By Matt Zoller Seitz

Spurred by this weekend's lively and often contentious discussion of Miami Vice director Michael Mann—macho poet or flashy fraud?—I offer the following piece on The Last of the Mohicans, originally published in the 2005 National Society of Film Critics anthology The X List, edited by Jami Bernard. (Caution: nothing but spoilers ahead.) For a concise, thoughtful look at Mann's filmography through 2002, see Anna Dzenis' Senses of Cinema article. Odienator's review of the movie version of Miami Vice is here. My Star-Ledger article on the original NBC series is here.
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A romantic drama set during the French and Indian War, Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans is a primal epic of survival and the overpowering urge to reproduce. Reworking the same-named 1936 movie, Mann and co-screenwriter Christopher Crowe transform their literary source, James Fenimore Cooper's chaste frontier potboiler, into a passionate tale of tough, simple men fighting and dying for land and women. In the movie's political/historical background, Native tribes, white settlers and British and French military forces compete to control the mountains and forests, which they hope will be overrun someday by their descendants. Mohicans shows that both an individual's goal to mate and pass on genes and a civilization's desire to possess and transform the land issue from the same biological urge. As articulated in the original 1992 version, and deepened in Mann's 2002 director's cut, the major characters are driven by the need to control, protect or perpetuate their bloodlines.

The film's central triangle sees Nathaniel "Hawkeye" Poe (Daniel Day-Lewis), the adopted white son of Mohawk warrior Chingachgook (Russell Means), competing with British Col. Duncan Heyward (Steven Waddington) to defend and possess Cora Munro (Madeline Stowe), Duncan's presumptive fiancée and the daughter of a British colonel. A secondary triangle echoes the first: Nathaniel's adoptive brother, Uncas (Eric Schweig) pairs off with Cora's sister Alice (Jodhi May), then loses her to Magua (Wes Studi), a Huron warrior whose wife and child died in an attack ordered by the Munro sisters' father, Col. Edmund Munro (Maurice Roeves).

Mann and Crowe's sustained comparison between two prizes—land and women—is established in the picture's spectacular opening sequence. After a terse, scene-setting title card, Mann reveals the story's geographical and metaphoric prize: the wilderness of upstate New York (actually South Carolina, where much of Mohicans was filmed). Shooting in CinemaScope with long lenses, director of photography Dante Spinotti flattens and abstracts the blue-green mountains to emphasize their rising, falling curves, than pans elegantly from right to left, inviting us to caress those curves with our eyes. The next shot is a static panorama of converging mountains that unexpectedly tilts down, swooning into triangular valley shrouded by mist.

Then we meet our heroes—Nathaniel, his adoptive father Chingachgook and Chingachgook's blood son Uncas, stalking and killing a deer. After blessing the deer's carcass, the hunters visit friends in an isolated cabin—a married couple named Alexandra and John Cameron (Tracey Ellis and Terry Kinney) and their young children. Alexandra remarks, "Why is Uncas with you? He should have settled with a woman, started a family by now." Nathaniel says they'll winter in "Kentuc-kee" and jokes that they'll "find a Delaware-speaking woman for Uncas. She will say, 'You are the one!' and bear him many children!" Upon repeat viewings, these lines ring with sadness; Chingachgook and Uncas are the sole survivors of a once proud bloodline—the last of the Mohicans. As the tale unfolds, Uncas will find a mate, then perish defending her.

Mann and Crowe's script repeatedly invokes blood and bloodlines, hearts, wombs, marriage and "seed." Early in the movie, when Cora rebuffs a marriage proposal by Duncan—an emblem of the boring old England she left behind—the English officer's arrival is heralded by a long shot of his carriage traversing a bridge over a river; as framed by the filmmakers, the bridge's arch and the arch's reflection in the water below create a perfect egg shape, smack dab in the center of the frame. When our tracker heroes save the Munro sisters from a Huron assault, Cora cozies up to Nathaniel, and admits that the American frontier is "more deeply stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been." Cora's beauty and bravery mark her as an idea frontier wife, transforming Nathanel from single warrior to committed mate so rapidly that neither of them have time to contemplate the change. "I don't call myself subject to much at all," Nathaniel jokes in an early scene, a slap against government that also alludes to his lack of romantic attachments. But midway through their journey, in one of the simplest and most powerful statements of commitment in American cinema, he tells Cora, "You be strong, you survive...Stay alive, no matter what occurs. I will find you."

