Last of the great romantics
Movies from seen in latish 2004.
Originally written: December 2004
Vanity Fair
Shall We Dance
De-Lovely
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Collateral
Saved!
Stage Beauty
Matchstick Men
Secondhand Lions
Kill Bill Vol 2
Angels in America
I have become increasingly pissed off with the spread of the term 'chick flick' to describe any movie which doesn't have a dozen plus body count. First, it reflects the current critical dialectic will not admit that there are gradations on the 'chick flick' to 'shoot-'em-up' continuum. But, more importantly, it downgrades the romantic comedy genre to nothing more than a reaction to the overt violence and mindlessness of the great majority of contemporary films which are aimed at the late teenage/early twenties male (seen as the least discriminating and most spendthrift of the movie audiences - not without reason). When I first came to the idea of the genre differentiation within the Hollywood film, there was a category called 'woman's picture', dramas which featured women in lead roles and largely concentrated on domestic conflicts: husbands and wives, mothers and daughters. Joan Crawford movies were in this category, as was a drama like Lana Turner's Imitation of Life. But a romantic comedy was not; nor were musicals. They were their own genre. But that's all too complicated for these simplistic times. So the categories get conflated and any movie which doesn't have limbs being hacked off or blood flowing in the gutters or audiences being gratuitously scared for the shock (or schlock) factor or ideas sublimated by the need to show all the special effects which cost the producers so much is dubbed a 'chick flick'. Or a 'teen chick flick', if it stars any of the coterie of interchangeable adolescent girls currently being cast in the lead of the endless repetition of Cinderella stories aimed at barely pubescent females. Well, I don't buy into the simplistic dichotomy. There are good movies, counter-programmed to the big budget effects movies, which cannot easily be dismissed as 'chick flicks', mostly romantic comedies, and we have seen more than a few of them in recent weeks.
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Jane Austen has never been among my favorite novelists. Nor the Bronte sisters, authors, like Austen, of a slew of books made into woman's pictures. William Makepeace Thackeray, on the other hand, has always appealed far more and his Vanity Fair is near the top of my list of great books. So a new movie version, directed by a product of the Bollywood school of sub-continental movie-making, was something to be looked forward to. Thackeray's protagonist, Becky Sharp, stands out in nineteenth century literature as an anachronistically modern woman. Determined to make her way in the world without regard for the effect that her machinations might have on others, Becky is the first true Anglophone anti-heroine. Not that you'd know it from the movie versions of the book. The rules of the movie game have always dictated that the harder edge of Becky's character be softened by a certain sentimentality that Thackeray would find appalling. To an extent the 1998 television miniseries, with much more time to tell the story, managed to capture the attractive repulsion of Becky, but the abbreviation of the story within the two hours of a movie (and the lack of daring that is often a part of an industry that needs innumerable bums on seats and thus tries hard not to offend) doesn't allow for the same depth of portrayal. At least that seems to be the outcome of the latest version, with Reese Witherspoon playing a believable and effective Becky, just not the Becky of the book. So let's forget Thackeray's Vanity Fair for the nonce and look solely at Mira Nair's. The film is really a Classic Comic's version of Vanity Fair, with the edges removed and the characters made somewhat bland. Witherspoon's Becky is still the pleb on the rise, fighting against class prejudice and inertia. She provides a strong basis for an enjoyable movie, even if the later part of the story undermines the character she had built up early in the film. Conscience does not fit well with Becky. But many of the other characters are not nearly as effective. This is almost universally the case among the young males who are a feckless lot. Rhys Ifans is badly miscast as the upright Dobbin, who should be the moral centre of the story, Jonathan Rhys-Davies is just wrong as young Osborne who is supposed to be a cad and a rotter, betraying Becky's best friend, but just seems a silly boy, and Gabriel Byrnes' version of the diabolical Steyne is weakened by compromises meant to soften his character in a movie meant for family consumption. James Purefoy does somewhat better as the put-upon husband, Rawdon Crawley, but he is more pretty than effective. Then there are the eccentrics, seemingly a requirement in any modern adaptation of classic English literature. Eileen Atkins as the maiden aunt Matilda Crawley, Bob Hoskins as her brother Sir Pitt Crawley and Jim Broadbent as the elder Osborne engage in heroic acting, eating scenery in the best British 'luvie' tradition. Nair has imbued the film with an Indian flavor which is interesting, given that the novel is set in Regency England when the British gentry were being influenced by the vibrant culture and ideas of the sub-continent. But her direction (and her re-interpretation of the classic) is not as effective as, say Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (to name but one brilliant re-imagining of British culture by an Indian director). The end result is that Thackeray's mordant attack on the British upper class and their skewed values becomes a fairly bland 'woman's picture' enlivened by some good acting and some attractive scenery but not adding up to a total success. Personally, I'd hire the miniseries on DVD if it were available.
