This project, on the other hand, is fascinating. Starting in 2009, Star Wars fans around the world began a shot-for-shot recreation of the movie, and the finished project is viewable here:

STAR WARS UNCUT – The Fan Version

As experimental video projects go, this is incredibly fantastic, with extra kudos to editor  Aaron Valdez (http://www.aaronvaldez.com) who must have sifted through unknowable piles of footage of wildly varying quality to craft this. Paper hats, action figures, feminist Darth Vaders, CGI, legos and tin foil all run together into a massive labor of love. The genuine ingenuity and occasional re-invention will suck you in and turn a thirty second curiosity-glance into five minutes of “how are they going to accomplish the next scene.”

Well done, gentlemen. Well done.
 

At a running time of two hours and forty minutes, it lasts about as long as I lasted reading the book. My bookmark still sits squeezed in between pages 340 and 341, at the start of chapter 17, where I finally gave up slogging through the Pynchon-ian digressions as I waited for the story to move forward. Pulp fiction is supposed to be lurid; over-salted, fat-filled cheeseburger narratives that leave a grease stain as they roll down your gullet. The story has to keep moving, it’s the basic commandment of the genre. Stieg Larsson’s novel instead flails about like a nervous grad student, so terrified of leaving out a critical fact he goes out of his way to include everything he’s ever learned about a subject. It’s tiresome and badly written, which never stopped his airport rack predecessors Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Patterson, and Dan Brown from achieving airborne omnipresence and the inevitable movie treatment as well.

The Swedes did it first. The 2009 version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (available on Netflix streaming) gets it right. The script especially was a thing of beauty, bursting with narrative energy; moving with bold and economic strokes that cranked out a satisfying, lurid yarn.

Fincher’s adaptation seems to have almost the same script (would love to see some internet kiddie split-screen the two movies and watch how the playback synchronizes), but he approaches the material with heavy hands and leaden feet. Fincher is a meticulous craftsman, but his approach is like Joel Robuchon recreating a meal at McDonalds, turning big, juicy bites of pulp into tiny morsels of Very Important Filmmaking. There’s a very expensive technical sheen on everything in sight, but the tastiest part of the whole endeavor is the amuse-bouche of the glossy black title sequence. The rest of the film rolls by in blurred succession of flavorless morsels that wears out its welcome long before anything delicious happens.

The story, for Swede-ophodes or my short-tempered brethren who never opened the books, revolves around a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomquist, hired by a Swedish oligarch, Henrik Vanger, to investigate his missing niece. The titular girl is a pierced, bisexual goth hacker who was much less of a cliché when the books were written pre-2004. After a reciprocal pair of anal rapes, she joins forces with our intrepid journalist to hunt down a serial killer. Despite the marketing promises of lurid, twisted sex, the most compelling parts of the story turn out not to be the notorious perversions, but the long trips to the library and hours spent flipping through photo archives.

If you’re going to strip the fun out of the narrative, as Fincher does here, you need to replace it with some substance, which he does not. Almost all of the film is pro forma filmmaking, operating as if the collective memory of a million pages turned en route from Denver to Chicago will fill the empty spaces with entertainment. For a story that is more timely now than when it was first released, this is a fatal misstep.

The narrative DNA is a revenge fantasy of the little guy bringing down the 1%, with a hefty dose of religious zealotry and casual hipster bisexuality mixed in for a cheery timelessness. In the era of “Occupy That”, every titan of industry is only a few moustache hairs away from tying a helpless damsel to the train tracks, replacing the Russians and generically turbaned terrorists as cinema’s favored bad guys.

Here, Fincher ignores that dynamic almost entirely. The sharpest edges are the perfectly smooth counter tops in Martin Vanger’s ultra-modern home. (Much of the film, with it’s square panes of glass and smooth lines feels lifted from Nolan’s tedious paean to architectural porn, Inception, so much so that I expected to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s team rappelling down a mountainside in the background on numerous occasions.) Whether it’s from laziness or compulsive obedience to the novel, ice-cold affiliations with the Nazi party hardly quicken the blood. There’s a lonely flash of life in the way a matriarch of the Vanger clan dismisses our proletarian journalist from a hospital waiting room, with her words rolling off an acid tongue sharpened from a lifetime of unearned privilege, that leaves you longing for more.

