William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

"A lovely piece of hardware"

"I predict the lovely couple here will be leaving any minute now," Frank says to Robot as they case a joint they mean to rob, the house of a obnoxious, wealthy young couple.

"I don't think so, Frank," Robot says, watching with what would appear to be perfectly undistracted attention. Frank patters on.

Within a minute, the couple do, indeed, get up to leave the house. "Like I thought," Frank says.

"Impressive. I missed the pattern," Robot concedes, it dawning on him that planning a heist is doing more to improve Frank's mental health than nutrition, exercise and conventional games.

"That's right," Frank says. "The human brain. Lovely piece of hardware."

In many ways, Robot and Frank is a formulaic movie. Most of the characters are types and not really needed in the film. But the chemistry between Frank Langella and Peter Sarsgaard, playing the voice of Robot, that is really special. Excellent performances.

Vertigo San Francisco locations 55 and a half years on

Last week Helen and I hired Jesse Warr to give us a private tour of key, in-city locations used in the filming of Vertigo, the Hitchcock classic starring Kim Novak and James Stewart. It was a great tour, and we took plenty of photos.

When I next screen the film, no doubt I'll keep an eye out for screenshots I can pull to do some side by side comparisons. but I'll share some notes now on the pictures we took last week. If you don't recall the names of the main characters, just remember that Madeline was played by Kim Novak, and Scottie by James Stewart.

This first picture is of Madeline's apartment on the northeast corner of Sacramento and Mason Streets. This looks pretty much just like it did in the movie. I took some shots that are clear of the car's window frame, but decided to use this one, with the shadow of the frame intruding, because it suggests a Scottie-like point of view.

And here's the facade of Mission Dolores, which I understand to be the oldest structure in San Francisco, spared the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It also look very recognizable from the movie, though the light on the day of our tour was very different. I'd attribute that to the difference between the spring, April light of our tour from the fall, September or October light from the location filming in 1957, but, I've read that Hitchcock used some pretty heavy duty filters in shooting around Mission Dolores, so, maybe Hitchock bent the same light to get the mood he wanted.

Speaking of contorting light, I used one of those silly, in-app "effects" to manipulate this shot from inside the chapel, to show the door from which Madeline leaves to go into the graveyard.

The graveyard, you can convince yourself is the same location, but it's very hard to reconstruct any of the sight lines from the graveyard scenes in the movie. Note the redwood in the center. Unless I'm mistaken, that tree was not in the graveyard when the scene was shot in 1957. That means that big tree is less than 55 years old.

Next is the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. The facade here seems the same but there's the reminder, too, of course, that laws and security protocols have changed. You can't quite casually sidle your car up to the curb at major landmarks anymore (as I think Madeline and/or Scottie do before we follow Madeline inside; this is where she views the portrait of Carlotta).

Now here's the money shot: the spot at Fort Point where Madeline goes into where the San Francisco Bay meets the Golden Gait Strait and Scottie dives in to fish her out. To come to this location is to commune with a place that is unmistakeable, gorgeous, and timeless. The light must in some sense be always the same here. I don't think you can see the Golden Gate Bridge without thinking of Vertigo, and vice versa.

I'll sign off for now with an anti-climatic picture and the disappointing news that Scottie's apartment on Lombard Street has been grossly defaced. It is almost unrecognizable. "Although the door has been repainted, the entrance is easily recognizable save for a few small changes to the patio," Wikipedia reports in notes on Vertigo locations. "The doorbell and the mailbox, which Madeleine uses to deliver a note to Scottie, are exactly the same as they were in the film." But that is no longer true. If I remember correctly, our guide Jesse told us the defacement has occured within the last 6 months or so.

Best actor

I'm glad Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar this year for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln.

I'm going to see the movie again and I hope so many other people will, that Hollywood titans at the top of their craft will make more movies rooted in American history.

Whether or not Day-Lewis captured the essence of how Lincoln, the human being, projected himself in real life, he did conceive and bring forth a very compelling interpretation that makes Lincoln less God-like, and all the more remarkable. A performance like that makes what Lincoln said, and what you read about him, more accessible.

Also gratifying to see the movie won the award for best production design. There was more creativity to the movie in that regard than you find in the magical fantasy movies or cartoons.

My favorite moment in the movie, now with the distance of 3+ months from first viewing, is when Lincoln bends down to tend the fire in a fireplace in a small room in the White House, while he is talking things over with William Seward, played by David Strathairn.

Here's my initial review of Lincoln, the movie. And here's my treatment of a Lincoln-inspired movie-to-be, about a singular moment in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, as told by Edmund Morris.

Theodore Roosevelt, the movie

The next story I want to see Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and their friends assemble for the big screen is the story of how a young, vigorous US president busted Victorian industrial and financial monopolies and opened the gate to the American Century.

As with Lincoln, the movie, you wouldn't want to cover the president's entire life, nor even follow the chronology of his administration.

Instead, you'd find dramatic, emblematic incidents to express themes. You'd look to tell an intimate story with flesh and blood characters grappling in drawing rooms, railroad cars and horse-drawn carriages.

One place to begin might be the scene Edmund Morris treats in his biography, Theodore Rex, when barons of railroad, coal and finance are called by the President to Washington DC to meet with a single, mysterious, charismatic and revolutionary coal miner union leader.

The barons are not accustomed to being summoned. But they know attendance is not optional. The President of the United States will personally mediate.