Way to go, Beverley
Richard Gere is a 'chick flick' favorite. After all An Officer and a Gentleman is really a 'woman's picture' cunningly disguised as a basic training movie and Pretty Woman is the apotheosis of the modern romantic comedy 'chick flick'. So it comes as no surprise to see him cast in the lead role of yet another such film. And this one also attempts to cash in on the current upturn in interest in ballroom dancing, a trend spotted a decade ago by Baz Luhrmann and now picked up by both commercial and non-commercial television in Australia and, belatedly, by Hollywood, which is as ever the Duke of Plaza-Toro of trend-spotters. Shall We Dance? is in fact the re-imagining of a Japanese film of pretty much the same name, made a few years ago. In terms of the story, there's not much to tell here. John Clark (Gere) is a successful estate lawyer with a wife, Beverley (Susan Sarandon), and a teenage daughter. He does not appear to be unhappy or unfulfilled but the sight of a beautiful latina, standing pensively in the window of a dance studio, espied nightly from his seat on the L train, somehow calls to him. One night he jumps from the train and before he knows it he has signed up for beginner's dance lessons. He interacts with others at the studio, learns some lessons from Paulina (Jennifer Lopez), the young woman he saw in the window, teaches some lessons right back, and becomes a better man through dancing. The characters, however, are a bit more interesting. Gere is joined in his lessons by two other, younger men, the oversized Vern and the mouthy Chic. Rather than being taught by Paulina, Miss Mitzi, the studio owner, conducts the lessons. Two other characters interact with Clark at the studio: Bobbi, a blonde dynamo looking for a dance partner, and Link, a lawyer at Gere's firm, who, wearing an appalling wig, is making his way through the Chicago dance scene. The versatile Stanley Tucci is very good in this role. These characters, and Sarandon, have an air of reality about them as they develop and play off each other. But you don't go to movies like this for the story, or even the characters. It's the set-piece dances that make or break them. That it holds out interest between the dance scenes is enough; in that respect Shall We Dance? over-performs. And it does well in the dance sequences too. These are filmed full length, benefitting from actors who can actually dance, and look good doing it. Perhaps the best sequence, outside the inevitable climactic dance competition, is when Lopez uses Lisa Ann Walter (who plays Bobbi) to show Gere how to dance the rumba - "... the vertical expression of a horizontal wish." She pushes Walter through a series of athletic contortions that demonstrate the sensuality of the dance, a concept reinforced by later iterations of the dance in the competition. My one reservation is the overly cliched scene where Clark finally makes it up to Beverley, in a scene so reminiscent of the finale to An Officer and a Gentleman that I expected one of her offsiders to clap her hands and cheer, "Way to go, Beverley". Leaving that caveat aside, the film has good acting, interesting dance moves, and a very effective song score adding up to a pretty good package. Even for a chick flick.
