seems post-modern, a Pirandello-style aspect to American Fiction involving an embedded narrative and indeterminate ending presented in three alternative versions -- the audience gets to decide how they want the movie to end.  This latter strand in the film emerges in its fullest development in the movie's last ten minutes, a jarring intrusion into the picture that is surprising and feels like a "cop-out"; the screenwriter and director didn't know how to end the picture and, so, several (not too compelling) options are presented.  This part of the picture also surfaces briefly in a Pirandellesque sequence midway through the picture in which the hero, a writer, is composing a salacious narrative that we see acted-out as he types --from time to time, the caricatured bad-asses in his novel turn to the writer and ask him what they are supposed to do next.  This is amusing but cuts against the grain of the film.  (There are some great movies that combine completely disparate elements:  Hitchcock's Psycho is the most notorious example of this kind of picture, swerving alarmingly from its sex and heist plot when the heroine reaches the Bates Motel; Brian de Palma's astonishing Body Double also explores the idea of a mid-picture change of course deviating from slasher-horror to something like musical comedy.  I'm not opposed to films containing jarring changes of pace and theme; but here I observe that American Fiction is too conventional to pull this off in a convincing manner.)

American Fiction starts strong.  The hero, Thelonius Ellison (called "Monk" after the jazz musician) is a novelist who has written literary fiction well-reviewed enough to earn him a gig at a liberal arts college.  He's teaching a short story to students by Flannery O'Connor, "The Artificial Nigger", much to the consternation of one of his students.  There's a clash about use of the so-called N-word and Monk loses his temper.  We learn that Monk hasn't been able to publish his most recent novel and may be creatively blocked; the administration reluctantly suspends him and he attends a book fair where he sees another African-American writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) feted for her raw portrait of life in the ghetto -- she's a darling of the White upper middle-class folks attending the festival; her novel is written in some hideously caricatured species of Ebonics and Monk finds the whole thing offensive and, even, racist.  (Monk doesn't regard himself as a Black writer but simply as an author and he says that he doesn't even think about race -- a view of the world undercut in a short, cutting scene in which we see him try to hail a taxi that ignores him to pick up a White customer.)  Monk goes home to Boston where his family is in chaos -- his mother (played by Leslie Uggams) is suffering from dementia and there are some scary scenes involving her wandering away from the house or appearing to be utterly dazed and confused.  Monk's hyper-competent sister, an ob-gyn, is managing the situation but needs help.  But, then, in a dire sequence, she has a heart attack in a restaurant and dies.  We learn some Gothic details about the family:  Monk's father who was also a gynecologist committed suicide -- he was a philanderer and everyone in the family was aware of his affairs (except the rather absent-minded professor, Monk); Monk's brother, Cliff, who is flamboyantly gay, has come back from Tucson for his sister's funeral -- he's also a doctor, a plastic surgeon.  The deceased sister has been recently divorced and Cliff has just ended a long-term relationship; money is tight:  the family pays a maid, Lorraine, and own a beach-house as well as their Boston residence; in other words, they have an expensive life-style.  Much of the action takes place at the Beach House where the family gathers for their sister's obsequies.  There's a meet-cute with an attractive neighbor and Monk and the woman have an affair.  

