is that so wrong?

indescribable unparalleled magic

2008-10-02T13:16:00.000-04:00

NYFF geek? That could be me. And I love their trailer: Just like AJM, it gives me chills.

michael cera's film career just isn't as promising as he thinks it is

2008-09-30T17:54:00.007-04:00

Oh, Michael Cera. Just a nubile 20 years old and already you're counting on surfing bland Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist-type roles for the rest of your career. Schmucky late-teens fare is your genre, kid. In fact, it's a genre that's practically being catered to you. What a joy it must be to have a plum schmucky role in an Oscar-friendly juggernaut like Juno. Why not ride that wave while you can, right?

God forbid you pay thanks to that which hath launched your career.

Perhaps it doesn't occur to Michael Cera that all these nerd-as-cool movie parts coming his way are all very much linked to his work in "Arrested Development". In fact, all these nerd-as-cool movie parts are all very much variations on a theme of his "Arrested Development" character, George Michael Bluth. Michael Cera hasn't burst out of this box, and why bother? It's how he's marketable.... and I'm guessing his agent is counting on that. He can just keep playing Superbad until he's thirty. Right?

In this vapid interview, Michael Cera just wants to have a career, you know? A career, that is, that doesn't involve "Arrested Development".... and certainly not an Arrested Development movie. Despite all the internet buzz and proof-positive "yes-it's-happening" rumblings from Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor about Arrested-Development-the-movie, Michael Cera just seems a bit queasy to sign on to the rumor. This is the second instance that I can remember reading about his unenthusiasm. But why not, Michael? Smart people (yes, me included) loved that show, and they even loved you in it. It's pretty widely accepted that "Arrested Development" was a preeminent and tightly-stitched comedy that's going to be hard to top, despite it's low ratings and Best Comedy Series Emmy win. These smart people, in turn, let you ride that wave of goodwill all the way to the Judd Apatow machine-made comedy Superbad last year. A role that, hey, let you play a version of George Michael Bluth! So you could relax, you could play on home turf.

And, hey, Juno let you do the same.

And, judging by the trailers, Nick and Nora should be a slamdunk, right?

Dear Michael Cera, did you have a lot of acting prep to do when tackling such a layered and complicated teenage anti-hero role like that in your forthcoming inspirationless titled Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist? [Author's note: had this film been pitched in the late 1970s, substitute "playlist" for "eight-tracks"; for late 1980s, substitute playlist for "mix-tapes"; for late 1990s, substitute "playlist" for "burned CDs"] Do you honestly think that by poo-pooing the possiblity of an "Arrested Development" movie, you can distance yourself enough so that you can keep getting these kaleidoscopically varied late-teen/early-20-something roles? Because, you know, they're really testing your acting chops. Who remembers George Michael Bluth anyway, right?

Oh wait, I do. Everytime I see your face.

So, why aren't you jumping at the chance to reunite with the gang and at least be positive about the possibility of a movie? Why not return to something so beloved and held dear? Why are you quoted more than once about your unease at the idea of an Arrested Development movie? Is it because you're leaning on your agent to make sure that the script for Nick and Nora 2 has already been picked up?

film fest this

2008-09-25T15:47:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow opens the 46th New York Film Festival (with a film slate that looks like this), and it appears to me the more I write about it the more I feel like I've been bought by them. It's not the truth! I just like to brag.

The festival's opening screening is The Class [Entre les murs], the first of a pretty sizable lineup of French films making their way through the festival circuit. Apparently there's gonna be a red carpet, people are gonna be dressed nice (which in turn means I'm gonna have to don the suit), there's a hobnobby get-together afterward. I've arranged my screening schedule so that I won't be seeing anything that made its way through the Telluride Film Festival earlier this month, though I am disappointed that David Fincher (he who stood up his audience at Telluride when supposed to introduce the director's cut of Zodiac) didn't pony up and get a print of his forthcoming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button out to the festivals any sooner. The twenty piecemeal minutes I saw at Telluride after a dead-on-arrival interview of Fincher weren't all that impressive to begin with. I think I just don't like Brad Pitt.

So, the question remains, how much of a starf*cker am I allowed to be when technically a NYFF correspondent? Perhaps I should take on the guise of jaded journalist. Except I'll have my cell phone camera on standby at all times.