Heaven knows, anything goes
De-Lovely is the second biopic of composer Cole Porter. The earlier version, Night and Day, made while Porter was still alive starred Cary Grant, then a closeted gay, as an apparently straight Porter. This revisionist version, with Kevin Kline in the lead, is more explicit about Porter's catholic tastes in partners. Which is not to say that there is any resemblance between reality and the story portrayed here; this is, after all, a biopic. What it is even more than that is a framework into which to fit a large number of Porter songs, many re-imagined by a new generation of singers. The framing device for the story sees an old Porter being led through a proposed new play, based on his life, by producer Jonathan Pryce. The individual episodic scenes, from the time he met Linda Lee (Ashley Judd), the divorced socialite who married him, through his success as a Broadway and Hollywood composer, his horse-riding accident which left him crippled, her death from cancer and his old age, are interspersed with his words and music. Sometimes Kline and Judd, or the actors playing their contemporaries, are asked to present the songs; occasionally they are presented as apart of a show. Mostly however, they are left in the hands of the likes of Robbie Williams, Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette to sing as if they were presenting them at the time they were written. Many of these versions are no better than OK. The AIDS benefit special and CD, Red Hot and Blue, was much more successful in its use of contemporary singers to re-invent Porter as a post-modern composer. There is nothing in this film to match Annie Lennox' "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" or Kirsty MacColl's "Miss Otis Regrets". Yet it is the music which dominates. This is partly as a result of the episodic nature of the narrative, constantly interrupted for a return to Pryce and Kline reflecting on aspects of Porter's life as shown in the previous scene, and partly because there are just so many songs presented through the story. More interestingly, the scenarists have used the songs to illustrate and underscore (pun intended) the lifestyle upon which Porter embarked within the gay demi-monde on the Continent, in New York and in Hollywood. The lyrics of songs like "Anything Goes", "What is This Thing Called Love", "Let's Do It" and "Always True to You (In My Fashion)" are made to comment on Porter's life, outside of the context of the shows for which they were written, as if the composer were constantly updating audiences on his risk-taking and his feelings for Linda. And a number of the songs are shoe-horned into the story in an anachronistic manner to suit the story, like "Did You Evah?", written for High Society in the 1950s, being performed in a 1920s' Paris drawing room. While the use of the songs as commentary on the composer's life is forced, the winning performances by Kline (as expected from this brilliant actor) and Judd (this was a bit more of a surprise as she hadn't previously shown much in the way of the effective emotional acting displayed here) more than compensate for this, and Porters' songs are so good that they stand on their own merits. Given the main theme explored here, Porter's love-life and the effect that it has on his marriage and, potentially, on his career, this would appear to be just another 'chick flick'. But it is something more than that: it ends up being a fascinating combination of style and substance, using its episodic framework to make some mordant comments on societal attitudes to gender preferences that have as much relevance today (in an era when antiquated religious doctrines are being used to impose lifestyle choices on people in Christian, Islamic and Jewish societies). An enjoyable experience.
Second verse, little worse
The success of Bridget Jones' Diary was always going to guarantee a sequel. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is the sequel and it delivers almost exactly what you'd expect. Renee Zellwegger is the eponymous character - from both sides of the colon. Having blimped herself all the way up to a size 12, she is here to convince us that she is the overweight heroine of the diaries. Having snared her Mr Darcy, she behaves exactly as if she wants to lose him: being suspicious, unreasonably, of his association with a female lawyer, listening to her own clueless friends, and hooking up again with Daniel Cleaver, Hugh Grant's interpretation of the cad. The film is a fairly good comedy, once you allow for the fact that it's repeating jokes from the first film and that most of the characters, apart from the three leads, are nothing more than stereotypes. I don't particularly like Zellwegger as an actress but her Bridget is an enticing performance and, once again, is sympathetic and touching enough to engage our attention. I'm not sure what we're supposed to see that she sees in Colin Firth's Darcy but I suppose British spinsters are brought up to believe that the common English prig is something of a catch. Grant is again very good here in what is really a cameo, despite his billing. He is given at least one joke that is fairly predictable, even if a little tasteless in the light of his Divine Brown experience. Another fairly decent entry in the 'romantic comedy chick flick' that will entertain well enough, but not really enlighten. My main caveat, apart from the emphasis once again on the avoirdupois acting of the lead, concerns the scene at the Law Society dinner when the trivia game comes down to popular culture, which is Bridget's special subject. She apparently misguesses the answer to the name of Madonna's first hit single. Why did they leave the question open and unresolved?