Nathaniel's monologue about the origin of the stars reinforces the film's symbolic architecture, which is intensely concerned with sex, reproduction and the idea of legacy. "My father's people say that at the birth of the sun and of his brother the moon, their mother died," he tells Cora. "So the sun gave to the earth her body, from which was to spring all life. And he drew forth from her breast the stars, and the stars he threw into the night sky to remind him of her soul."

Magua, whose own bloodline was destroyed by Col. Munro, vows vengeance against Munro's family: "When the Grey Hair is dead, Magua will eat his heart, Before he dies, Magua will put his children under the knife, so the Grey Hair will know his seed is wiped out forever." Sweet, stoic Uncas seizes a chance to extend his own endangered bloodline by protecting helpless Alice. But late in the film, after the Munro sisters have been kidnapped by a Huron war party, a Huron chief imperils Uncas' dream, giving Alice to Magua in so that Magua can pass on his bloodline and "heal his broken heart." During the film's climactic mountaintop battle, Magua cements his claim on Alice by killing Uncas in hand-to-hand combat. In a powerful yet ambiguous gesture, at once imperious and needy, Magua beckons Alice with a hand stained by Uncas' blood. But Alice is so horrified by Magua's ruthlessness that she would rather leap off a cliff than become his mate.

Incidental characters and situations reinforce the film's sense of biological urgency. Throughout "Mohicans," men and women struggle to reunite after violent separations, or prevent their mates or offspring from being wiped out. A dramatic crest occurs in the film's last act, when a Huron chief orders that Alice be given to Magua and Cora burned to death. Nathaniel reflexively offers to die in Cora's place. But Nathaniel's romantic rival Duncan, who serves as translator in the scene, manipulates the proposal so that Duncan is the one volunteering to die. Duncan perishes so that his beloved Cora—the woman who resisted his marriage proposal—might survive. In the end, Mohicans is less an action picture, a romance or war film than a fierce and beautiful dream about fighting, rutting, dying and leaving behind some trace of yourself. That so many characters fail to realize the last part gives the picture a melancholy feeling rarely found in Hollywood epics. The sadness is most pervasive in the last scene, which finds surviving characters Nathaniel, Cora and Chingachgook standing on a mountaintop surveying the land so many people died to possess.

"The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the Red Man of these wilderness forests in front of it until one day there will be nowhere left," Chingagchgook says. "Then our race will be no more, or be not us,"

"That is my father's sadness talking," Nathaniel says.

"No, it is true," his father replies. "The frontier place is for people like my white son and his woman and their children. And one day there will be no more frontier and men like you will go too, like the Mohicans. And new people will come, work, struggle. Some will make their life. But once, we were here."

by Odienator
The TV show Miami Vice is a relic of the 1980's, a weekly descent on a fancy speedboat into a pastel-colored Heart of Darkness full of sex, drugs and, worst of all, macho posturing. Filmmaker Michael Mann and series creator Anthony Yerkovich took NBC boss Brandon Tartikoff's description of "MTV Cops" and built a show around it; the title has become synonymous with Reagan-era excess. Mann's theatrical visuals were edited for maximum adrenaline; entire set-pieces played out as short films cut in sync to the songs of the era; the sense of stylistic overload was leavened only by fleeting references to current events.

When Vice became the latest in a line of TV shows scheduled for movie upgrades, it came attached to the show's master stylist. Back in the day, Mann's sole purpose was to bring an 80's movie into your home every week. Now, freed from the content restrictions of NBC censors, I expected to see what Vice might have looked like if HBO were doing TV series back then. Either Mann was going to give us a jolt of 80's nostalgia, reminding us why the show was so terrible yet compulsively watchable, or he was going to play it straight, upping the angst quotient and macho bullshit, muting the color scheme, and reminding us why you can't make a ho into a housewife.