Nursing Home care is costly and Monk, as a joke and to earn money, writes a parody novel, incorporating every possible stereotype about the Black underclass:  criminality, deadbeat dads, and pervasive gun violence, all of this expressed in raunchy ghetto-ese.  Monk's literary agent sends the manuscript to a publisher under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a reference to the prototypical Black bad hombre, Staggerlee.  The parody is called My Pafology ('f' for 'th').  Monk's recent serious novel, said to be a modern variant on Aeschylus The Persians, has been "passed on" by his publisher -- but My Pafology is greeted with wild enthusiasm.  Monk is paid a $750,000 advance on the novel and, later, agrees to a four million dollar contract for movie rights.  Monk does some interviews, making a code-switch to appear as a tough guy fugitive from justice.  (Later, in a provocative gesture ecstatically received by his white editors, he demands that the novel be re-named "Fuck".)  When the book appears in print, it is a number-one bestseller, demonstrating that the stupidity and guilt of White readers knows no bounds.  Later, in a development that the viewers can see coming a mile away, Monk is appointed to a committee charged with making a prestigious literary award.  Of course, Fuck as it is now called, appears on the list of best books of the year and Monk is faced with deliberations involving the novel that he has pseudonymously  written.  Both he and Sintara Golden, also on the panel, dislike Fuck immensely and see it as salacious and pandering.  But the White members of the jury all rave about the book's authenticity and rage.  Meanwhile, Monk's mother's memory is deteriorating.  (In one moving scene, she says that she always knew that her son was a genius; but, then, we realize she doesn't know to whom she is speaking -- although Monk takes her words to be about him, in fact, she's talking about her homosexual son, Cliff.)  The stress of maintaining the lie about Fuck preys on Monk and he gets in a nasty fight with his girlfriend to the extent that they break-up.  The family's maid, Lorraine, falls in love with a gentleman caller and, in a sweet subplot, they get married.  Everything, then, leads to the awards banquet where the prize will be given to the alleged fugitive from justice, Stagg R. Leigh.  A callow young director, a sort of Quentin Tarantino wannabe, is directing a movie about Stagg R. Leigh's improbable career as an author and this triggers the film's post-modern and recursive gesture to the audience -- we get to decide on the film's ending.  

Jeffrey Wright is superb as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison and the entire cast is excellent.  The movie has some sharply written satire but is mostly a sentimental family drama trafficking in revelations and reconciliations, pretty standard stuff.  The theme of the Black artist nudged into exploiting racist tropes for profit is explored brilliantly in Spike Lee's much more problematic and indignant Bamboozled -- in that film, an African-American artist performs in minstrel corked-up black-face, intending offensive satire but, astonished, to find that White people love the character and are willing to pay him a fortune for his offensively caricatured performance.  Spike Lee's picture is a sort of encyclopedia of racist mass-media imagery, contains some raw sexual material, and, further, demonstrates a very peculiar and poignant response to the minstrel humor that it exploits -- Lee seems weirdly nostalgic for the good old days in which racist themes were overt and, somehow, endearingly goofy.  Bamboozled is everything that American Fiction is not:  it's legitimately disturbing, outrageous, and wildly indignant, a muddled mess of a movie that most critics despised when it was first released.  I think American Fiction is reasonably good and worth seeing, but it needs to be on a double-feature with Spike Lee's disturbing and hilarious take on the same theme.  American Fiction is competently directed in the standard Hollywood style used for well-made and prestigious pictures -- it's completely bland from a pictorial standpoint, a bit like a made-for-TV movie or TV sit-com.  By contrast, Lee's Bamboozled is a febrile dream studded with spectacularly racist imagery.  It's not fair to attack American Fiction for not being a Spike Lee joint and it has its own merits, including a sort of lucidity and coherence that Bamboozled conspicuously lacks.  But...

(Stagger Lee was a Black pimp who shot a man in St. Louis around the turn of the 20th century; a song was written about the crime and became very popular in a version by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians (!).  The song has been performed by dozens of artists and presents the archetype of the bad, dangerous Black man. American Fiction respects its audience's intelligence and doesn't footnote this reference or the allusion to Thelonious Sphere Monk, the great Jazz man.)

Watch these YouTube videos:  Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians "The Happy Wanderer" and, then, "Dem Dry Bones by the same group.  This will lead you to a version of "Dry Bones" by the Harmoniums and, at last, a scary music video from The Singing Detective of the same song.

