Back in 2000, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane managed to exuberantly praise Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while simultaneously insulting the entirety of Asian cinema and, for that matter, the very concept of half-way knowledgeable film criticism. Aside from this completely innocuous, possibly scrubbed, capsule review, there is no trace of it online.

Fortunately, we have Godfrey Cheshire’s thorough 2000 take-down of the piece in particular and Lane in general to keep that memory alive. I don’t necessarily agree with every single word — just 99% of them, including this entirely apt description of Lane:

…he’s not really a film critic but a quip-minded belletrist who happened into a lucrative gig and appears to have no inclination, now, to patch up the gaping holes in his knowledge of film. (Why learn anything about a subject that’s only there to be the object of one’s witticisms?)

Now, Lane’s back at it again, this time in the course of a pan, rather than a rave — not that it matters. In a terrifyingly snide and proudly ignorant review, he expresses this highly original thought:

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.

Thoughtful and reliably sensible liberal blogger Steve Benen of Washington Monthly, however, reports the following retort from The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer who, like me, is not interested in defending a film he hasn’t seen, but is interested in combating ill-informed idiocy against an entire medium and all of its consumers:

Not to question what is, I am certain, the vibrant and thrilling sex lives of film critics, but I’m not so sure that “film critic” is much higher than “comic book geek” on the social spectrum.

I’ve been both, and I’m here to tell you…yup. That’s about the size of it. He goes on to make this point…

Comic book nerds can count Barack Obama, Rachel Maddow and Patrick Leahy among us…. Whatever Lane’s opinions of Watchmen’s source material, comic books are the closest thing Americans have to folktales, and their content is about as close as a reflection of American cultural identity, for good or for ill, as we have. You’d think that for that reason alone, the material and its consumers would be worth at least a minimum of respect.

You’d think.

And as per Steve Benen:

As it happens, right around the time Adam was posting his defense of comic-book readers everywhere, Matt Yglesias (comic-book reader) referenced a remark by Ana Marie Cox (another comic-book reader) about Watchmen and contemporary politics, which Matt then expanded on to make a point about Cold War policy towards Russia.

Now, it strikes me that both Maddow and Cox are kind of in the business of “requesting intelligent conversation” and do, indeed, more than qualify as being members of the tribe we call “woman.”

Anyone care to ask them if they feel afraid of meeting themselves?

For decades, I thought I’d hallucinated/dreamed this…but it was real. As for the inevitable film version, George Clooney seems like a natural…

Why, as my blogging brother in Whedonesque geekhood reminds us, pay no attention to that distracting calendar, it’s Dollhouse day.

Just to explain a moment for those of you who are in the not in the full geek know — this is the new television show from TV creator Joss Whedon, about mind-wiped, physically perfect jacks-and-jills-of-all-professions (including old ones) starring Eliza Dushku. As all my friends know, I went pretty gaga over Whedon’s Buffy, the Vampire Slayer TV series, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Angel, both of which took back to my own days as an avid Marvel comics reader, right up to including the occasional superhero and/or monster crossover.

Not long after, I went ultra-multidouble-dweeb-gaga over his even better, far more consistent, and wonderfully canceled pioneer-science-fiction epic Firefly, which took me to my present place of classic film Western love. (It’s movie spin-off, Serenity, went more space opera than horse opera.)

Nevertheless, I don’t want to pitch the expectations too high on this — in fact, I want to take them way, way down. Whedon’s return to TV after the tragicomic musical net-hit Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is getting what have to be the most mixed reviews of his entire career as a TV showrunner. Some of this may be a case of the bar being set very high based on all that past praise, even if it was never fully matched by ratings. But the fact that his most consistent and persuasive critical booster, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker, felt moved by protective feelings to raise his grade from a mere B- to a B, gives a fan pause.

On the other hand, to me, Buffy’s entire critically praised first season was pretty much a warm up for the thoroughly engaging, multifaceted entertainments that came sometime in the middle of season II and seemed to level off, for some reason, at the beginning of most seasons (the reviews are based on the first three episodes). Also, the worst review I’ve seen so far — and it’s an out-and-out praise-be-thou-John-Simon kind of a pan — comes from Tom Shales, probably my least favorite critic on the planet who is not a complete idiot and not Armand White.