NYFF dispatch #2: la pierre de famille

2008-09-23T19:52:00.003-04:00

Perhaps I'm not the first person to run and ask about the manners and mannerisms of contemporary French society. I don't know jack about the French, and certainly the French language is a mystery to me when spoken.... I don't speak a lick of it, and it never sounds to me how it is spelled. These are digressions though: what's up with French humor? Is it so deadpan and lackluster that the laughter comes from the heart of cynicism? Suddenly these sound like my kind of people.

I posit this, only because I was struck by the kind of deadpan atmosphere of comedy fostered by the Vuillon family in A Christmas Tale [Un conte de Noël], part of the main slate of the 46th New York Film Festival as put on by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, starting this Friday. I'm a fan of French cinema new and old, but I can't say I've seen many French comedies. A Christmas Tale isn't exactly a comedy (actually, no.... this movie is drama all the way), but it has a stunning scene between Vuillon family matriarch Junon (played by Catherine Deneuve, ravishing forever this woman is) and her crackpot adult son Henri (the guy from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, aka The Sea Inside) as they sit together in the snowy backyard of the family's homestead. They talk almost off-handedly about how neither of them like each other very much (he a bad son, she a bad mother), yet the venom is drained out of their words. Are they joking with each other? They're not smirking. I'd want to believe yes, except the scene is played so non-chalantly that it feels like they're only discussing the boring truth they've both known forever. But they love each other. It's there.

Director Arnaud Desplechin (who I am unfamiliar with, though I'm told his films are always off-kilter) gives us a Christmas tale that volleys some pretty standard tropes about family Christmas movies: estranged siblings, loner grandchildren, sick but brave family elders. Although the pieces don't seem to be trumpeting anything new, I'd argue that Desplechin deploys them in ways that caught me off guard. His style could be described as jumpy; scenes are strung together by non-sequitirs, sometimes punctuated by distracting title cards for each "movement" of the film. The cast of characters have quite a lot going on, sometimes independent of many of those throughout the movie, and in order to balance things out, it feels as though Desplechin applies contrasting settings (the warm Vuillon family home, the cold hospital, the neon darkness of a discotheque in town). I think he's driving for something that appears fragmentary but has more connective tissue than meets the eye.... not unlike how families grow as the children return home as adults.

The Vuillons seem to be wrested at the hands of eldest daughter Elizabeth who seems to always want to be at the center of some power struggle no matter how much she has to create one. Her reasons for "banishing" Henri from her sight are shoddy at best.... she claims to be worn down by his screw-ups throughout his whole life, so she pays off his debts in one swoop and then announces she never wishes to interact with him again. Boy, does that make family get-togethers awkward. Instead of demanding answers or counseling her in any other way, the family sort of goes with it, and in effect Elizabeth has sealed herself off from anything jolly the family ever has a hand in. It's interesting how her trajectory plays, though, because she is absolutely convinced she has done the right thing.... and is blind to the fact that her consistent misery might have something to do with the fact that she's a heartless bitch.

But Henri's no angel.... we learn that mental instability runs in the family, and Henri is just jumping on the bandwagon. Maybe he's even faking it. Elizabeth's teenage son is starting to show signs of early schizophrenia, and apparently younger Vuillon son Ivan has been miraculously cured in adulthood of his similar teenage affliction. Henri makes some wild outbursts when home with the fam, and somehow his not-so-much-a-bombshell bombshell girlfriend sits back and politely laughs about it all. The family seems complacent in Henri's edginess, but that could just be denial talking. You'd think this was an American family.

To try to divulge all the inner workings of this family would take a good long while.... but why bother? Even if there's a shoehorned topsy-turvy love affair at the end, does that change our view of a family teetering on the edge? I left the film with only flatline words to describe it, like "weird" or "strange", but only in terms of subject matter.... to be hoenst, at face-value, it seems pretty straightforward.

The core of the story sits between Junon and Henri, and in some part with Elizabeth's son. Junon, recently diagnosed with a rare cancer, is in need of a bone marrow donor.... and both Henri and Elizabeth's son have the perfect matches. And here in lies the dilemma: Junon would be happy to accept either as a donor, but what does it mean to have the bone marrow of a schizophrenic teenager transplanted into you? What does it mean to have the bone marrow of a child how was unable to save a previous child from a similar death? How do each of these players feel about it?