There must be an ancient Greek word for the boredom that comes from over-stimulation. Until the scholars turn up something better, Fincherism will have to do. Or perhaps Bay-ism, though at least Bay is compulsive about providing adrenalin jolts, even if it is by any shameful means necessary. Fincher flashcards images of symmetrical beauty one after the other, and it takes him over two hours to stumble across a single one that approaches memorable. Instead, he moves the story along at a relentless pace, rushing at every turn, but all his efforts generate negative results. He takes five edits to get Blomquist, played by the doughy cheeks of Daniel Craig, off a train.

1. Close-up of the “Hedestad” station sign.

2. Wide shot of the train pulling in.

3. Medium shot of Blomquist de-training.

4. Close-up shot of Blomquist for two seconds, then

5. Back to the medium shot as he keeps walking.

The frantic display of coverage adds nothing to the story; the snare-drum snaps of editing serving only as an uptempo metronome, rudely pushing the story along like an impatient dinner date with an early curfew. If the worry or caution in Blomquist’s blue eyes are so important, lingering on them for a pair of seconds is not a substantial enough time to let it register. The sequence could easily have been done with three shots, and a calmer hand might have opted to linger on the close-up of Daniel Craig’s icy blue eyes, and opted out of the sterile traveling shots that follow.

But that’s not Fincher’s style. Instead he prefers to slip through machined, calibrated images like an overstimulated slide show. The only imperative in the story is a rush to get to the next page by any means necessary. The characters are motivated by arbitrary expedience, stumbling through the chilly frames with passions so cool and character so bland that they might be mistaken for another part of the landscape, which, in many senses is all they are. In too many crucial ways, Fincher reduces his characters to two-dimensional ciphers, props to be photographed instead of heroes to be cheered.

Pairing the icy Fincher with material this cold is both lazy thinking and a recipe for disaster. Fincher brings nothing new to the table, except a surfeit of style. I spent a good deal of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wanting to know what Lars Von Trier might have brought to the film instead.

After spending much of the last month contemplating Lars Von Trier’s fantastically compelling Melancholia, with it’s damaged heroine, unchecked contempt for the past, and misogyny so reckless it becomes empowering, I left the theater desperately wanting to see his version of Larsson’s story.

***

As a final PS, this blogger has a fascinating feminist take on the differences between the Swedish and American incarnations of Lisbeth Salander. She is so spot on that even addressing the issue here felt redundant. Very worthwhile, and thought provoking reading.

http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/65403546.html

The first sign of trouble this season: One of these things is not like the other. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Chicago. Miami. New York City. Las Vegas. Washington D.C. Texas.

Did you spot it? Let me give you a hint, it’s the one that’s NOT A CITY. It’s that massive 2nd tier state with a soon to be failing economy that leaps out at you. Did you think we wouldn’t notice that  names like “Dallas” or “Houston” or “San Antonio” seem to be conspicuously missing?

Do you know why they’re missing?  Because nobody associates any part of Texas with food. The state dish is admittedly delicious BBQ, but it’s best served behind a gas station on a plastic tray, with half a loaf of Wonder Bread as a chaser. The unofficial motto is “everything’s bigger in Texas.” Note carefully that it’s not “everything’s BETTER in Texas”, just bigger. When it comes to culture, Texas makes Donald Trump look classy. Nobody moves to Texas looking for any kind of cutting-edge cultural experience unless you’re in Austin, the city who’s mantra is “Please ignore the map because we’re really not a part of Texas.” On the national stage, Texas is mostly known for choking – whether it’s Tony Romo under pressure or George W. Bush eating a pretzel. This is the food culture you want to tap into?