Mann went with option number 2; Vice is a dismal affair that puts a serious face on everything that has become cliche since 1984. The series was a showcase for drug trading set to music--sort of a DEA version of Schoolhouse Rock. Guys wanted to look like Crockett and Tubbs, to drive their fast cars, wear their flashy clothes, and have their action-packed adventures. The remake puts a stop to all that wishing and hoping, despite a promising opening sequence. Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe lead us through a visually compelling storytelling maze that ends in a gruesome suicide and even more gruesome murder. Mann lets the visuals tell the story, edited to a Jay-Z track, and we are pulled into the quick cuts and the limited view of events as seen by detectives Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx). The situation becomes clear to us and the characters simultaneously, allowing us join their adrenaline rush.

This is where Mann excels. Where Bob Fosse edited to the dance, Mann edits to the music underscoring his glossy depictions of extreme violence. Unfortunately, Miami Vice is also a showcase for what Mann does worst. It's full of what is supposed to pass for plot and dialogue. The plot is a confusing tangle of extraneous characters and loose ends. The dialogue is so overdone and preposterous that, when the theater screening Vice suddenly lost sound in the dialogue speaker for 15 minutes, the movie actually made sense. The characters babble for interminably long stretches before Mann remembers he's making an action movie and shoots someone in the head. So many brains splatter all over the screen (more people are shot in the head than in The Proposition) that there weren't any left for the script. This is the last act of a Desperate Mann.

Foxx and Farrell look more inclined to kill each other than be partners--it's doubtful that either would trust the other with his life—and while Farrell brings the right amount of sleaze and weary angst to his otherwise mismanaged Crockett, Foxx glares unconvincingly at us from the screen. It doesn't help that Foxx resembles R. Kelly with a nappy billy goat beard that looks stereotypically like Brillo. (The tough macho guy is a role Foxx needs to remove from his oeuvre. He makes a convincing artist or a man struggling with demons--as his Bundini Brown proved in Mann's earlier Ali--but he's no John Shaft.)

Crockett and Tubbs wade through an undercover drug scheme run by Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar) and his right hand man, Jose Yero (John Ortiz). Along the way, they deal with some White supremacists who seem thrown in by Mann to offset how shoddily this film treats its minority characters. Mann usually fares well with minorities in his films and TV series, but Vice negates any good will he's accumulated by casting Naomie Harris and Gong Li as tough women who are reduced to helpless third-act victims, and a slew of Hispanics who all seem to be involved in drugs. If any of these characters had an arc of complexity, this sin might be forgivable. But they are all caricatures. Foxx's stable relationship with Harris is ignored in favor of Farrell's self-destructive, clumsy relationship with Gong, at least until those White supremacists show up. Though that plot wrinkle produces one hell of an exploding head, it's extraneous and sloppily handled.

Gong Li gets the bulk of Mann's laughable dialogue, and she deserves a refund from whomever taught her how to speak English. Gong, a fine actress in her Chinese films, becomes Super Bad "I Shall De-STWOY YOU!" Geisha Lady whenever she uses the Roman alphabet. Gong has been criticized for basically playing a victim/moll/geisha wannabe her entire career, but in Chinese she has a fiery presence that can't be extinguished. Here, she's supposed to be the rough-edged moll of Tosar, yet most of her performance consists of making bigger goo-goo eyes at Farrell than Pocahantas did. Her sex talk with Crockett ranks as the worst come on (or is it come in?) I've heard outside of porno. Mann ups the cruelty quotient by having her speak Spanish too. (She deserves two refunds.)

Comparisons with Collateral are inevitable, as Mann rehired his cinematographer and two actors from that film. But Collateral was superior. Jamie Foxx's Everyman taxi driver (and Cruise's hit man as well) personified a recurring theme in Mann's work: hard men whose professional excellence comes at the price of their souls. Vice's heroes attempt to continue the tradition, but they don't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Russell Crowe's Jeffrey Wigand from The Insider or James Caan's Frank in Thief. Barry Shabaka Henley had the finest moment in Collateral, so it is dismaying that his Lt. Castillo (so grandly brought to life on TV by Edward James Olmos) is given little to do but threaten to take away Crockett and Tubbs' badges. Where Olmos' sour magnetism intimidated both his underlings and the viewer, Henley isn't given the opportunity to feel superior to the two detectives.