Hundreds of Beavers

 In Wisconsin's north woods, a pioneer named Jean Kayak harvests fruit from his orchard and distills applejack.  He gets drunk.  Everyone gets drunk.  Beavers gnaw through the poles supporting Kayak's distillery vats and the booze gets spilled in the snow.  When the fiery high-proof stuff encounters a campfire, there's a huge explosion and both the orchard and the brewing equipment are destroyed.  Jean Kayak is alone in the snow, struggling to light a campfire for warmth, but the wind keeps changing and blowing out his flames.  Starving, Kayak hunts rabbits.  The critters are wily, but Kayak is desperate -- he imagines the rabbits as chicken drumsticks and slices of pizza, that is, as delectable morsels.  Finally, Kayak kills and eats a couple of rabbits.  In the forest, sepulchral beavers are filing through the woods carrying huge logs to a sort of mastaba that they are building in the middle of a flowage.  (In central Wisconsin, flowages are lakes or swamps that show directional current.)  Jean Kayak lugs a couple of dead rabbits to a trading post where a furrier displays exchange rates -- a certain number of rabbit pelts equals a knife, six wolf pelts will get you a rifle, three beaver pelts equals a baseball bat, ten pelts will buy you a diamond.  The furrier chews tobacco and spits but the wad of juice never hit the nearby spittoon.  The furrier has a comely daughter who flirts with Jean Kayak.  Jean trades his pelts for the knife, an utensil that turns out to be tiny, a little blade about the length of his pinkie.  The furrier's daughter cuts up the dead rabbits, extracts their internal organs, and plays with them. 

Kayak sets up a trapline -- that is, a loop defined by locations where he has established traps to catch fur-bearing animals.  The loop takes him through a very dense pine forest, across a frozen lake, to a precipice over a deep valley, to a cave filled with aggressive and dangerous wolves, past an Indian trading post and a rural cemetery and, then, back to the pine forest.  At each station, Kayak has placed traps.  For some reason, beavers are attracted by coiled turds of beaver shit and Kayak places this material in his various dead falls.  Although about half the time, the traps fail, or simply catch Kayak instead of his prey, the hero begins accumulating furs for trade at the trading post.  He is able to buy snowshoes, later, a bat to bludgeon his prey, and some big traps.  By this time, Kayak has fallen in love with the fur-trader's daughter -- at one point, she strips down to her skivvies and does an exotic pole dance for him.  (Of course, the couple's lustful encounters have to be concealed from the girl's protective father who spits tobacco juice ineffectually and carries a long rifle.)  Finally, Kayak asks for the girl's hand in marriage.  He is told that he can't have her unless he delivers to the trading post "hundreds of beavers."  Emboldened by his love, Kayak invades the beaver's huge structure on the flowage, a mill that looks like Brueghel's tower of Babel from the outside, fights the incumbent beavers, and, ultimately massacres enough of them, to deliver the pelts of "hundreds of beavers" to the fur trader.  The trader, who acts a little like Jimmy Finlayson, in the old Laurel and Hardy pictures, doesn't like the transaction, but a promise is a promise.  He spits angrily and, at last, the tobacco juice hits the spittoon -- "The End."  

Thus, the gist of Hundreds of Beavers, a bizarre black and white film directed by someone called Mike Cheslik, apparently released in 2022 and, now, developing, it seems, a cult following. (Cheslik is a Milwaukee film-maker and closing credits suggest that both the States of Wisconsin and Michigan subsidized parts of the film.)  The movie is shot in black-and-white and its action occurs entirely outside with characters trudging through snow-filled forests and along icy-looking river rapids.  (This movie is unrelentingly cold-looking -- I had to wear a sweater while watching it.)  The animals slaughtered by the hero, Jean Kayak, are played by actors stomping around in the deep snow in "mascot" costumes -- that is, cloth costumes imitating rabbits, slavering wolves, and, of course, "hundreds of beavers."  (There are even two men playing head and ass of a horse.)  There seem to be about thirty "mascots" in the movie (this is how they are credited) but cell-phone style special effects expand their ranks to sixty or eighty figures.)  The film is silent except for some old-timey music and the cries of animals -- we hear sled dogs (also mascots) whimpering on the sound track, growling and howling wolves, and so on.  There are about six or seven silent film intertitles but they are, more or less, unnecessary.  Most of the film has the flavor of Roadrunner and Wily Coyote cartoon -- the trapper sets traps, his prey evades him or turns the tables:  he gets his limbs crushed by the jaws of his own traps, is repeatedly pulverized by falling logs in his deadfalls, gets sucked under the ice on the frozen lake and nibbled by barracuda-type fish; he has bent a sapling to make an improvised catapult but, about half the time,  he gets snared in the sling shot the hurls him through the air above the icy taiga.  Initially, the slapstick stunts are very funny and ingenious but the gags run out of steam half-way through the 108 minute movie.  The effects are of the cut-and-paste variety -- although many of the gags have the flavor of a Buster Keaton film, there's no sense of agility, physical prowess, or danger; this is because the special effects, involving avalanches of snow, bushes full of sharp burrs (the Midwest equivalent of the barbed cacti in Roadrunner movies), trunks nibbled to razor sharp, lance-shaped spikes, falls from lofty trees and so on, are all accomplished with minimalist computer effects or animated in some way.  There's really no sense that the figures traipsing around in the barrens are really located near any danger when the slapstick shenanigans, comprising 90 percent of the movie occur -- most of the stunts are implemented with some sort of crude animation..  