OK, I get it. You’re looking to spread your wings and explore, but let’s be serious. Top Chef should be like the Super Bowl. All you have to do is rotate through the same three or four base cities (NY, LA, SF, and because they have Grant Achatz, Chicago) and call it a day. If you want to put Padma in chaps, then import a cowboy. If you want a change-up, try New Orleans. You can’t justify San Antonio as a point of culinary interest any more than you could justify Denver, Detroit, or Dallas.

Second: The two opening “audition” episodes might be the lowest point in series history. It’s clear that the 150 chefs you’ve featured to date have pretty much exhausted the talent pool of undiscovered A-list, TV friendly chefs. You don’t need to advertise that by exposing us to 100 more C-list chefs who don’t stand a chance of making the casting cut. Your job – your very raison d’etre as producers – is to find, recruit, and choose 15 interesting chefs and test their endurance for my amusement. Staging a repetitive, American Idol style auditioning cook-off is the antithesis of what makes your show interesting.

Beyond that, the judging panel methodology of American Idol does not work for you. On Idol, for better or worse, I can hear what is reasonably close to what the judges are hearing. It’s a little interesting because I’m working with the same information that they have. On Top Chef, I have nothing to work with. I can’t smell or taste the plates, I’m experiencing it vicariously through your judges. This is not a show that invites “play along at home”. This is a show about pressure, personality and imagination. Forcing Tom, Padma, and some random schmuck to play Simon, Paula, and some random schmuck is embarrassing and dramatically uninteresting.

Either a chef is good enough for Top Chef, or they’re not. If you want to show me some cocky young buck or tear-jerking sob story, then cast them. I know that if you’re focusing on some interesting story in those opening episodes that they’re just going to get cut. If they’re interesting and make it, you’ll save their story for when the bullets go live. If they’re interesting but don’t make it, you’re going to squeeze that out while you can. (And if they’re uninteresting, as many of them are, why are you showing me at all?)

Just do your job, Top Chef. Cast the best you can, put them under pressure in the kitchen somewhere and see who rises to the challenge.

Production values are slipping, too. The green screen for the interviews have hit a nadir at many points so far this season. For the uninitiated, those beautifully composed interview shots that comprise the bulk of the show are usually shot in a cramped room behind the set with the chef sitting in front of a green sheet like they’re posing for a portrait at Sears. Post-production magic swaps out the green screen and replaces it with a gorgeous wall ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. There’s no smooth way to say this, but this is Hollywood 101 at this point, and Top Chef has done a technically poor job of it. The process is called “keying”, and if you look at the Heavy Girl With Disheveled Hair, you can see that all the detail has been keyed out of that lesbian rat’s nest on her head. That’s kind of forgivable because fine threads of hair are tough to key out, but pulling a bad key on Old Bald And Bitter Chef is inexcusable on a technical level.

And tell the people who shoot the food inserts to lay off the rack focus. Yes, the crew must be very excited by the new tilt-shift lens, but the same rack focus on 16 consecutive plates of food is tiresome. While you’re at it, smack the editor who cut those in, too. There must be something on a slider you could alternate with.

You know how I can tell this season is off? Tom Colicchio can’t be bothered to hide it. He’s never suffered bad chefs lightly, but making him send one contestant home in the middle of the first challenge was embarrassing – both to him, the show, and the chef. Watching the quinceanera episode, until the eating started he couldn’t be bothered to wipe that condescending look off his face.  There were at least five shots of him in the episode last night where he was clearly thinking: ”Who thought this was a good idea? What the hell is this idiotic party I’m stuck at? Where the hell is the nearest decent restaurant? When can I go back to see my kids? Why the fuck am I here?”

That’s the only real saving grace so far this season – Tom’s expertise and intolerance of poor cooking gives Top Chef enough gravity to hold together when the show threatens to go Real Housewives. His judgments are the reason to keep watching, and when he looks like he’s checked out, the show is in deep trouble.