As long as I’ve been aware of him, Shales has always written like a gigantic intellectual snob, even if I have to admit he’s not an ineffective wordsmith. In his days as a film critic, Shales basically panned anything that didn’t fall into a pretty narrow range of social realism, as if man could live by Sidney Lumet alone. You could depend on him to deride pretty much any film that was remotely fantastical and in any way over-the-top — especially if it was in any way related to comic books. He also appears to hate Jon Stewart. In other words, he’s the anti-me….And also someone who totally belongs at the Washington Post, the center of the universe of antipopulist, pro-status quo, pro-ivory tower journalism. So, I’m taking his pan as a sign it may turn out to be a lot better than people think. (Except he liked, in an obnoxiously superior way, Stephen Colbert’s ingenious Christmas special. Cause for concern. Also, why is it the most pretentious critics are the ones most likely to call something “pretentious”?)

Still, with expectations appropriately lowered, I am going to be glued to my TV at approximately 9:00 (or so…all praise the mighty DVR). Should be interesting.

For those wanting more, much more, Whedonesque would be the place, which also gets a huge h/t for this entire post.

And now, a slightly misleading interview with my favorite cast member of the show, at least at this point. “Something about an English accent lends itself to sinister organizations.”

This one’s for you, Rushmore fans

While I’ve been hit by a few blog memes in my time, I’ve somehow been left out of blog meme awards up to now. (No way to know if I’ve even been mentally “nominated” by people, so I can’t quite claim Randy Newman/Susan Lucci status for “frequently nominated, eventually winning something.”) Not that I minded being branded, by implication, an Unthinking Blogger when I failed to make the “Thinking Blogger” cut some time ago…I’m just happy not to be frequently excoriated on the Intertubulars for something stupid I might have said. (I’ll leave that for my occasional DailyKos flame-war opponents.)

In any case, my thanks to one of this blog’s most loyal supporters in the blogosphere, Mr. Brian Doan of the highly esteemable and widely esteemed Bubblegum Aesthetics who awarded me with a Dardo well over a week ago, giving me the honor of sharing an award with the legendary Larry Aydlette.

Anyhow, this is probably the point where I have to trot out the rules and meaning of  this here award meme thing…

“The Dardos Awards is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.”

And now I’m supposed to…

“1) Accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to his/her blog.
2) Pass the award to another five blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgement, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award.”

The first rule is already taken care, the second rule I’ll handle later. In any case, that’s where it gets tricky for me. Let’s face it, if there were Nobels or Pultizers for film blogging, it seems the collective cinema blogosphere long ago would have given it to Dennis, Girish, and The Siren, among a few others, long, long ago. They, and well, all the film bloggers I read have already been Dardoed [note: perhaps not all, it turns out, see the update below], perhaps multiple times…and I don’t see a lot of point in giving Dardos to the various hot-shot political bloggers I read and sometimes comment at on a fairly compulsive basis (more compulsively than film blogs, I fear) because all they’ll do is make me feel bad by ignoring my shiny gift.

Instead, I’m going to channel my inner G.W. Bush and honor people who have done me favors and because I like them personally and also because they might actually furnish me with food, employment, or other emoluments at some time. I should also add, however, that while I am currying favor with them, I actually like what they’re doing. Not one has done a “heckuva” job.

So, here we go….

* The first Cronyism Dardos goes to Lance Mannion, who I’ve never met and who is really not a crony, but he is without a doubt the first (and so far only) blogger with a large rep outside the strictly cinephile blogosphere to link here…and in a flattering manner to boot. He’s also a thoughtful culture, autobiographical, and progressive political blogger who I heartily endorse and generally plan to continue ingratiating myself with for whatever trinkets he cares to dispense with. It also happens that his post today, about an old friend of his, is particularly moving. He might even have the kind of juice to waste enrich political bloggers’ time with this if he’s of a mind, but we shall see.