The structure of the film is a bit like a video or computer game as imagined by the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin -- although Cheslik doesn't distress his film stock nor does he attempt the gorgeous chiaroscuro (after the manner of Joseph von Sternberg) that characterizes the Winnipeg director's work.  In effect, the picture seems to be auditioning for game status -- it's like Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong or the Mario Brothers.  The hero runs around a barren landscape accumulating points in the form of pelts -- he exchanges the points for bigger and better weapons and useful equipment until he has killed enough enemies (and taken their furs) to reach his objective, marriage to the fur trader's daughter.  The nondescript snow-covered fields and forests where the action occurs are vividly depicted but ultimately all the same -- a mere backdrop like the buttes and canyons in a Roadrunner cartoon or the deserts landscapes in George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics.  The film is surprising gory -- mascots get crushed, burned alive, speared and impaled but it's all cartoon violence; death is shown by the mascot's eyes displaying crossed "x" marks. (The hero has gutted on of his victims -- it looks like a man-sized raccoon -- and treks through the snow wearing the dad creature's head as a sort of over-sized crown.)  It's also a politically incorrect movie featuring an Indian chief with a peace-pipe now and then interacting with Kayak, along the lines of a cigar-store carving.  The movie is too long -- it's wildly inventive but about a half-hour of this would be sufficient.  (The great Roadrunner cartoons tend to be ten or twelve minutes long; Buster Keaton's best stuff is framed as bits strung together each gag running about eight or nine minutes -- even his feature films, which tend to be about eighty minutes in length have this form.  A comparison with Keaton is illuminating:  Keaton's most famous (and dangerous) stunt was a falling facade, collapsing over the comedian who is spared a horrible death by standing in the exact position where an open window in the towering front of the building can frame as the structure topples.  Cheslik reprises this scene not once but twice in an obvious homage to Keaton, but he just has his hero smashed into the snow in his version of the gag -- that is, there's no convenient and open window to spare Kayak.  Cheslik's film features lots of chutes and ladder antics with sudden pitfalls, slippery slopes and voids in ice-covered lakes; corpses get pressed into the snow and leave footprints and outlines where they died.  But there's no sizzle to the ingenious mayhem because we know that everything is done with rudimentary, if effective, special effects.  The film is worth seeing and should be supported because it is certainly made very much against the grain of commercial movie-making.  But it's ultimately fairly boring.    