Look, Top Chef, it’s first-world problems to keep a successful and beloved show running. But learn from those who have failed before you, and accept your place in the world. Nobody wants to see a 100 yard dash determine who runs The Amazing Race. Stick to what you do best – finding interesting chefs, put them under extreme pressure, and let us watch them rise or fall.

Your mind is the scene of the crime. Too bad the crime is insufferable boredom.

The biggest deception of Inception is the perception that it’s an exception to the infection of abomination that is the summer movie-going season. If this glib conjugation is a cause for celebration, then you might find elation in the pretension

If, however, you find that paragraph a pointless simulation of masturbation, then congratulations, because your perceptions are most astute. Trying to find substance in Inception is as difficult as explaining one of your dreams to a complete stranger. It would take an exceptionally long time explain why your high school gym teacher running laps with your boss in your childhood living room is so emotionally perplexing. You can talk until you’re blue in the face, and you’ll only succeed in boring your companion to tears.

Leonardo DiCaprio recycles his pinched-face squint from Shutter Island as Cobb, the leader of a high-tech gang of thieves who can invade your dreams to steal your innermost thoughts. The jobs have been growing progressively more dangerous, as a nasty secret deep in Cobb’s unconscious threatens to overwhelm the dream worlds his crews must work in. His team are a bunch of blank-faced automatons of the model that populate dreams – the ethnic guy, the old guy, and the slicked back hair of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The flat, low-contrast cinematography is just as featureless, doing nothing to differentiate between dreams and reality while robbing both worlds of any sense of wonder.

Who's who in "Inception"? Abandon all Hope, ye who would differentiate here.

See More Inception Publicity Still at IGN.com

After a job goes horribly wrong, Cobb gets the ultimatum that no cinematic thief can refuse – one last job that will wipe the slate clean and let him leave the criminal life behind. His enigmatically wealthy sponsor wants Cobb to plant an idea in the mind of a business rival, however the dream-world rules mean that such a task is impossible.

To accomplish the impossible first requires a half-hour of exposition. Then Cobb recruits Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young architectural student who needs to wander around aimlessly, asking questions to clarify the first round of exposition. Once she seems to understand the rules of dream construction, the film tasks her with standing around wide-eyed to ask more questions because once the actual action begins, nothing that she learned is ever used again. Then most of the exposition is rendered moot because there’s an entirely different set of rules and dangers that they must navigate once the bullets start flying. All this so Cobb can return home to some children he can’t remember and a multi-billionaire can get a global monopoly in some industry that doesn’t seem to matter.

Dreams are heady stuff for cinema, but they remain largely the province of esoteric artists like Lynch and Kubrick. True dreams are too personal and inexplicable for a medium as crass as the summer blockbuster. Christopher Nolan isn’t an artist, he’s a mechanic. For a movie set inside layers of dreams, there’s barely a recognizable human emotion on display, and never a pause to consider the connection between dreams and reality. When Cobb and Ariadne take one of their expository wanders through the Parisian streets of Cobb’s subconscious, Nolan has a scene that is comprised of these loaded philosophical concepts:

* Ariadne, the Greek goddess of myth who helped Theseus escape the labyrinth of the Minotaur.

* The process of dreaming.

* Physical manifestations of Cobb’s subconscious

* The infinite self-reflection of a hall of mirrors.

A director with the capacity for wonder could have taken half of those elements and created a moment of contemplation. A skilled director would have posed a question that makes the audience wonder about their own existence. Nolan turns the moment into a pointless bit of exposition, and a plot device to walk Cobb and Ariadne from point A to point B. Then after demonstrating her grasp of world-bending abilities, she’s called on to do nothing more complex then designing the lobby bar of a W hotel.

It’s a navel-gazing hall of mirrors, only they’re looking at nothing. Nolan doesn’t have anything to say, and he wraps his hollow, clockwork trickery around a core of emptiness. There’s more philosophy to be found in dismantling a cheap watch, because even at a dead stop, the cheap watch can be bothered to tell you the time twice a day.