Silent night, bloody night
You wouldn't think that a Michael Mann movie in which Tom Cruise plays a cold-blooded hitman out for a night of wetwork in LA would have any elements of the 'chick flick' but for the first ten or so minutes it looks that way as Jamie Foxx's taxi driver looking to buy a limousine service meets cute with Jada Pinkett's lawyer about to try a major drug case. Having established these two characters, Mann moves Vincent (Cruise) into Foxx's cab and the night of blood is underway, as Vincent starts knocking off a series of witnesses all connected to one drug lord. Foxx is the title character in Collateral and pretty much its central one as well. Cruise is given a character without any personality - a role he was made to play. Foxx however is much more interesting and he manages to hold the piece together for much of the film. Michael Mann is one of the more imaginative directors working in American film, with a string of well-made movies, including The Last of the Mohicans and, especially, Heat. But this one doesn't quite work. Like Heat, there is a central, incredibly bloody shoot-'em-up scene but, unlike the earlier film where the scene is central to the narrative, this scene seems gratuitously violent. Before that however there are a couple of nice set pieces, especially Vincent's confrontation with a jazz musician and the parallel narrative where Mark Ruffalo's LA cop is following the trail left by Vincent and closing in on what is occurring. One of the most disappointing parts of the movie is the climactic chase scene (potential SPOILER warning) where Vincent finally closes in on his final victim, whose identity is predictable from incredibly early in the movie (and even from this review), and the couple of goodies have to first avoid and then deal with the killer. Mann's films are usually more classy that this sort of cliched ending but, at least by that point in the movie, you'd never mistake it for a 'chick flick'.
First love's gay abandon
I'm not sure how to classify Saved! but 'chick flick' would not be in the final five. It's a teenage high school coming-of-age cool-kids-versus-rebels satire of fundamentalist Christianity. Sui generis, perhaps. Let me give you a taste of the way it goes: Mary loves Dean who thinks he may be gay. They are students at a fundamentalist Christian school, American Eagle Christian High School, so pre-marital sex is as outrageous a thought as homosexuality. But Mary believes that she has had a vision of Jesus and that the act of love will 'save' Dean and that she will be made virginal again. In this movie, thank Ghod, the world doesn't work like that: Dean is shuffled off to a Christian half-way house to be won back from the dark side and Mary find herself, like her namesake, somewhat up the duff. She decides to ignore the growing problem, hide it from all, including her mother, the Christian Home Decorator of the Year (played by Mary-Louise Parker, who on the basis of The West Wing and Angels in America, among other roles, is quickly becoming a favorite), and complete her final year. Her experience sours her view of her beliefs, her school and her friends. These divide into two parts: her old friends, like the queen bee of the school, Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore in a delicious role as the over-the-top god-botherer constantly seeking to improve others); and her new allies, including Cassandra, the only Jewish student at American Eagle, Roland (Hilary Faye's crippled brother) and Patrick, the son of Pastor Skip, the school principal. The actors playing these roles are really interesting and effective. Jena Malone, so good in Donnie Darko, is Mary; Patrick Fugit, the teenage journalist in Almost Famous, is an earnest Patrick; and Eva Amurri, Susan Sarandon's eldest, is very good indeed as the troubled rebel Cassandra, sent to the Christian school as a last resort but refusing to conform. If, on the basis of this film, I had to pick one actor from this lot who'll succeed even more than the others - and I'd bet on all three having long careers - it would be Amurri, who manages to portray intelligence as well as sensuality. The fourth musketeer is Macaulay Culkin, making a comeback years after his success as a child star. He shows enough here to suggest that he may even make it back as an adult performer, as Roland. There is something brave about a mainstream movie that is prepared to take on the immoral minority, facing the ire of mealy motor-mouths like Jerry Falwell, in order to make the very obvious statement that, among the religious fundamentalists of the Christian right, there may be the scent of hypocrisy and cant. That it does so entertainingly, and is pretty funny most of the way, despite the overly sentimental ending, is something of a surprise. That it manages to point out the foibles of the extreme wing of Christianity, while asserting the values inherent in Christianity itself, is miraculous. Like Girl Next Door, Saved! is something more than just another high school coming-of-age movie. Perhaps there is some hope for mainstream American film-making for teens based on these examples. Thoroughly recommended.
