New Villain for Nikita: The CIA!

By Jason Apuzzo. Does the poster on your left grab your attention?  It certainly caught mine, although perhaps that had to do with the fact that there was an approximately 100 foot high version of it draped over a building I drove by recently here in LA.  I have a great interest in firearms, you understand, and seeing an automatic rifle that large immediately caught my attention.

I’m being facetious, of course – at least with respect to the relative appeal of firearms.  Nikita, for those of you who may not have heard, is the CW’s reboot of a TV show – La Femme Nikita – that was actually once run by an acquaintance of mine, 24 producer Joel Surnow.  And Joel’s show, in turn, was based on the 1990 Luc Besson film of the same name, about a young criminal babe recruited to work for French intelligence – and to otherwise fire guns while wearing 4-inch heels.

There was a so-so American remake of Besson’s film that followed in 1993, called Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda.  Then came Joel’s gritty, noirish and very successful show in the late 90s – until that show ran its course, roughly around the time he was developing 24.

And whereas the specific plotlines of these various Nikitas have changed, one element has remained constant: a sexy young misfit woman, who must be able to fire semi-automatic weaponry while wearing cocktail dresses, is recruited by mysterious intelligence forces to fight … somebody.

Perhaps you already see where I’m going with this.

In Joel’s version of La Femme Nikita, sexy young Nikita (played by Peta Wilson) is recruited by a shadowy government organization to fight terrorism.  [Bear in mind that this anti-terrorist plotline was developed prior to 9/11 – as was 24s original plotline, incidentally.]  Some of La Femme Nikita’s basic plotline and vibe eventually got rolled into 24 – with fantastic results, of course.

Now would seem to be a good time to go back to that anti-terror storyline, what with Al Qaeda still lurking around, right?  With, for example, young terrorist guys trying to set off bombs in Time Square, or gals like Jihad Jane trying to recruit young people into Al Qaeda.

And incidentally, let’s not forget Salt in this context.  In that very recent film, sexy spy Angelina Jolie battles retro-communist sleeper agents here in the U.S. – in a clever, Rubik’s Cube storyline seemingly ripped from current headlines (i.e., the capture of Russian spy babes like Anna Chapman and Anna Fermanova).  The worldwide grosses on Salt are currently topping $150 million, so now would seem to be a good time to send Nikita after some infiltrating, ideologically driven baddies, yes?  Russian agents … Al Qaeda moles … perhaps even a Chinese communist superspy or two (cue Hawaii Five-O theme).

Wrong!  In the new Nikita series, we’re the villains.  Or at least, the C.I.A. and American intelligence services are the villains (see here and here or the video below).  Angry, pinch-faced W.A.S.P. bureaucrats in cheap suits are the villains.  [And I’ll bet they have bad aftershave, too!]

This irritates me.  I would like to be able to watch this show, for reasons I presumably don’t need to explain (at least to the male readers of this website).  Doing a series like this should be so easy – a breeze, actually.

Peta Wilson, from the original series.

You find some good looking gal, and have her hunt down, say, a snarling member of the A.Q. Khan smuggling network who’s trying to get nuclear materials into Miami … while he enjoys a few martinis at the Skybar.  Maybe he’s a Russian mobster with a weakness for Incan quinoa and Fantasy Football.

Our delectable heroine pulls up to the club in a Lamborghini Murcielago (CUT TO: camera capturing her shapely leg as the doorman helps her out of the car); after some perfunctory banter, and few snappy and/or inane quips (“Next time, make sure my salmon is served cold!”) she pulls a Glock out of her garter and has a shootout with the Russian and his gang, and escapes from a fireball or two – just in time to make it back home to her charmingly oblivious boyfriend in the suburbs, who just got back from a sale at Ikea.

I mean, the story writes itself.

Instead, the CW has decided to make us the villains.  What a drag.  These kinds of shows are being made all the time (e.g., Alias, Dark Angel, Painkiller Jane), and there are many different ways to go with the material.  CW is making the most idiotic decision imaginable by making our own intelligence services into the bad guys.