Beebe's Collateral visuals put a steely gloss on Los Angeles, evoking the film's mood and serving as its entry point into urban fable. Beebe's work in Vice--shot, like Collateral, on high-definition video--is haphazard, switching stock for no good reason, and generally accomplishing little besides drawing attention to itself. For every line of visual poetry, there are countless lazy stanzas. If anything, Vice should be joyful to watch; inexplicably, though, Beebe makes Miami look darker than the Nostromo in Alien. The movie sticks to muted, gritty colors, treating the tropics as if it were the Pacific Northwest. The only splotches of bright color appear on people unfortunate enough to get bullet-sized headaches.

Vice disappoints because so many things Mann does wrong here were done right in his earlier work. Compare, for instance, the interaction between Joan Allen and Tom Noonan in Manhunter with Gong and Farrell, or Collateral's suspense level to Vice's; look, for that matter, at the complex minority characters in Last of the Mohicans and in Vice's TV incarnation. The movie version of Vice is instead a means to earn a quick buck from an audience which, for the most part, wasn't alive when series originally aired. In the mid-'80s, when I was the age of today's preferred opening weekend moviegoer, everybody wanted to be Crockett and/or Tubbs. Who would want to be them after seeing this movie? To paraphrase Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, they're maudlin, and full of self-pity, but they ain't magnificent.

By Keith Uhlich

It's tempting, one must admit, to mangle the title of Woody Allen's latest trifle and let it stand as a review. To wit: Pooper Scoop. But professionalism dictates we delve further (if only briefly) into the increasingly uninteresting and profoundly disinterested mind of a filmmaker with nothing more to say, and whose primary concern of late appears to be scheduling his movies' release dates around the summer and winter solstice.
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To read the rest of the Slant Magazine review, click here.

by Wagstaff

"All baseball pictures are about redemption of some sort" - Odienator

During these hot days of summer, a man will look for relief in baseball and beer, and no movie delivers baseball and beer better than The Bad News Bears. That's the real beer of director Michael Ritchie's 1976 original I'm talking about, not the nonalcoholic equivalent served up in last year's remake. Bears is one of the finest American films of the 70s, and watching the remake only adds to my appreciation of its glory. Richard Linklater's version follows the first one closely, yet still manages to go wrong at every turn—it even muffs some baseball fundamentals, like how to field a grounder down on one knee. The original never commits such errors. It is funny, tight and triumphant, and it clocks in at a brisk 102 minutes. Here then are nine reasons—enough to field a team—that make The Bad News Bears endlessly watchable 30 years later. Play ball:

1. Walter Matthau - Matthau gives one of his finest performances as Coach Morris Buttermaker, the boozy ex-minor league pitcher who's had too many losses in life. He says he once struck out Ted Williams, "...1947, Vero Beach, Florida... spring training, around March 15." But now Buttermaker could use a good win, and when the win comes tantalizingly close, he quickly degenerates into a man no better than his nemesis, Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), coach of the Yankees. Buttermaker's realization that he's gone too far is a wonderful moment of dugout drama; the camera lingers on the bloodshot eyes set in Matthau's bulldog face, as the reality of his actions sinks in. It is a "there and back again" moment, and in this remarkably subtle movie it serves as a major character arc.

Billy Bob Thornton's coach, on the other hand, is more of a bad boy than a loser. He's a sexy ladies man who dresses... well, like Billy Bob Thornton out for a hip night in Hollywood. Linklater's Bears makes Buttermaker an ex-major league who now works as an exterminator. I don't know why—extermination is an active job that makes decent money. The 70s Buttermaker was a pool cleaner, a low rent job you can get drunk and still muddle through. Plus, Matthau's a less affected curmudgeon; who else could sell a line like, "Now get back to the stands before I shave off half your mustache and shove it up your left nostril"?