Historical bent to gender
It is a fact of history that, during the Restoration era (1660-1680), the tradition of English theatre that prevented women appearing on stage, and reserved female roles for a coterie of specialist male actors, was ended. References note that Edward Kynaston was the last male to take the part of a women on the English stage in serious drama. Contemporary chronicler Samuel Pepys makes reference to Kynaston in his Diary, talking of his 'beauty', and of his later appearances after a beating administered by, or on behalf of, aristocrats. From these occurrences Jeffrey Hatcher wrote a stage play, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which viewed the change-over from men to women from the perspective of the last female impersonator. That play has been adapted by its writer to a screenplay and the film directed by Richard Eyre, and result is Stage Beauty, which is a thoroughly entertaining romp. The artifice of the piece is worth noting. The point of view in the film is that of Maria (Claire Danes), Kynaston's dresser, with additional perspective provided by Pepys (Hugh Bonneville). The idea of the perpetual observer and diarist becoming a major character, and influencing the action, adds yet another layer to the piece. We first see Kynaston (Billy Crudup), as a part of the acting company of Thomas Betterton (Tom Wilkinson), in the role of Desdemona, observed by Maria, who has absorbed every aspect of his performance, every nuance and gesture, and now wants to act herself, even though no licensed theatre can employ women. The style of acting employed is very artificial and theatrical, as was the custom until quite recent times. Kynaston's avocation washes over into his life, including his affair with the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin) and his interaction with other nobles, including the foppish, but venomous, Sir Charles Sedley (Richard Griffiths). These characters all come into the orbit of the restored Charles II (Rupert Everett) and his court, which includes a very modern Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper) and the puritan Chancellor Hyde (Edward Fox). As a result, the playing of women on stage by men is outlawed and a generation of actresses is born, of which Maria is the first. The film from works at several levels. There is the historical representations of the people and the era which, allowing for some telescoping of time, appears to be close to what we know of them (allowing for the reservations about Pepys and Nell noted above, and for the over-the-top playing of Smedley by Griffiths, who has concluded that there is an insufficient 'luvie' quotient in the cast and has decided to balance it single-handedly.) There is of course the obvious affect on Kynaston, representing the female impersonators, who are suddenly out of a job; and the equally obvious corollary: there is now a plethora of women without adequate stage training attempting to take the place of the boys who'd been women. Maria, as a representative of these pioneers, feels inadequate, partly because she continues to base her performance of women on the performance of a man pretending to be a woman. Her concerns are exacerbated by continuing romantic feelings for Kynaston, whose sexuality is as confused as his performances. All this plays out in a film that manages to entertain and stimulate, through some predictable pathways, towards a climax that involves a reprise of the Desdemona death scene in which modern naturalistic acting anachronistically replaces the theatrical style. The acting is uniformly good, with Danes and Crudup giving insightful performances and Bonneville being a very effective Pepys. I like young Tanner's Nell Gwynn, even if there was a bit much modern brazen hussy involved. In shining a light on an aspect of history involving women the film does a service, even at the expense of again writing out of the story another interesting sidelight of Restoration theatre, in the form of Aphra Benn, English theatre's first successful female playwright. In the old days we would have called this a 'period piece' but today, I suppose, it would be fitted within that all-purpose rubric, a 'chick flick'. Whatever we call it, Stage Beauty is a very good film with lots to recommend it, including me.
On video
We've caught up with a few films missed at the cinema, or never released there. Matchstick Men is an above average grifter film and I've always loved good films about conmen, or complex heists. They are invariably plot-driven and provide you with something to work out along the way. In this case, Nicolas Cage is the old master and Sam Rockwell his apprentice as they practice the 'long con' with the aid of Cage's daughter (Alison Lohan). The quirky factor here is the Cage is an obsessive-compulsive. Like other films of its kind, Matchstick Men is built around a trick that is revealed towards the end. That the trick is obvious from pretty much the get go is neither here nor there. The fun is the getting there, the dialog and the performances, which are all pretty much top drawer. It carries on a long tradition of con-man movies, which has also been maintained on television in the BBC series, Hustle, with Adrian Lester and Robert Vaughn, shown recently on the ABC. Matchstick Men was directed by Ridley Scott, and is an odd follow-up to other films he's made recently including, Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Gladiator and GI Jane.
Secondhand Lions didn't get theatrical release in Australia and is the sort of quirky movie that might have just been successful had it. Written and directed by Tim McCanlies who'd also done Iron Giant, the film stars Michael Caine and Robert Duvall as a pair of eccentric brothers running a ranch in Texas who have a grand-nephew (Haley Joel Osment) foisted on them for a summer by his irresponsible mother (Kyra Sedgewick). There they learn to like each other while shooting at travelling salesmen and building themselves an airplane and buying a lion and doing all sorts other things which appeal to the 12-year-old in their nephew and in all of us. Osment shows that The Sixth Sense was no fluke and it's hard to think of a film that Caine and Duvall have not improved by their presence. Even though it involves largely two old men and a boy, this is classic 'woman's picture' fare and will appeal to anyone who likes it slightly off-beat.