A much more appropriate reference of Greek myth is Narcissus – the hunter who grew so enamored of his own image that he ignored the rest of the world until he wasted away. Right from the get-go, Inception confuses complexity with emotionally engaging mystery. In the first five minutes, Cobb washes up on a beach, sees some mysterious kids, then is escorted into a mysterious room where he eats mysterious gruel while an old man mumbles something mysterious about a mysterious man he remembers from a mysterious adventure many years ago while a mysterious top spins. Then the film arbitrarily leaps to the same mysterious fortress, only at a different time where more mysterious stuff happens. Then more mysterious stuff happens.

Compare the tedium of Inception to the equally complicated exposition of The Matrix. In between the complicated bits of setup, The Matrix manages to deploy shock and awe to engage the audience. The bullet time acrobatics of Trinity’s first astonishing leap pulls the audience in closer, creating a sense of wonder at seeing the impossible come to life. The best Inception can muster are cryptic mumbles about the inexplicable, and a shadowy silhouette of Cobb as water floods a room.

Inception isn’t a movie about dreams, it’s a movie about paradoxes. It’s overlong but rushed. It’s too loud, but constantly mumbling. It’s constructed with architectural precision, but narratively shapeless. It’s about worlds nested within worlds, but spatially incoherent. Perhaps the biggest paradox is that it’s a $200 million dollar movie that is built like a heavyweight but evaporates from memory exactly like a dream.

]]> http://goodisthenewbad.com/review-inception-326.htm/feed 5 http://goodisthenewbad.com/review-the-white-ribbon-314.htm http://goodisthenewbad.com/review-the-white-ribbon-314.htm#comments Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:13:46 +0000 Jeffrey Williams http://www.goodisthenewbad.com/?p=314 Das Weisse Band, with the subtitle “In which we shall discuss the glorious enlightenment that a director of cinema shall bequeath unto an audience]]> I shall title this review Das Weisse Band, with the subtitle “In which we shall discuss the glorious enlightenment that a director of cinema shall bequeath unto an audience, and the manner in which said audience shall receive that most holy golden gift, even if it shall be locked up tightly and largely withheld in any case.”

Das Weisse Band, or as it is grudgingly known in English The White Ribbon is the 2009 Palme D’Or winning film by Michael Haneke, an Austrian filmmaker who’s most notable leitmotif is hostility toward the audience. Whether or not you like his films will boil down to your position on that issue, and quite honestly, if you think that going to the movies should involve some glimmer of entertainment, then stop reading now. Michael Haneke despises you and your gluttonous, popcorn-guzzling ways. If you have a quarrelsome streak, and have a fondness for arguing with the inexplicable, then you’ve just found your Citizen Kane.

The White Ribbon is set in a small Austrian village on the eve of World War I. A storm is coming, and it appears to begin with a malicious prank. The town doctor thrown from his horse when it gallops into a wire strung across the path. The doctor is thrown off and shatters his collarbone, and the close-knit town can find no motive or suspects. Days later, an accident in the mill begins to reinforce the suspicions and paranoia. Gradually, the idyllic life becomes routinely shattered with inexplicable acts of violence and soon everyone in town – from the Baron and the pastor, to the doctor and the farm workers – are all caught in a growing cloud of darkness.

Who among the villagers is responsible for these deeds? Who is covering them up? Haneke won’t answer those questions, and the film’s power is in its stern refusal to even address them. Evil isn’t the product of a single, discernable event, Haneke seems to be saying, it’s merely part of a grand cycle that passes from generation to generation. And once it takes root, it’s impossible to weed out.

The stark black and white cinematography adds to the air of vaguely defined menace that suffuses the village. The film was originally shot in color and converted to black and white in post-production, which, as many critics have noted, seems to have drained the film of any glimmer of hope. The crisp focus and blown-out highlights film each frame with intense detail and complete opacity. It is meticulous cinematography, every frame is precisely calibrated. The glacial tempo is strictly regulated and the soundtrack is painfully dry.