* The Second Cronyism Dardo is very cronyish indeed. Not a month goes by, it seems, when I don’t use this blog to plug the work of my close friend and most frequent commenter, cartoonist and now blogger Randy Reynaldo. Randy has found that one site alone cannot contain his genius — or is it super-genius? (Say it Wile E. Coyote style, regardless.) First there is his fine blog, Portrait of the Artist, where he mixes thoughts on creating comics, computer hard-and-software, comics in general, movies he likes (or just watches), and what his adorable and ridiculously happy family is up to. The second is the official site of his excellent self-published comic book, Rob Hanes Adventures.

Randy and I first bonded in our later college years over comics like The Spirit, and when I first saw what he was working on even back then, I knew I was seeing a major talent in old-school style illustration. He’s, of course, an even better artist today and his retro-yet-contemporary work is, not too surprisingly, pretty much in line with the spirit of FtY.

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Randy also designed my logo…yes, even that part of it. He’s really 99 years old, but looks about 24 or so.

* Since my writing sometimes appears there, it would actually be one step beyond cronyism to award a Dardo to Premium Hollywood, the entertainment blog of Bullz-Eye.com, the only online outlet ingenious enough to actually pay me to write about movies and other fun stuff. Nevertheless, I feel no hesitation whatever in honoring one of their most frequent contributors, Bullz-Eye editor and all around good guy Will Harris. His coverage of events like the TCA offers an invaluable look inside a big TV industry event with plenty of worthy coverage of his meetings with people like, say, Ian McKellan. These interviews inevitably yield interesting results because Will is a very smart guy who never tries to hide his passion for entertainment. He also has the stamina to watch, listen, and write about an enormous amount of TV, pop music, and the occasional movie boxed set, while raising a family, which deserves an award all its own.

Whether critics are Ebertian softies, a bit like myself or Kael-style quirky hard-assess like, say, Noel Vera (who doesn’t even like Ebert, particularly), passion is what separates the good ones from the poseurs, and Will Harris certainly has that and is also an effortless writer to read. And the fact that he sometimes throws work my way as a Bullz-Eye editor should in no way be construed as influencing my opinion. In any case, since Premium Hollywood is a professional, group blog, I’m not sure Will is any a position to Dardo others, even if he feels like it. However, you can all keep up with his goings and comings at his MySpace blog.

* I became acquainted with animators and occasional bloggers Lili Chin and Eddie Mort through a good friend of mine who, if he had a blog, would probably be here as well, but since he doesn’t and these nice folks do, they win. Anyhow, Eddie and Lili are best known as the creators of the sucessful Warner Brothers animated series Mucha Lucha, which brought them both to L.A. from Australia and have recently continued to mine the rich cultural vein of Mexican wrestling to come up with a entertaining and actually kind of beautiful feature, Los Campeones de la Lucha Lubre  (which I wrote about just last week on the sad occasion of psychobilly pioneer Lux Interior’s death).

Anyhow, you might also want to take a look at the official website of Eddie and Lili’s fwak! animation as well. Nifty stuff there.

* And that leaves one more Dardo which…tympani please…I am giving to…OMG OMG OMG…Slumdog Millionaire.

No it’s not a blog, and you slumdoggian backlashers can relax, it’s not my favorite movie this year — I’m not even sure it would be on my ten best list if I had one — but I just can’t ignore the momentum. I…just…can’t. It is written.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:  After so glibly ending on a gag like that, I realized that I had falsely assumed the great, lovably caustic Edward Copeland, who, though he has commented here recently, is not really a crony in any sense, had been among the first to be Dardoed — except now I realize he apparently hasn’t been though its possible I’m wrong. In any case, I’m ripping that last Dardo out of Slumdog’s undeserving paw and giving it to the very deserving Mr. Copeland, one of the lynchpins of the cinephile online community since long before I arrived.

The coincidence of this coming so soon after the death two weeks back of Ricardo Montalban was not lost on the Robot Chicken staff, who dedicated the last episode to him, but I would like to think he would have loved it.

 
“See to it that Senator Leahy’s…comfortable….”

If I’m going to up my web stats, I’m really going to have to develop some stronger, really contrarian, opinions. For example, I actually thought The Dark Knight was pretty terrific, probably one of the two or three best superhero comic book adaptations made yet…though my favorite, and this is as contrarian as I’ll get tonight, is the first and not the second Spiderman movie.

