{ 2 bars + 3 stars }

If you grew up in the 1980s as I did you probably remember watching on a random Saturday afternoon or two “At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert”, that annoyingly pompous two thumbs up/down TV show. (Siskel died of brain cancer in 1999 and Ebert is battling thyroid cancer and has lost the ability to speak, so neither appears on television much anymore.)

Forget all that. Go read Ebert’s reviews online, especially of good movies, movies you particularly enjoyed (i.e., if you enjoy good movies; if you don’t enjoy good movies, don’t bother). Simply put, the man is a master critic. Even better than his current reviews, read Ebert’s periodic re-reviews of older, favorite, good movies, e.g., last week, “Lost in Translation” (2003), set in Tokyo, starring Bill Murray as Bob and Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte. Reading Ebert’s re-review conjures up the same chills that led me to pay three times for the joy of  watching the film in theaters.  

We understand Charlotte loves her husband, and we understand how he wounds her, and why she cries on the phone. There’s no possibility he will cheat on her. [... He] is simply a moth fluttering around [another woman’s] fame. That’s what hurts Charlotte; he leaves her alone in the hotel for silly reasons that betray him as callow. We understand that Bob loves his wife and especially his children at home in America, but after years and years he knows and says that marriage and children are “hard.” So they are. We know that. Few movie characters know it in the sense he means. [...]

I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they just don’t get “Lost in Translation.” They want to know what it’s about. They complain “nothing happens.” They’ve been trained by movies that tell them where to look and what to feel, in stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. “Lost in Translation” offers an experience in the exercise of empathy. The characters empathize with each other (that’s what it’s about), and we can empathize with them going through that process. It’s not a question of reading our own emotions into Murray’s blank slate. The slate isn’t blank. It’s on hold. He doesn’t choose to wear his heart on his sleeve for Charlotte, and he doesn’t choose to make a move. But he is very lonely and not without sympathy for her. She would plausibly have sex with him, casually, to be “nice,” and because she’s mad at her husband and it might be fun. But she doesn’t know as he does that if you cheat it shouldn’t be with someone it would make a difference to. [...]

What is lost in translation? [Her husband] understands nothing of what Charlotte says or feels, nor does he understand how he’s behaving. [...] Bob’s wife [doesn’t] understand how desperately indifferent he is to the carpet samples. And so on. What does get translated, finally, is what Bob and Charlotte are really thinking. The whole movie is about that act of translation taking place.

Read Ebert’s Journal, too. Less about movies, but just as masterfully written.

I hesitate to comment on a television show in the middle of its run. (No one comments on a book, chapter by chapter, while reading it.) But I will comment on the commentary on Mad Men, because there’s so much of it, and so much of it is worth reading, especially if you’re watching each new episode on or near the date it premiered. I’ll start with the much-talked about “The Allure of Messy Lives” by author/journalist Katie Roiphe. 

Today’s moderately restless or mildly discontented couples tend to go to couples therapy and “work” on their relationships instead of drinking so much they don’t know where they are, or slipping into a back room with a man they meet in a bar. But can we be sure our own malaise and alienation is better than theirs? Are we happier than Don and Betty Draper, or are we just doing yoga or Pilates or “working” on our relationships?

You don't have to buy his suit to be Don Draper.

Yes to both her rhetorical questions. We can be sure we are happier because nothing real is stopping us from behaving exactly as the characters of Mad Men. We can drink and smoke and have sex as recklessly and casually as our 1960s counterparts, but most of us, it seems, choose not to. Not because society forbids us (which it doesn’t — it’s far more liberal now than 1964), but because we know the unavoidable risks (alcholism, cancer, STDs, the trama of divorce, etc.) are the inevitable by-products of all that “messiness.” In other words, we have foresaken the carnal pleasures of the now to avoid the physical and emotional pains of tomorrow. 

Also worth reading each week is Walter Dellinger’s WSJ conversation (yes, the Walter Dellinger) and Slate TV Club’s episodic colloquy. Most everything else is woefully un-insightful by comparison.