2. Michael Ritchie - Ritchie is one of those directors I keep in my private collection of favorites—an unsung master whose inventive but appropriate camera angles and invisible editing are evident even in crap like The Island. Back in 1976, he was coming off a string of successes—Downhill Racer, Prime Cut, and The Candidate. He was the kind of director that creates a reality and then positions himself around that reality and transforms it into art. His easygoing subtlety makes Linklater, a subtle director himself, look clumsy. It takes Linklater three or four shots to achieve effects that Ritchie—working with cinematographer John A. Alonzo and regular editor Richard A. Harris—manages in one laconic take. On top of that, Ritchie's film is a definitive sketch of California in the 70's, from its opening crane shot of sprinklers watering a baseball diamond to its parting long shot of our underdogs celebrating their championship loss with beer on a field flanked by an American flag.

3. Tatum O'Neal - If I didn't realize that I had a crush on O'Neal when I was seven, I should have. Now, watching her 30 years later my affection is as strong as ever. Amanda Whurlitzer is the perfect tomboy—watch her throw curveballs from the mound—and a total doll, too. Anxious to leave her tomboy days behind and jump into womanhood, Amanda wears espadrilles and runs her own business—selling star maps to tourists. The remake's Amanda is a mushy nonentity; she sells clothes with other people. Ritchie's Amanda had spunk back when the nation's skyrocketing divorce rate was fresh news. Linklater's remake compounds this offense by omitting touches that deepened the character. Gone is that lovely shot following Amanda leaving the dugout after Buttermaker throws beer on her, telling her that if he wanted her company he would've looked her up, he "wouldn't have waited two goddamn years." She walks across the field and the camera swirls around to catch her face in closeup, Bizet's beautiful music playing, her warm tears shining; it's a defining moment, merging realism and lyrical grace.

4. Jackie Earle Haley - Before he was Breaking Away and Losing It, Haley was bad news in the best way. As live-wire bad boy Kelly Leak, the actor is funny, sensitive, and tough as hell, sporting a premature wisdom that seems to have been beaten into him. He's a total badass who catches Amanda's fastball with his bare hand. The image of Kelly riding his motorcycle along a fence on opening day while chatting up a teenage girl in a white T-shirt and impossibly short cutoffs encapsulates most of my nostalgia for the 70's. In Linklater's version, Leak—played by Jeffrey Davies—is a mushy nonentity who doesn't even smoke or ride a Harley; if the filmmakers were trying to go the teen idol route, they failed; their Leak wouldn't earn a tiny photo in the back pages of Tigerbeat. Haley's incarnation of Leak has a layered charisma; the actor is so astute that he can convey Kelly's shattered vulnerability, and the tough facade that hides it, with a single look. One wonders what his home life must have been like, or if he even had one. "I got a Harley-Davidson," he says, then adds hopefully, "does that turn you on? Harley-Davidson?"

5. The Kids - Seldom have kids been so natural on screen. They talk over each other, curse and fight, yet they still seem like kids, not miniature adults. Ritchie renders all his characters in quick, memorable strokes. There is Engelberg the fat catcher who bites into his candy bar for sustenance ("Couldn't you have at least unwrapped it first?"); Ogilvie the statistician who, with the possible exception of Lupus, is the worst player in the league; Rudi Stein, the geeky wannabe pitcher on puberty's cusp; Tanner Boyle, the preternaturally wiry scrapper whose cause is usually righteous (Tanner in the remake looks like an overstuffed Hanson); and Timmy Lupus, whose timidity and reluctance to get off the bench is heartwrenching, which makes his spectacular catch of a fly ball feel triumphant. (In the remake, Timmy doesn't catch the fly ; an unconvincing CGI ball bounces out of his glove, to be caught by an additional character I refuse to mention.) Then there's Miguel Agilar, whose diminutive stature translates into a nonexistent strike zone, and Ahmad Abdul-Rahim, the lone black player who is so hard on himself after the Bear's first pummeling that he strips down to his underwear and climbs a tree. There's even one kid actor who is the grandson of Gummo Marx. Can you guess which one? (I'll give you a hint: he has curly blonde hair and hardly speaks.) In the remake, nearly every casting decision rings untrue, and as an ensemble, their energy could not be more awkward. Linklater's facility for drawing out naturalistic performances is usually impressive, though this time he may have pushed too hard. Gary Cavagnaro, who played the original Engelberg, said in an interview that, "Everyone talks about the way we were able to 'act'. The reality was, we were a bunch of kids who were told 'pretend that your parents are not there and act like you would normally under that circumstance'. We were all just being ourselves."