The Holdovers

 Alexander Payne's The Holdovers (2023) is intentionally anachronistic on several levels.  The movie is set around New Year's 1971; the Vietnam war is still in progress and kids without college deferments are being killed in action. The Holdover's script channels seventies' influences, most notably Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (based on a Robert Towne screenplay and featuring Jack Nicholson) crossed with the somewhat later movies made by John Hughes (The Breakfast Club seems a particular influence.)  The Holdovers posits that an unhappy, if resigned, older man can have a beneficial influence on a selfish youth -- and that the boy's spirit can reinvigorate his mentor and breathe fresh life into him.  I doubt that people in sophisticated circles believe such things today, but this sort of theme was popular in the seventies and eighties and, of course, still has a naive appeal.  Further, Payne devises his movie to imitate the conventions of seventies' filmmaking -- there's the sound of a projector at the outset of the picture and the movie is shot in handsome wintry monochrome using zoom shots, lateral panning motions, and many expressive close-ups; it's a conventional style but absolutely well-calculated for the outdated and (mostly) predictable material that comprises this film.  Payne is an important film-maker but has shown himself to be conventional in technique and subject matter.  The question arises as to why this rather slight, if pleasing, movie was made -- certainly, we don't need another iteration of the story of the curmudgeon humanized by his relationship with a kind  of rebellious waif, a cliche back when George Eliot penned Silas Marner.  (The film set in an expensive New England prep school also reminds me of novel people read in the seventies, but no longer -- John Knowles' A Separate Peace).  Payne has suffered some recent reversals -- his baffling, if ambitious (and unsuccessful) movie Downsizing cast him into some temporary disrepute (people might exclaim:  What was he thinking?) and allegations, very stale to be sure, of statutory rape committed more than 30 years ago, came close to canceling his career.  My surmise is that Payne needed to play it safe, engineer a film that exploits his strong work with actors and conventional plots, and get some scores back on the board.  The Holdovers is perfectly acceptable, modestly entertaining, and good enough for a weekend night -- it's feels fairly long and has, perhaps, too much material in its second half, but I thought it was okay.  It is not, however, in any sense a necessary movie whatever that might mean.

After a half-hour opening act, The Holdovers evolves into a two-hand movie:  Paul Giamatti is a repressed, embittered, and highly intelligent instructor at a private school  He's buttoned-up and disliked by everyone at the Boy's School where he has taught for the last thirty years (after attending the place when he was in prep school himself).  According to the conventions of this sort of screenplay, Giamatti as Mr. Hunman is the sort of character to whom nothing interesting can ever occur -- until, that is, something happens to dislodge him from his ordinary, stifling routines.  Angus Tully is a rebellious 17 year old, one of Hunman's students in his class on Ancient Civilizations (for the purposes of the movie, Hunman is basically something like a Latin and Greek teacher),  Tully announces in the opening scenes that he is excited about a trip to St. Kitts with his parents over the Christmas Break.  As soon as he tells everyone that he is headed to the tropics, of course, alert members in the audience know that he will go to no such place, and, indeed, find himself trapped with Hunman over the holidays.  When school is dismissed for the semester, Tully, in fact, learns from his mother that she is going on a honeymoon with his stepfather and that he has been abandoned over Christmas vacation.  Hunman is being punished for failing the son of a prominent benefactor of the private boy's school -- as a penalty for his arrogance and disobedience, he's condemned to babysit Tully (and, intially, four other boys) over the break.  There's some interesting and poignant byplay between the other kids and Hunman / Tully:  two of the older boys clash with Tully and there's a fight; one of these kids is overtly vicious and, probably, a psychopath.  The two younger boys are also interesting:  one is a straitlaced Mormon kid and the other is a Korean child too far away from home to be returned to his home country (this poor boy is also a bedwetter and intensely homesick).  This cast of characters is literally whisked away in a surprising plot development about a half-hour into the movie and the story, then, focuses on the fraught relationship between Tully and Hunman.  A couple of subplots complicate the action:  there's a pretty administrative assistant to the noxious Headmaster, implying, perhaps, a romantic relationship between Hunman and this woman.  A Black manager of the cafeteria is crippled by grief for her son who died in Vietnam.  She tries to conceal her sorrow but its gets the better of her.  A series of misadventures, construed as mildly comic, ensue:  Tully gets hurt defying Hunman and has to go to the emergency room (his shoulder is dislocated); at a Christmas party, the cafeteria manager and head chef gets drunk and belligerent and breaks down; Hunman's desire for love and romance, a yearning so repressed that he can't acknowledge it even to himself, is thwarted and, in the show's fourth act (of five), Hunman and Tully go to Boston where they have several other encounters with minor characters.  Of course, a movie like this requires that surprising and painful secrets be divulged and, of course, this occurs in due course.  These events, rather implausibly, result in Hunman's discharge from the school -- something that may be a blessing in disguise in light of the fact that his work at the place has crippled the older man's life and emotional responses to things.  Tully seems to have become a better man as a result of the adventures with the witty, emotionally stunted Hunman.  