Entourages do not assemble at the White House. The White House is undergoing restoration (subtext: Roosevelt is junking the dross and dowdy affects of the Victorian-era and dressing the set for a modern, imperial American era). Instead, the meeting takes place at a nearby townhouse where Roosevelt - who despite being arguably the most determined, aggressive and hard-working person ever to hold the office, won't let the presidency interfere with his camping, hunting and other wilderness forays both in the West and the deep South - is temporarily confined to a wheelchair, recovering from surgery to an injured leg.

As Morris relays the affair, reporters position themselves across the street from the townhouse, where they can peer into the second floor windows and make out the tophats of the seated barons and, by turns, their faces, when they stand to make a point or affect offense.

Roosevelt, necessarily seated because of his injury, cannot be seen from the street. The President has cannily arranged to direct the attention of the press to the wizards of capitalism.

The robber barons are dismissed by the President sooner than anyone had expected, and one by one they descend the townhouse stoop. The journalists rush across the street to try to provoke ill-considered statements. As the bearded gentlemen gambol inefficiently into their carriages, they seem perplexed and suddenly older.

One journalist, however, instinctively holds her place across the street. She sees that the union leader is standing, lingering, listening.

Why has the President retained him alone after dismissing the capitalists?

The President stands! What is Theodore Roosevelt saying as he pushes his thumb into the chest of the anguished looking union leader?

You get the idea. It would be awesome.

Cinema December

After a long *meh* spell, suddenly there's a bounty of theatrical releases my two youngest kids and I want to see.

Now Lincoln, that we attended right away, opening weekend. We took my fiance and my youngest son's girlfriend, too. What a treasure, a gift from talented, experienced Hollywood craftspersons. Lincoln hands you an imaginative key that helps you decode some of the mystery enveloping one of our greatest presidents, in a way not that unlike how Ron Chernow's recently study, Washington, A Life, in a different medium, a written biography, personalizes another.

This afternoon we're heading out - finally - to see Flight, the new Denzel movie. We believe Denzel Washington to be the sole contemporary star who merits a place among the silver screen's all-time first order, on a level with legendary personalities like Cary Grant, James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It's worth seeing anything Denzel Washington does, just to watch him chew up the scenery.

The other new movies we want to see are the one about Hitchcock filming Psycho, and the one where Bill Murray plays a fun loving FDR, showing stuffy English monarchs how to cut loose on a country estate, American style.

It can be difficult to schedule a time all three of us are free. So it remains to be seen whether we will manage to see the latter two.

One date is firm. We plan to see The Hobbit, for the return of Ian McKellen in the role he was born to play, Gandalf, on Christmas Day. We are trying to persuade number one son and his bride to join us.

Lincoln

There are so, so many things I love about the Lincoln movie, I hardly know where to begin.

It's an artfully realized parable not just about seizing but about having the imagination to shape opportunity. We watch Lincoln brood, argue, lobby and demand, propelled by the conviction that a lame duck Congress and the public perception of military necessity represents the only possible moment to get the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives.

Lincoln is at the center of power, but keeps no entourage. 

In one scene, at the War Department, bustling with activity and frustration as the news of the awful price of a military victory is telegraphed in from the field, the President suddenly declares himself, having been seated inconspicuously at a clerk's cubicle for some time.

The President has a story to tell.

The Secretary of War, mortified at the cost in lives of an incomplete victory, can't abide the surprise of Lincoln's presence and quits the room. "Dear God, not another story, I can't bear to hear another story," he shouts (or something to that effect) as he leaves.

Lincoln waits a beat, and then proceeds to tell a funny story about how Ethan Allen got the better of an English lord over the latter's placement in an outhouse of a portrait of George Washington. "It is most appropriately hung," Lincoln quotes Allen as saying. "Nothing makes the British shit like the sight of George Washington."

Lincoln has to move freely and to carry his own comic relief or the stresses will overtake him.

You see Lincoln draw what today we call "boundaries" with his wife and with his oldest son, also to preserve his capability to act decisively for the nation. It's almost unbelievable, how good Daniel Day-Lewis is at letting you see the wheels turn inside a character.

I'll stop for now. I definitely want to screen this movie again. You should see it. It's a very timely movie.

The Sacred, the Profane, the Hollywood

So MGM has spent good money in post-production to turn the fictional invaders of America from Chinese soldiers to North Korean soldiers. The project, >Red Dawn<, is a remake of a film from the 1980s. In that initial version, the invaders were Soviet.

Reactions I've heard to this news border on the incredulous, as though there were artistic integrity at stake, or else verisimilitude. The Chinese could muster enough bodies and energy to occupy America from sea to shining sea, but not the relatively sparse, malnourished populace of the northern half of the Korean peninsula?

Isn't this just good business. Why bypass the chance to distribute the film in China; why not, instead, write off the least viable communist theater-going market?

But if it's courage the armchair movie moguls, tweeting from their home theaters, want from Hollywood, here's my list of suggestions for more worthy sacrifices of business sense for the sake of creative tension.

1. Remake >The Ides of March<, with George Clooney reprising his role as a psychopathic governor running for President, only this time make him a Mitt Romney Republican instead of a George Clooney progressive.

2. Remake >Michael Clayton<, only this time make the corrupt company a charismatic personality-driven tech behemoth that makes shiny consumer gadgets that mesmerize and addict, instead of a faceless corporate chemical company. It's too simple and preordained that a chemical company will poison schoolchildren. Of course it will. You have to be Julie Roberts and Albert Finney (in >Erin Brokovich<) to make that premise suspenseful.

3. Remake whatever that reality show is about a contemporary ad agency, the one the cable network AMC is pushing and running after >Mad Men< airs. Only this time, have the employees watch a season or two of >Mad Men< on DVD, realize they are in the wrong decade, and hang it up to teach high school history in a suburb or brew beer in a logging town on the Olympic peninsula.