However, let’s face it: superhero flicks are a pretty small genre in terms of numbers and pretty prone to out-and-out turkeys as well, so the competition here is less than fierce. For that reason among many others, I have absolutely no interest in picketing the Academy for failing to nominate The Dark Knight in every category, including a special Oscar just for being so frakking sweet.  I’m a reliably avid viewer of what someone recently called “the gay superbowl” — because there’s obviously nothing wrong with that. I love the Oscars, but that doesn’t mean I take them seriously. I’m not a complete idiot.

Still, by actually liking this latest Batflick quite a bit, at least after one initial viewing, I lose a shot at that little boost of energy in the response enjoyed by such very good guys as FtY blog-friend Keith “311 Comments!” Uhlich and Chicago’s own Jim Emerson (who didn’t hate it or anything and who has nevertheless got an interesting side controversy going with gool ol’ Jonathan Lapper).

Nope, once again I suffer for the crime of having a commonplace opinion. I really need to get my Kael on at some point and just get freaky weird in my likes and dislikes

Nevertheless, the night I actually saw The Dark Knight with several friends, who all enjoyed the movie (though I’m not sure if the earth actually moved for any of us, beyond the power of those IMAX speakers) the closest thing to controversy was this: What gives with those Maybelline eyelashes on the mayor? 

Well, The Dark Knight battle will no doubt outlast Roman Polanski’s exile, but at least my Bullz-Eye colleague and sometime editor Will Harris has, by the radical route of actually speaking to the man, gotten to the bottom of the matter of Lost actor Nestor Carbonell’s controversial peepers.

Rest easy, citizens.

I was just starting the Patrick McGoohan RIP below this when I saw the news that another seriously underrated and really interesting actor with an extra dose of geek appeal had passed on. And sad news it is.

The Spy Kids have lost a grandpa. Capt. James T. Kirk has lost his showyest and most poetic adversary and the LAPD’s Frank Drebbin is sans  his suavest foe. Fantasy Island is without a leader, and Corinthian leather will never, ever be quite as rich. Ricardo Montalban, the kind of wonderfully dignified ham actor who gave overacting a good name — sometimes a great name — has left our earthly sphere at the age of 88.

What I love and genuinely respect about Montalban was his embrace of artifice, which became more effortless and enjoyable over the years, whatever kind of movie (and there are more than I can possibly recall) he was in and whether the quality was outstanding or, as in the case of Fantasy Island, pretty much beneath contempt. As per Wikipedia, it was actually “soft Corinithian leather” the Mexico-born Montalban spoke of in that notorious car commercial…and said leather was actually produced in New Jersey.

That’s show business and few performers have expressed such a smooth grasp of the unreality of dramatic reality. Of course, he emerged in an era where, for a minority actor, a certain stealy determination to do anything was probably needed. It worked. Starting his U.S. career as a 1940s “Latin lover” (relieved only by occasional dramatic turns, like Anthony Mann’s eternally topical Border Incident), Montalban transformed over the decades into one of Hollywood’s most reliable utility actors and undoubtedly the best known Latino thesp of his generation (though Fernando Lamas was always snipping at his heels).

The geeksphere will no doubt be celebrating his twin Star Trek appearances as Khan Noonien Singh in one of the best regarded episodes of the series as well as the most popular of the many films in the franchise (and others are still obscessing about the provenance of his apparently miraculous sixty year old physique in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan). But, as much fun as his performance is there, it’s not my all-time favorite Montalban role. I’ll take his supporting part as an egocentric but basically decent Italian-like film star in that FtY favorite, Sweet Charity.

He neither sang nor danced in that film, but he did both in a number of lightweight MGM musicals and comedies he appeared in during his first flush of stardom alongside Cyd Charisse, Jane Powell, Esther Williams and others where he showed he could hold his own as hoofer alongside pretty much anyone. Like any minority actor in his day, he had to be three times better and more professional than the typical Anglo performer, and he was. Sometimes four or five times better.