All of this (except I think Hunman's firing) plays out convincingly in a minor key.  Colors and events are muted.  There is a moving close-up of Giamatti's face when he learns that his unexpressed, but nascent desire for the boss' pretty secretary can not be realized.  The mixture of self-contempt, sorrow, and relief on his face is perfectly depicted.  The movie has a lot of bad language that would probably not be accepted in a movie made in the seventies or earlier eighties and we are reminded that people smoked a lot in that period -- the cook, for instance, generally has a cigarette dangling from her lip.  On the other hand, movies in the seventies and early eighties were more bawdy, had more nudity and sexual content.  Payne decorously avoids sex in the film and the picture is mostly chaste.  The Holdovers is, as they say, life-affirming, has a good script (and an interesting soundtrack of seventies folksongs), and is beautifully acted. It's the sort of picture, a success d'estime, that predictably garners a lot of award nominations (but doesn't win in most categories).  I thought it was good but not completely interesting.  However, I hope the critical success of this movie will free Alexander Payne to direct something more exciting in the near future.  

(One of Hunman's foibles is that he has a box full of volumes of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a book that he gives to people when he needs to make a gift -- it's his all-purpose gift and he doesn't really care if the book is appropriate for the person to whom he gave it.  One of my very good friends, now deceased, was a prominent college teacher in town and, also, admired Marcus Aurelius.  He was also always giving people copies of the Meditations, a text that he thought would calm its readers into stoic acceptance of things as they are.  But, often, he was unrealistically idealistic about the influence of the book.  If you are seriously distressed or mentally ill, Marcus Aurelius will not penetrate to the heart of your misery.  In The Holdovers, we see that there are aspects of human suffering that can't be assuaged by aphorisms in Latin.  Nonetheless, I always admired my friend for relying on the Meditations as a sort of vade mecum; the remedy was true to him and his spirit and I respected it.) 

The 3-Body Problem

 The 3-Body Problem is a complicated science fiction story crammed with impressive visuals and some effective special effects.  Although derived from a celebrated book by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin, said to be rigorously scientific and absorbing, the Netflix series (eight episodes) mostly bundles together well-worn cliches and, ultimately, isn't that compelling.  After a strong start, the show gets lost in the intricacies of its globe-trotting plot and, because the 3 Body Problem is the first of a series of novels, ends in a welter anti-climaxes intended to set up the inevitable sequels.  

Something has gone wrong with the laws of physics, at least on a quantum level.  Chaos rules at the world's greatest laboratories and results derived from huge particle accelerators and other impressive apparatus make no sense.  Physicists take their theories and formulae seriously and the fact that their laboratory results seem randomized has driven a number of these scientists to kill themselves, often in gruesome or picturesque ways.  At first, the show seems something on the order of a detective or crime picture -- the question presented to the hard-bitten authorities is whether the scientists are simply committing suicide in dramatic ways or being systematically killed.  This turns out to be a red-herring since this aspect of the plot fades into insignificance once the narrative begins in earnest.  