Why idiotic?  Because your garden variety Hollywood liberal – one thinks here of, say, Jeffrey Wells – isn’t going to watch this series anyway just because there’s a snarky, leftie-conspiratorial plotline. They’ll consider this show too déclassé to begin with … while potential viewers like me get alienated.  And again, why?  What’s the purpose?  Because the producers want to make some asinine point about U.S. foreign policy?

Is that really why they think we watch this stuff?

Posted on August 10th, 2010 at 1:57pm.

Review: Cairo Time

By Patricia Ducey. Time in Cairo is slow. Very slow. Glances are exchanged. Background concertos are heard. Sparks, however, are not ignited, ever, between Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), an American magazine editor and Tareq (Alexander Siddig of Syriana), her supposed Romeo in Cairo Time.

This is not Shakespeare, or even English Patient (a great weepy if ever there was one). This is one nuanced love affair.

Juliette and Tareq represent archetypes of the East and West, yet they are actually more alike than different: both inhabit internationalist circles – Tareq just recently retired from the U.N., where he came to know Juliet’s husband (a UN operative in Gaza), and Juliet herself a feminist women’s magazine editor. Not much of a culture clash here. At a few points in the film Tareq lightly (and rightly) scolds Juliet for her easy outrage over a few social problems in Egypt. This hints at further story is to come, perhaps a real discussion of custom and culture, but nothing develops. (The Last King of Scotland, by contrast, brilliantly portrayed the deadly consequences of feckless liberalism in its main character.)

Juliette arrives in Cairo to await her husband’s arrival from Gaza so they can enjoy a long dreamed of vacation together. He is delayed, though, by trouble in the refugee camp he manages – so he asks his old friend Tareq to see after his wife until he can join her. Juliette seems anxious, tentative and tongue-tied from the start – odd behavior for a successful magazine editor. We wonder why – middle age crisis, bad marriage, illness? – but we never find out. She loves her husband, children, and her job. Tareq tries to draw her out but she rebuffs him. Later, though, she mystifyingly shows up at his men-only coffeehouse to visit him – not once but twice.

This fog of ambiguity never clears, and slows the movie down to a crawl. Juliette wanders the streets alone, inexplicably tossing aside her husband’s warnings about women traveling alone. Naïve, self-destructive? One can only ponder. This behavior does reveal the only people who seem to know who they are, sadly: the bands of leering men on the Cairo streets who consider her, a Western woman alone on the street, as something south of “available.”

Juliette finally takes action after her husband is delayed again and again. She hops a bus to the border and to Gaza to find him, but the Egyptian police stop the bus and send her back to the hotel; they realize the situation in Gaza is dangerous.  As Juliette follows the police, her seatmate – a young Egyptian woman – stuffs an envelope into Juliette’s hands and implores her to deliver it to her lover back in Cairo. Again, hints at a story: tension, mixed up in politics, danger – but this too goes nowhere. She gives the letter to the young woman’s lover.

Non-doomed lovers.

The narrative of any melodrama demands some rupture of the moral code. English Patient’s doomed love story was played out on the canvas of a World War, when the old world order was collapsing in England and the Middle East. The lovers in English Patient violated every norm of class, race, gender and sexual orientation and died in agony for their transgressions. Patricia Clarkson’s protagonist, on the other hand, is a modern Western woman and thus is left with no moral code to rupture whatsoever. What will she lose if she betrays her husband, what would happen if she did betray him with Tareq? Not much. Tareq is an Egyptian Muslim who is kind of secular, kind of not. We are not quite sure what his moral code is either, or if he has one. Perhaps this is why the greatest doomed love stories take place at least pre-1950.

Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda has underwritten both the characters and the story. The characters’ physicality – walking, talking, eye gazing, walking, talking – as well as their sparse dialogue reveal little. Clarkson and Siddig do their best but have little to work with.

My inner writer asks, what do these characters want? Apparently not each other. Or at least not very much. Perhaps Juliette will remain faithful to her husband, perhaps not, but it is of no real import to a woman in the grips of such anomie. Tareq was content pre-Juliette and is content post-Juliette.  I am not asking for these characters to outrun a fireball or gun down CIA assassins – I just want to know why their lives and loves matter.

Posted on August 10th, 2010 at 9:36am.