As he aged — and he aged about as well as any human — Ricardo Montalban was a link to another time. Sillier, of course, but also in many respects more courtly, elegant, stylish and fun than our own era of entertainment. As a person, L.A. Times obituary writer Lorenza Muñoz reminds us of traditional religiousity as well as his activist side on behalf of Mexican and Latino actors — he was irritated that he rarely played actual  Mexicans (his enormous IMDb listing includes the character of Nakamura in Sayonara).

All in all, Mr. Montalban was a gentleman of the old school, and that’s something to celebrate.

An extremely interesting actor and one of the main creative forces behind an early relative of just about everything interesting on your modern TV screen has passed on at age 80. Irish-American by birth and British by upbringing, after turning down the role of James Bond in Dr. No (and he would have been about as great as the bloke who actually agreed to do it) McGoohan made it big on a pair of English spy series, probably today best known in the U.S. as the source of the Johnny Rivers hit, “Secret Agent Man.”

That led to a 1967-1968 non-sequel, The Prisoner, which had McGoohan playing a secret agent (which he always denied was Secret Agent Man John Drake) who tries to quit but instead finds himself in “the Village” — basically the ultimate gated community with just a dash of Gitmo (waterboarding not included), where the not-secret-agent-man is given a number, 6, and his name is really taken away. Despite constant prodding and head games (which get ever more heady as the show progresses), No. 6 fails to cooperate — but just why and what he’s fighting is not a simple matter of something you can quote at an ACLU meeting.

McGoohan appears to have effectively been the showrunner of the series, which for decades was often cited by critics as probably the single best TV series of all time. Though the competition for that title has increased exponentially over the decades, it was without a doubt, a major force in my adolescence, and world geekitude in general, when it was revived on PBS and later on cable and home video. McGoohan went on to a solid movie career as a character actor, usually playing very interesting antagonists/bad guys in movies like Escape from Alcatraz and Silver Streak, but The Prisoner was always the one that people talked about when they talked about McGoohan.

It was for good reason. Like his acting, the show bore an unmistakable stamp of originality and commitment that’s impossible to forget.  His L.A. Times obit includes this quote from Peter Falk, who exposed him as a murderer not once but twice on Columbo.

There are many very, very talented people in this business, but there are only a handful of genuinely original people….I think Patrick McGoohan belongs in that small select group of truly original people.

I think Falk would know.

More from master-compiler David Hudson at his new IFC locale and also from Bullz-Eye’s esteemed TV maven Will Harris.

Be seeing you, Mr. McGoohan…

And now, well, you know I can’t resist. Best. TV show opening. Ever.

I really think so.

UPDATE:  In memory of #6, Jim Emerson has reposted his analysis of the above. Definitely recommended.

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Brian Doan, some words from Glenn Kenny, who also digs up a revealing quote from David Cronenberg about the rough going he experienced with McGoohan on Scanners, a movie I really should be able to handle, now that I’ve got my gorephobia partially under control. Why, I wouldn’t mind seeing it right now (except that I won’t).

AND YET ONE MORE UPDATE: The amazing Kimberly “Cinebeats” Lindbergs has some good stuff up on the subject as well, though I disagree with her that the prospect of a new Prisoner TV show is necessarily depressing. To me, everything is basically a remake of something, admitted or not — it’s just a matter of whether the remaker has something new and worthwhile to bring to the party. On the other hand, after what I’ve been through with Frank Miller’s vile travesty of The Spirit and Neil Labute’s ridiculously clueless and bluntly misogynist The Wicker Man, I can very definitely see her point.

So, the famed picture above is a lie. Now, at last I join the throngs (well, tens) of disappointed progressives who are looking for the nearest bus under which to throw our not-yet president. I mean, who cares about Rick Warren or Sanjay Gupta? The President is no DC fan, but a Marvel Zombie. OMG! OMG! God help us all.

But seriously, even if its been decades since I’ve made mine Marvel, I think yet another intriguing sign of generational change as the geek friendly generation takes over. Obama meets Spiderman. It had to happen.