Some impressive flashbacks introduce us to a woman named Ye, also a world-class physicist, but a traumatized survivor of Mao's Cultural Revolution as well.  (These scenes directly engage with the source novel; however, the rest of the film has been largely transposed to London and the West, featuring a cast that is about half Asian and half European or American.)  After seeing her father beaten to death at a huge public rally, Ye gets sent to a concentration camp somewhere in Mongolia.  She survive and her talents as a physicist are recognized; she is recruited to work on a secret project operated on a mountain top overlooking the vast forests of inner Mongolia.  The Commies on the mountaintop are trying to contact aliens.  Ye figures out how to use the sun as an amplifier (don't ask me how this works) and transmits a message to a nearby star.  In that star system, there are beings called (in the Netflix version) Santees.  These critters are highly advanced and communicate with one another telepathically.  They are interested in the Earthlings and begin communicating with a cult-like order of their worshipers on Earth.  (I wasn't able to figure out how this cult formed or why.  I  think Ye had something to do with it.  The plot seems to suggest that Maoism with its mobs of like-minded robot Red Guards waving Mao's little red book in the air is similar to the group-think of the cult founded by Ye and Santee's collective consciousness -- this is an interesting idea but never developed in the show.)  Unfortunately, one of the Santee servants on our planet reads a a fairy tale to his Lord (the Santee are hive-mind in which "they" is a "he" or "she" depending upon the scene).  The Lord is horrified to learn that the earthlings can lie to one another and, in fact, do this frequently.  Shocked that sentient beings can misrepresent the truth, the Santee cut off communications with the Earth declaring that they are "very afraid" and launch an expedition to attack our planet where they, apparently, intend to exterminate "the bugs" as they now call the inhabitants of our world -- this seems a distinct over-reaction of "Little Red Riding Hood."  (The murderous intent of the space aliens doesn't keep members of the Santee cult from continuing to revere the space monsters.)  Interstellar travel is taxing and we are told that it will take 400 years for the aliens to reach our planet to wipe us out.  All the best minds on Earth are recruited to a secret "Manhattan project" in which counter-measures are developed to repel the Santee invasion penciled onto our human calendar for 400 years in the future.  When she was imprisoned in Mongolia, Ye met a ecology-minded Anglo named Mike Evans with whom she may have had an affair.  Evans, uses his scientific savvy to become an energy mogul -- (everyone in the show is genius of one sort or another).  How Evans morphed from conservationist and ecology crusader to a world-destroying plutocrat is not clear to me.  The show is fairly dull in places and I may have fallen asleep when this was explained.  Evans spearheads the Manhattan project underway to devise means to forestall or repel the Santee invasion.  

I have to make surmises as  to how certain parts of the show fit together because much of the plot is indecipherable -- perhaps, you are supposed to have read the Chinese novel before watching the TV version.  (Although I doubt that this would be too helpful since the names and places used in the Chinese original have all been changed so that the story could be lifted out of China and dramatized as occurring in London and its environs.)  There's a effects-heavy subplot about virtual reality video games that doesn't make much sense and that I didn't understand.  My guess is that the Santee, using proxies on Earth, have devised the VR game, utilizing gleaming steel helmets to deliver the computer content into the brains of the players, to destabilize the Earthlings and lure our best and brightest to their doom.  The game scenes have a sword and sorcery (or Game of Thrones) vibe and feature lots of decapitation, armies of dehydrated zombies who are revived by being cast into the sea, and much dim-witted Dungeons and Dragons bullshit -- this subplot is pretty much an embarrassment and I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean.  Further, the show inexplicably drops the story after about the third installment although in the last twenty minutes someone discovers yet another helmet terminal for the VR game and dons the device.  (I don't recall who this was or why this was supposed to be significant).  The VR scenes establish that planets entrapped in a three sun system (the titular 3 bodies) involve orbits that can't be reliably calculated, leading to long periods of "chaos" in which civilization is impossible -- I surmise that the Santee are trying to destabilize human culture so that our propensity for lying doesn't infect them, that is, induce three-body dynamics on Earth. In the end, there's a space shot in which the disembodied brain of one of the heroes is sent on a mission to encounter the Santee, a ride in a fast conveyance that, even at 1% of the speed of light, will take, at least, 200 years -- the hero's brain is put in a canister and kept in a twilight state of suspended animation during the space trip.  Things go awry and the eight hours of 3 Body Problem end with the protagonists vowing to fight smarter and better in the next series.  