6. Vic Morrow - Testosterone-fueled Coach Roy Turner of the Yankees is a fine antagonist for Buttermaker. He is the Great Santini of coaches, but while Morrow's performance is often scary, it's never less than human.Though he's an asshole, he's more of an antagonist than a villain. Turner doesn't want to talk about winning during a pep talk, but about losing, and how you have to live with it for the rest of your life. When he walks out to the mound and slaps his son down for trying to bean a batter, his anger flares at realization that anyone dared defy his authority; but there's also genuine concern about the injury that might have happened. The remake re-conceives Turner as a comic weasel; luckily, Greg Kinnear makes the best of a bad situation and ends up coming off better than his costars.

7. Bill Lancaster - Burt Lancaster's son got two screenplays produced—this one and John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing. That's only two times at the plate, but he batted a thousand. It's been said that Lancaster based Buttermaker on his father and Amanda on himself. I don't know about that, but his script catches the tension between adults, who often try to live their unfulfilled aspirations through their children, and the kids who just want to play ball. Lancaster doesn't go for any emotional home runs, just a line drive up the middle. Only two characters verge on caricature, Cleveland and Councilman Whitewood, but all in all, they don't seem much more cartoony than some real people I know. Linklater gave Lancaster a screen credit for his original story, but unfortunately, credited screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa needlessly mangle many of his finer accomplishments. They cherry-pick a brief line about class-action lawsuits and embellish the scene with many more of the same; they alter good scenes with changes that miss the entire point—such switching an after-game celebration from a Pizza Hut to a German restaurant; they even try to explain the victory-in-defeat ending as if the first movie was over our heads. And in one interview, the writers freely admitted to knowing almost nothing about baseball; talk about a fact worth keeping to yourself.

8. Jerry Fielding - Rewatching Bears, I was delighted to learn that Jerry Fielding was responsible for the inspired raid on George Bizet's opera Carmen that's used for the score. While scoring several of Sam Peckinpah's best pictures—The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner—Fielding took a full-blown orchestra and made it sound subdued and ironic; he also scored a lot of television, including some of the most famous episodes of Star Trek (including the surreal western riff "Spectre of the Gun"). His excavation of Carmen provides each ballgame with its own dynamic of humor, suspense, and drama, and best of all, he knows when to keep silent; his work here might qualify as the best use of classical music in a Hollywood movie since 2001. The remake excises most of Fielding's choices, and what it keeps it misuses.

9. It's so quintessentially American - When I saw The Bad News Bears for the first time, I was younger than the kids who played the Bears. Those kids had a special allure because I lived in Japan and I wanted to know what was happening in America. A couple years later I moved to California and played little league ball myself, and everything was just as it was portrayed—the team chants, the Pizza Hut parties, the suicide soft drinks. It's such an American story, and the movie captures so well that peculiar American attitude—an ingrained identification with the underdog that is patriotic and "fuck you" at the same time. It tapped a spirit that flowed on through National Lampoon's Animal House and Bill Murray's American Mutt speech from Stripes. For a truly American experience, find a copy of The Bad News Bears this summer and watch it. It will deliver on moms and baseball. The only thing missing will be the apple pie, but Pizza Hut works just as well.

by Odienator

In Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979) and Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (2006), the filmmakers respectively invoke death to gently chastise viewers for the imaginary crime of not affording them the appreciation they feel they deserve. Both works cry out, "You're gonna miss me when I'm gone." Yet for all their surface similarities, they are oceans apart in tone.