Clinton was our first rock and roll playing, excessively hugging President. Obama will be our first dancing, basketball playing, not so secret geek President — he’s also said to have been fond of Conan, the Barbarian — once again, reaching across the aisle to embrace both brainy science nerd superheroes and, well, barbarians.

It’s the march of history, folks.

Meanwhile, on the right — charges of blatant superheroic bias!

UPDATE: Kossack Droogie6655321 has more on this theme.

I haven’t been posting much lately. Holiday-related mishegas, other writing and editorial tasks (some of it related to the the need to get through an ever-growing assortment of free DVDs still sitting in my living room), etc., and also real life and inevitable ickiness I feel everytime Israel drops bombs on people has, up to a point, have been distracting me.

In addition, I’ve recently rediscovered that written information can also be printed on paper or enjoyed in bed or on a couch (i.e., I’m really enjoying reading, after much delay and a lengthy break at about page 150, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay). Let’s face it — there something qualitatively very different from our ephemeral intertubular conversation and reading a book or even a magazine or newspaper, but I’m not McLuhan, nor am I likely to draw him out from behind a standee to settle an argument (and muff his line), any time soon.

I will say, however, that three movies I’ve seen — ending a long, DVD-driven recent exile from movie theaters — seem to defy words for me. Three are simply too small to bother with. Baz Luhrman’s Australia is actually, to me, a bit more good than bad and even got the tear ducts going with borrowed impact from other movies (most particularly, Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which gets me every time). Still, it’s mainly an exercise in bringing classic-era Hollywood westerns and romances over to Australia, which is very nice and intermittently enjoyable, but is kind of the same league as “Sex Farm.” A tune that, to quote indirectly from Nigel Tufnel/Harry Schearer, takes the idea of sex and puts it on…a farm.

Frank Miller’s travesty of Will Eisner’s The Spirit is another story entirely and utterly beneath contempt. A mean, small-minded, crude videofilm that misses (one sequence excepted) everything worthwhile in its source material and replaces it with stuff lifted and made stupider from Sin City and from other, much smaller spirits than Eisner’s, starting with Spillane.

It’s a tenet of my film writing faith that it’s not okay to judge a work by the politics of its creator. Yet, Miller (who, though many don’t know it, is a pretty open neoconservative) seems to make it impossible for me to ignore as he transforms Eisner’s pragmatic optimism to cynical depths that, as fearful as I was before seeing the film, I couldn’t begin to anticipate. So, yeah, this is the cinematic equivalence of the looting of Iraq that Rumsfeld permitted. Miller clearly went to film with the half-finished script he had, and wound up with a hideous companion to Robert Altman’s heretically brilliant re-engineering of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye which honored its source material in the breach, kind of, and which I really shouldn’t even be mentioning in relation to the film…except for the suspicion I have that Miller was deliberately swiping from that, too.  And why am I still writing about this?

I also nearly forgot that I saw Valkyrie yesterday…and it’s already evaporated completely. Nazis have never been more “meh”-worthy (though Kenneth Branagh squeezes some nervous laughs in with his segment and it’s always good to spend screen time with Terrence Stamp and Bill Nighy).

The other film, which I caught up with last night, was Charlie Kaufmann’s Synedoche New York which is the “too big” film and, perhaps, a too close to the bone for one viewing. I didn’t love it the way I think Roger Ebert loved it, but I also can’t ignore it for reasons both artistic and personal, though I may try — but I’m not at all sure it’s that’s a good thing to do.

Also, sorry as I am to have missed today’s Stinky Lulu supporting actress blogathon, Kaufmann’s directorial debut deserves some kind of special award for creating a reality so encompassing that, of the films’ several outstanding supporting actresses, I only recognized Catherine Keener and Dianne Wiest. It’s somewhat understandable that, having not looked over the credits beforehand, that I wasn’t quite able to place Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, or Hope Davis; all first rate actresses that I haven’t seen onscreen lately. But I have to give special credit to Jennifer Jason Leigh — a long time favorite of mine (she only missed out on my “20 Actresses” thingy because I didn’t happen to be thinking about her when I put the list together)  — who I failed to catch at all as she apparently became wholly absorbed in the character of Ms. Keener’s unpleasant German tatoo-artist friend.  It’s like magic.