The plot is driven forward by a group of attractive young scientists who are like apprentices on the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.  They're all incandescently brilliant, pretty, young, fit, and prone to wise-cracks.  Several of them get killed for no good reason.  The leader of this cadre of young heroes is a Black man named Dr. Saul Durand -- he's sort of a catalyst around which the characters gather: the others are a snack manufacturer ("Jack's Snacks" is his business) who's horny and cynical -- he gets offed early in the show which is too bad because his character was reasonably interesting.  A beautiful young woman named Auggie has developed ultra-strong and durable fibers -- this is some sort of nano-technology which is so threatening to the Santee that they threaten her with a running countdown projected onto the cornea of her eyes that stops only when she gives up her scientific endeavors.  This woman's technological innovations are central to several big scenes in the show:  the showstopper is a sequence set at the Panama Canal; the sinister and self-loathing cult of Santee worshipers have taken to the seas after the manner of Ron Hubbard and his scientologists (cf. Sea Org).  They are traitors to their species, inviting the Santee to appear and wipe out the "bugs' -- that is human kind.  When the Santee cult on their vessel "Judgement Day" sail through the Canal, tiny, invisible strands of nano-wire are set up to block their passage.  These fibers act as a giant  wire cheesecutter slicing the Judgement Day and its passengers into lateral segments -- this is a gory and impressive sequence that is undeniably effective, although gratuitous; one would think that the objective of stopping the Santee cult could be accomplished without using the momentum of the ship to slice everyone into six inch wide slabs of metal and gore.  Toward the end of the series, the Manhattan project scientists again enlist Auggie to build a "radiation sail" to power their spacecraft carrying the disembodied brain into the lap of the Santee -- what this is supposed to accomplish is also unclear.  Auggie's last scene is in Mexico where she is using her nano-fiber filters to finally solve the problem of bad, diarrhea-inducing water in that country.  Dr. Ye, who loves the Santee, goes back to Mongolia and, apparently, jumps off a cliff next to the ruins of the radio telescope that sicced the Santee on our world.  Her motivations have been impenetrable throughout the show.

3-Body Problem has a big cast.  But the characters are all, more or less, stereotypes, an aspect that is typical of Science Fiction, where the concerns of the narrative don't have much to do with psychology and schematic motivations are characteristic.  There's the avuncular and down-to-earth African American, Saul Durand, the obsessed and driven scientist Auggie, some other science types including a nerdy Chinese girl-savant, and a young man dying of pancreatic cancer who never really dies, long outliving his welcome on screen -- he's an irritating figure and his fate, of course, is a bummer.  These young people have boy- and girl-friends and there's some low level and uninteresting romantic intrigue among them.  The dying guy has bought a star for one of the women (she's going out with a dashing Indian naval officer) -- he's spent 19.5 million dollars to have the star named after the girl but he's too shy to tell the woman about his lavish and futile gift.  Before he can come clean, his brain is excised, stuffed in a flask of what looks like dry ice and shot into space.  On his death bed, the young man is confronted by his sister and her husband and they ask him to make sure that they inherit his wealth -- this sequence is baffling and typical of much of the show:  characters appear with demands of various sort, conflict with one another, and, then, drop out of the plot entirely.  

I think this show is carefully scripted and suspect that it makes sense if closely watched.  But the subject matter is just junk of a predictable variety and, so, although you're entertained it's not enough for you to keep close track of the proceedings.  After a while, you can't really figure out what is going on because the material isn't intrinsically interesting enough for you to undertake the intellectual effort of keeping track of all the intricate, and, seemingly, random plot developments.  Everything seems theoretical, a point that the characters make within the plot as well -- the Santee aren't due to land on Earth for 400 years so why are we all so upset and determined to repel them?  We live in a world in which everyone was warned about climate change for the last fifty years and, yet, no one has done anything, just kicking the can down the road for another couple decades or so.  Why would the threat of an alien invasion four-hundred years in the future cause anyone much concern.  If we haven't been moved to worry about the sea's turning into steam baths and inundating the coast as Greenland's ice-cap melts and Antarctica's ice shelves crash into the sea, why would an alien invasion announced for the year 2425 cause us any concern at all?  My point is that all the epochal and world-ending imagery in 3-Body Problem lacks urgency -- we all revert to magical thinking:  either the aliens will get detoured to some other star-system or we'll figure something out; a solution can always be improvised so long as we don't have to accomplish this feat today.