All That Jazz, one of my favorite movies, is meandering, infuriating and surreal, packed with dance numbers and music. Scripted by Robert Alan Aurthur, and owing Federico Fellini's 8 ½ a debt too large to repay, Fosse reimagines the musical drama of his own life, sometimes employing original cast members (Ann Reinking plays a character based on herself), while crafting a self-congratulatory piece that screams "I am Bob Fosse! I am breathing down the Grim Reaper's neck because I'm a drug-addicted workaholic! Partake in my world of cynical Broadway smut, and celebrate me before it's too late!" Prairieis also meandering, infuriating, surreal and full of music. Owing All That Jazz a similarly huge debt, Altman builds a dramatic frame around a facsimile of Keillor's long-running radio program and some of its recurring castmembers and characters, while crafting a self-congratulatory piece that declares, "I am Robert Altman! The Grim Reaper is breathing down my neck! Partake in my world of cynical Midwestern sing-a-longs and celebrate me before it's too late!"

In Flesh for Frankenstein, Udo Kier says, "To know death, you must fuck life in the gallbladder!" Both Prairie and Jazz aim for a more easily accessible point of penetration by envisioning the Angel of Death as a hot blonde chick dressed in virginal white. In Jazz, Jessica Lange plays Angelique, who appears to protagonist and Fosse stand-in Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) in a form he can appreciate. He knows that she has come for him; like the Ghost of Christmas Past, Angelique leads Gideon through the various events that led to their meeting. Though a chronic lothario who lies to the women in his life, Gideon feels compelled to be truthful to Angelique--and to resist her. When she moves to administer the Kiss of Death, Gideon stops her; it might be the first time he's ever resisted a woman's charms. Angelique seems vapid, but her dialogue reveals that her bullshit detector is on: "I always look for the worst in people," Joe tells her. "A little of yourself in them?" she asks. Fosse also alludes to Angelique taking the physical representation of one of Gideon's fans and former lovers: Gideon's mother tells Angelique, "He always loved you." Meanwhile, back in the real world, Joe Gideon is dying in the hospital while the backers of his latest Broadway show weigh their options. Gideon's death would potentially mean the demise of the show, unless the backers can convince Gideon's nemesis (John Lithgow) to direct it; however, their accountants state that if Gideon dies, they can make a bigger profit by letting the show die with him. Thus Angelique gets to claim Gideon's last potential triumph in a two-for-one sale on his soul.

Both living and dying are envisioned as intricately choreographed and rehearsed performances. A recurring montage of Gideon's bleary-eyed wakeup routine—Alka-Seltzer, cigarette, Visine, Dexedrine—appears several times in the film, always scored to Vivaldi's "Concert in G" and ending with Gideon looking in the mirror and declaring, "It's showtime, folks!" Fosse ends Jazz with a number titled "Hospital Hallucination, Take 1," a nearly 30 minute, self-indulgent tribute to himself--one final showstopper for Fosse/Gideon; since we're never asked to like Gideon, it's a ballsy way to end the movie. Costars Reinking, Leland Palmer, Erszebet Foldi, Ben Vereen and Scheider give a taste of what the film version of Fosse's Broadway hit Chicago might have looked like had Fosse survived to direct it--though like the "Air-otica" sequence earlier in Jazz, it seems a pre-emptive self-parody of his distinctive style. The deathbed number and the gruesome open heart surgery footage that precedes it are endurance tests for viewers.

In Prairie, Virginia Madsen portrays The Dangerous Woman, aptly named because her performance is dangerously bad. Madsen's Angel of Death has also come for the film's protagonist—the radio show itself. Sure, she picks off a few people en route, but her purpose is more symbolic. G.K. (Garrison Keillor)--Prairie's screenwriter, the creator of the real-life radio program, and Altman's de facto stand-in--vows to have one last great show before the theater in which he performs is razed. G.K's nemesis, represented by company man Tommy Lee Jones, could let this institution live, but he notes that they'll make more money without it. Like Gideon, G.K. is also a womanizer, as evidenced by Lola Johnson's (Meryl Streep) out-of-left-field freak-out during a duct tape commercial.