Critics have been enraptured by the film, because it’s the kind of film that appeals almost exclusively to critics. Read Ebert’s thoughts here. Anthony Lane blends a review with a tongue-bath of a profile of Haneke, and thoroughly slobbers over both (New Yorker, October 5, 2009; subscription required).

In Lane’s article, one of the early quotes from Haneke seems to sum up his position as an artist:

“I hate the smell of popcorn. I rarely go to the cinema… The spectators seem to have lost respect for the film.”

A profile in the New York Times magazine for his 2008 film Funny Games reinforces that.

“I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”

Stay classy, Michael Haneke. His work, however, is an interesting paradox. Countless art school dropouts have attempted to “rape the audience” with their work, but Haneke is one of the few who succeeds in making people ask for it. His films tease and beguile, luring you in with the promise of catharsis and then torturously refuse to deliver. Yet, as audience raping goes, Haneke does a far better and more thorough job than verzogener Fratz like Darren Aronofsky.

Haneke gets away with it because is an exquisite craftsman as a director. His work has a technically precise feel that clutches you by the throat even when the film is meandering through a sunny field. Even his admirers will admit his films are profoundly uncomfortable to sit through, and like any exercise in masochism, it forces to you reflect upon why you’ve just done that to yourself.

If you want answers, this is not a movie for you. The White Ribbon won’t even bother to answer your questions with other questions. Try to probe its mysteries and the film would laugh at your efforts, if it deigned to notice you at all.

Perhaps the film is a Zen koan – a riddle designed to probe the incomprehensible. As an audience member, I found The White Ribbon insulting and tedious. As a critic, I found it tiresome and opaque. Wearing either hat, I wouldn’t recommend that anybody go to see it. But whether it’s a study in arrogance, pomposity, or mundane belligerence, anybody who goes to movies to not enjoy them should make extra effort to seek this out.

With Robert DeNiro as his muse, Scorsese crafted cinematic classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. With DiCaprio, he’s delivered the abstruse and turgid train wrecks Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, and now, Shutter Island. Simultaneously noisy and tiresome, the film expends so much energy trying to conceal its central gimmick that it spirals out of control. And without any real point of focus, all the sturm und drang dissipates like a whisper in a hurricane.

From the opening frames, where a ferry slowly drifts out of an impossibly opaque fog bank, the film announces its agenda to deliberately withhold the bigger picture. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing the film decides to withhold, because the rest of the film is overstuffed with a collection of thrown-together noir movie cliches.

Leonardo DiCaprio scrunches his face into knots to play Teddy Daniels, a man who constantly insists that he is a United States Marshall. He arrives on Shutter Island with a brand new partner to investigate the escape of a prisoner while, naturally, a hurricane is bearing down on the island. The hospital is run by the mysterious Dr. Cawling, played by the shaven head of Ben Kingsley. When Max Von Sydow shows up as a German doctor, the alarm bells of suspicion turn into red flags of absurdity. Von Sydow couldn’t appear benevolent if he walked onscreen carrying a bouquet of roses, surrounded by animated bluebirds.

The escaped prisoner plot line quickly takes a back seat to implications of nefarious conspiracies, personal vengeance, and Nazi-science experiment surgeries. The facility on Shutter Island isn’t the only one with a hidden agenda. Teddy, it turns out, believes the man who killed his wife has been hidden away in the bowels of the hospital, and he’s on an unofficial mission to find him. It also comes as no surprise to learn that Teddy is a haunted man, plagued by visions of his dead wife and his experiences in World War II. As the investigation plods onward, Teddy devolves into a hospital orderly, an inmate, and a fugitive.