Kill Bill Vol 2 has much more dialog than its prequel, and much less effective action scenes. It is slightly more believable and slightly less entertaining. And we learn The Bride's real name. Tarantino may have something to contribute as a film-maker but this is not it. Its lack of credibility and depth make it faintly ridiculous. And, of course, it scores negatively on the 'chick flick' meter.
We were overseas when Angels in America was shown on ABC-TV in June. And it has taken me some time to catch up with the mini-series, in essence two extended telemovies which link together to form a coherent narrative. Among the things I found most interesting was how the series shone a light on the lack of response in America to Reaganomics. In the UK, the reactions to Thatcherism were legion. Films as diverse as Brassed Off and The Full Monty addressed its impact; detective series like Prime Suspect and Cracker gave voice to the destruction of elements of the society and the despair that arose from that; dramas like House of Cards, The Politician's Wife and A Very British Coup looked at its impact on politics. But in the USA you wouldn't really have much idea about the swathe cut through society by the inequity and unfairness of the Reagan years, with its concomitant rise in social inequality, unemployment, homelessness, suicide and despair. Angels in America is such a response. The play arrived in the theatres in the early 1990s and has taken over a decade to get to film, and then it relied on the cable network HBO, because Hollywood and the major networks are too scared to tackle the real difficulties of American life. The story is of a small group of Manhattanites, connected by a series of inter-relationships, and responding to the mid-80s AIDS pandemic. The central character is Prior Walter, diagnosed with the disease. His partner, Louis, abandons him and falls in with Joe Pitt, a closeted Mormon, married to Harper and friendly with Roy Cohn, the right-wing demagog who'd been counsel to Joe McCarthy's committee on un-American activities, and whose own closeted gay lifestyle had led to him also contracting AIDS, which in turn leads to his hospitalisation where he is nursed by Belize, Prior's best friend. Mixed into this coterie is a series of fantasy elements: Harper Pitt has drug visions of increasing reality; Prior also has visions, is visited by ancestors who announce the coming of a heavenly messenger, the eponymous angel, who hails Prior as a new prophet; and Cohn is being haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the radical whom he railroaded into the electric chair, allegedly for selling atomic secrets to the USSR. Even if we were to leave aside Tony Kushner's incredibly interesting screenplay, based on his own stage-play, and Mike Nichols' flamboyant direction, there'd still be a heap to talk about in the acting. Headlined are Al Pacino (a relatively unmannered portrayal of Roy Cohn) and Meryl Streep (in a number of roles, including a rabbi, Joe Pitt's mother and Ethel Rosenberg), but they are supported by a brilliant cast. As you would expect, Emma Thompson as the angel and Prior's nurse is convincing in both parts; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Harper, is again amazing. But the four younger members of the cast are also very good indeed, especially Ben Shenkman as the morally cowardly Louis and Justin Kirk as the prophet Prior. Jeffrey Wright is the one survivor of the stage production and his Belize is a sublime creation, especially in the scenes with Louis. He supplements this with a turn as the devil tempting Harper to abandon her unbearable life and move to Antarctica. Patrick Wilson rounds out the main cast as the stoic Joe who learns much about himself but is not prepared to change. There are a couple of nice bits from luvies Michael Gambon and Simon Callow as the prior Priors killed, respectively, by the Black Death and the Plague of 1665. The two plays provide enough material for a dozen good stories. Here the material is used to flesh out a condemnation of the sort of benign (and malign) neglect with which AIDS was met in the US in its early years and shines a spotlight on the burden borne by those who needed to care for those afflicted and who had to watch them die. Yet, at the end, there is, if anything, a message of hope in the continued loyalty of friends and in the sympathy and empathy found in a couple of women, Harper Pitt and her mother-in-law Hannah. And we get to see Roy Cohn die a horrible and painful death, much to Ethel's amusement - a truly cathartic moment. This is the sort of television of which there should be much more. And we should not have to rely continuously on HBO (and Channel 4 in the UK and the ABC in Australia) to be the sole providers of such quality.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]