But G.K. seems far more dishonest about both his sexual history and his feelings about mortality than Fosse's alter-ego. When the show's resident horny old man keels over, presumably after taking a load of Viagra, G.K. seems apathetic. Later in the film, Dangerous Ginny comments that "the death of an old man is not a tragedy," which led me to holler out, "Bullshit, Mr. Altman." When Lola asks if he is concerned that this is the last show, G.K. says "every show is your last show. That's my philosophy." "Thank you, Plato," Lola's sister Yolanda (Lily Tomlin) sarcastically replies, saving grumps like me the trouble of talking back to the screen again.

While acknowledging Altman's importance, I find his tone here lacks the passion for life that speaks to me from Fosse's film. Even in Altman's brilliant breakthrough period--the era of M*A*S*H and Nashville--he has always come off as a curmudgeon. But the Kansas City native was 80 when he sat in Prairie's director's chair—with acolyte-turned-protege Paul Thomas Anderson by his side, just in case the lady in white decided to drop in before the wrap party. This makes him the perfect director for the kind of film Prairie's radio fans hoped to see; Altman understands Midwestern stoic folksiness. Fosse, a Chicago native born two years after Altman, was 52 and a Broadway veteran when he made All That Jazz; his relative youth made it a more visceral ride to the same destination of deathly meditation.

But the Keillorites' gain may count as a loss for some. I am closer to 52 than 80, and more attuned to Broadway than Lake Woebegone; I know more about sex and self-destruction than the wisdom of age and the sense of entitlement one feels for living a long life. Most importantly, though, I also know something about being a grouch, and from that vantage point, Prairie's subtle exhortations to go gentle into that good night seem a false comfort from Altman to his fans--a reassurance that displaces his usual blunt honesty. For a movie whose cast includes a sexy reaper, Prairie is too smug and passive about dying. The mortal coil is unraveling from the show and its participants, yet Altman chooses to deflect a universal fear by pretending that death is a mere nuisance.

This is why Madsen is so terrible; her air-headed angel's platitudes ring hollow in the Altman universe we've come to know. Would the younger Altman have let a character get away with such bullshit? This artist has never felt the need to embrace and console his audiences in the past, so why start now? Nashville's final number, "It Don't Worry Me," was about willful denial; the whole of Prairie is about acceptance, yet it feels like a denial as well. The palpable fear that this is Altman's last movie is never honestly dealt with by the director's stand-in, Keillor, nor the film itself. It seems almost as if Prairie thinks it holds the monopoly on dying, and that the show-within-a-movie is noble--and its demise a tragedy--simply because it's been around for so long. Altman's onscreen representative G.K. keeps pooh-poohing the distress his colleagues feel throughout their last show, going so far as to state that he doesn't want to tell people how to feel about his legacy; but his relaxed attitude never feels true. Altman throws out a hopeful, interesting curve when dealing with the fate of Tommy Lee Jones' character (a fantasy of how to deal with one's enemies). Here is the mean Altman we know and love, lashing out at his critics, informing you of his perceived greatness and how much it'll be missed once he's gone. But the film treats it as a throwaway; as quickly as it arrives, it defers back to that transparent, dishonest lulling. If Prairie weren't so concerned with coddling us, we'd deduce that it's OK to acknowledge Death—-just don't go looking for it; wait until it shows up to pull your number.

Both films are obsessed with death, but where Jazz dramatizes and fulfills its own prophecy, Prairie ignores the apparition in the corner of the room. Gideon's doctor says at one point that Gideon "doesn't give a fuck" about his life anymore since his hospital room is always full of sex and booze. While neither Joe Gideon nor G.K. seem to give a fuck about their own inevitable passing, Fosse the filmmaker is at least honest about his fear (and fascination)--an honesty that extends to self-destructively pushing up his date with the woman in white.

Fosse's semi-autobiographical confession was prescient: the heart attack that took Joe Gideon took his creator as well, and also claimed what might have been Fosse's final film triumph, Chicago. Altman, at this writing, is still with us despite having similar heart trouble. Perhaps, at 80, you look at life differently than at 52, which might explain why Prairie is slower, more passive and less defiant than Jazz. But if Prairie could act as elder statesmen and deliver a message back to Joe Gideon, it would come from Jearlyn Steele, who sings, "The day is short/the night is long/Why do you work so hard to get what you don't even want?"