Unfortunately, the trailer tips off almost all of the plot, and every scene carries the scent of suspicion. Misdirection hangs in the air like a thick fog, and nothing that we can actually see is engaging on its own, semi-obscured terms. The mysterious flashbacks are inexplicably psychedelic, and the powers-that-be on the island are improbably obscure. As the incongruities mount, that sense of withholding becomes fatally distracting. When Teddy has a crucial confrontation with a prisoner, you can’t help but wonder which cliché will ultimately explain everything. Is it the Jacob’s Ladder purgatory? The Angel Heart descent into hell? The sinister conspiracy that ensnares Teddy a la Arlington Road?

The problem with Shutter Island is that it violates the trust between the audience and the storyteller. Movies that have a successful twist have to operate on two levels. With or without knowledge of the bigger picture, every scene has to make sense both ways. For all the logistical nonsense of Fight Club and solemn misdirection of The Sixth Sense, the first two acts of both films are comprehensible and emotionally engaging on their own. By the time the narrative is stood sideways, it’s an enhancement, not a relief. On Shutter Island, the director is part of the subterfuge. The mystery doesn’t come from the telling, it comes from the certainty that the filmmakers are withholding some crucial parts of the story.

Scorsese’s hallmark has always been intense realism, so the opportunity to squander an epic budget on psychedelic elements must have been attractive. It’s hard to imagine another film that would allow him to stage the graphic concentration camp shootout that is one of the best executed (pun intended) visuals in the film. The pretentious and CGI heavy images of fire and water homage European surrealism, and the extended flashback that caps Teddy’s story feels like it could have been lifted from an unseen Bergman work.

All that firepower is wasted on a film that perversely decrescendos instead of climaxing. Whatever cinema-historical references Scorsese set out to homage are best left uncelebrated. Perhaps an upcoming filmmaker working on a tight budget could have made a smart, claustrophobic thriller out of this material. Sadly, Scorsese and his unchecked ambitions have little to offer beyond unnecessary obscurity.

Jack Bauer, at the start of season 1

Consider this – Jack Bauer has served CTU under five different presidents: the guy before David Palmer, David Palmer, Wayne Palmer, Charles Logan, and Alison Taylor.  He’s faked his own death, gotten hooked on heroin, and served time in a Chinese prison.

From ESPN’s loquacious Gregg Easterbrook, one of his loyal readers has pulled together this Bauer timeline:

I noted that on “24,” Jack Bauer saves critical minutes by traveling during commercials. Kevin Woods of Santa Rosa, Calif., provides further details on time dilation in the series: “In the first season, in 2001, Jack was a highly successful federal agent with a 15-year-old daughter. Although Jack’ age was never stated, he had to be at least 40. He was a college graduate who had received his master’s in criminology, then joined the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of captain in the prestigious Delta Squad. After the Army, he worked for Los Angeles SWAT team, then joined the CIA in its clandestine wing. After this, he was recruited to the CTU, the mysterious agency where Jack toils when the series begins. Jack had to be 40 when the series began.

“Let’s assume 43. Here is where the time line gets tough. Season 2 was 18 months after season 1, making Jack 44-45. Season 3 was three years after season 2, making Jack about 47-48. Season 4 was 18 months after season 3, making Jack about 50. Season 5 was 18 months after season 4, making Jack about 52. Season 6 was 20 months after season 5, making Jack about 54. 24-Redemption, a two-hour movie that supposedly tied things together, was four years after season 6, making Jack about 58. Season 7, happening shortly after Redemption, still has Jack at around 58. Season 8, looks to be two-three years after season 8, because Jack's grand-daughter is seen having conversations with him, making Jack around 60 years [old]. He's quite spry for 60! Also, add up the years and it is now 2014 in the series. Maybe that explains all the CTU super-technology that does not seem to exist in our reality.”

That's after 20 years of living right.

Now Mr. Woods of Santa Rosa is playing a little loose with the rounding up, and not knowing Jack Bauer’s birthday it’s tough to be precise. However, even with tightening up the estimates, Jack Bauer is 58 years old. May we all be so healthy on the edge of 60.

via Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings were brought down by Favre’s fatal flaw – ESPN.