By Juan-Carlos Selznick
Trapped attention
The Lost Bus, with its swathe of recent local history, caught some very real attention from me, even though some of it seemed to wobble between fascination and aggravation. As a docudrama and disaster movie with a story of rescue and redemption running through it, the pell-mell storytelling proves both intense and banal, sometimes simultaneously. What won my greatest admiration is the sequence in which it appears that the school bus with its load of gradeschoolers is trapped by fire on all sides. It’s a “No Exit” moment with all hope lost, and what happens next (and how it happens) is worthy, for a moment, of comparison with stories by Camus and Hemingway.
Baseball, close up
Broadcasts of October’s baseball playoffs showcased brilliant camerawork and editing of the sort that has also made NFL football a must-see TV spectacle. Baseball, of course, requires a different approach than football, and this year’s playoff broadcasts made especially fine use of close-ups— of players in particular, but others as well — as a way of intensifying and personalizing individual stories and dramas. We get the report of the game action, but we also catch glimpses — in the faces we see — of character and emotion, of smaller dramas within the larger story.
It’s always been evident, for example, that Toronto’s great slugger, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., is a gracefully rugged tower of power. But some of the closeups of him in the playoffs also suggest that he’s the kind of person who makes life more interesting for everyone around him. Similarly, one of the great baseball pleasures of the year has been the emergence of Cal Raleigh, the Seattle Mariners’ portly catcher, as a record-breaking home run hitter. All of those home runs inevitably change the way we think of Cal Raleigh, but — even better — the close ups of him during the playoffs seemed to reveal a man of humble dignity, an adult playing a boy’s game and thriving, but wary of easy sentiment and illusion.
Funny, again
The inspired silliness of the antic The Naked Gun continues in the most recent version, with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. An action sequence that includes Anderson doing some impromptu scat singing in a nightclub is sublime comedy of an exceptional sort. The best way to see and hear it is within the ongoing action, with its galloping stream of sight gags and non sequiturs.
Returning this fall
Glad to see several of my recent TV favorites flourishing in the new fall season. Only Murders in the Building and High Potential continue to build on previous comic success with larger casts and somewhat more dramatic scripts. The recently completed Season 5 of Slow Horses is especially strong, with its stingingly pertinent, dark-humored takes on the mix of absurdity and deadly seriousness in contemporary geopolitics. Gary Oldman’s sardonic, sidelined agent continues to be a rumpled anti-hero for our times.
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