The movie clocks in at 150 minutes, and it feels like a stretch. There's lots of interesting drama, but not much explanation of its roots; the viewer occupies the spot of Henri's bombshell (?) girlfriend here, the outsider thrust into this world without much background. I can't help but think of a handful of scenes (hell, subplots) that could have ended up on the cutting room floor, and perhaps some filling in of the blanks behind Elizabeth's and Henri's separate madnesses. Why not spend more time on the schizophrenic grandson's illness, why not pull his thoughts/fears/feelings to the forefront? Where are the connections between him and hius uncles? More coloring within the lines is needed. But this is a family drama, and unlike recent American family dramas I've seen of late (Christmas types no less.... The Family Stone, anyone?), this movie feels like it's aiming to strike deeper, and at least does the pick-axeing necessary to get started.

!! link me !!
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-- New York Film Festival --

NYFF dispatch #1: harrowing pet stories and trains trains everywhere

2008-09-18T12:58:00.005-04:00

Next week opens the 46th New York Film Festival, brought to you by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. And, like most fall-season film festivals, the selection list is crammed with movies both underground arty and fodder for Oscars. Like most fall-season film festivals, the selection list masquerades as premiere-worthy when in reality these films have seen small audiences earlier in the year. But, luckily for me, I've been tasked with writing festival dispatches for FilmLinc, and I have the rare opportunity to see a handful of the films offered by the NYFF.... and let my true opinions let out into the wild on this very blog you (yes, you!) are reading.

My first foray into the press screening experience? Wendy and Lucy, a hyper-minimal and very film-festival-friendly entry by director Kelly Reichardt (who wielded similar minimalism, I've read, with her previous film Old Joy).

Down-and-dirty plot summary: Wendy is homeless and jobless and headed to Alaska in her Honda for reliable work in the canneries. Her companion and roadtrip partner is her dog Lucy. Just outside of Portland, her car gives out; she's got $500 to her name and can't afford to fix it. She's run out of dog food. She shoplifts said dog food, gets arrested for it, and we're treated to a memorable and heartbreaking shot through the back windshield of the police car of Lucy tied to a bike rack and faithfully waiting at the door of the supermarket. Wendy's left with nowhere to go and no means to get anywhere, and without her dog she finds herself truly and undeniably lost.

This is a kind of road-film, but I like that it opens in a way where Wendy is ultimately caught in a feedback-loop odyssey; this is a road film without any roading. It's probably too reductive to say that the movie is about Wendy's search for Lucy, because that's only one piece to the puzzle. Down to its bones, this is an atmospheric and behavioral film rather than one that adheres to Aristotelian rules of story and structure; every little scene that highlights Wendy's impending collision course with rock-bottom is as much what the movie is about as it is about trying to find her lost companion.

Nary a shot goes by without Michelle Williams, she of “Dawson's Creek” and Jack-nasty, who carries this entire film on her shoulders. Unfortunately, she's saddled with an awkward Mary-Martin-goes-goth haircut. I think the jury's still out for me on whether I think Williams is a high-caliber actress, and part of me thinks that she approaches the role about as well as any unknown-but-reasonably-talented actress would. Wendy is, after all, awfully destitute, but not to the point of going a bit wacky (unlike a small troupe of tattooed drifters she meets near the film's opening). Her performance is quiet and even-keeled, but she approaches each situation of Wendy's as dead-eyed and helpless.... What doesn't move me into full-fledged sympathy for Wendy, especially after losing Lucy, is that fact that Williams treats Lucy dead-eyed and helpless as well. A movie that is titled Wendy and Lucy, after all, must require some degree of chemistry between the title characters.... and I never quite feel it.

Still, movies that involve pets separated from their loving families always tug at my heart strings. How can they not? They highlight that gray area where humans and their pets simply can't communicate in the way that says “stay close to me”.... any amount of unforeseen difficulties, even worse when they're accidental, can separate a pet from its owner, and each one of these difficulties always ends in helpless loss. Of course, most media on the subject isn't so heartless that owner-and-pet end up separated forever, but the fear still lingers. Suffice it to say, after watching Wendy and Lucy, I wanted nothing more than to go straight home and snuggle with my cat, whether he wanted to snuggle or not.

Kelly Reichardt, the director, came to the press screening and answered a few questions from the audience after the film was over. The film is based on the short story “Train Choir” by Portland-native Jonathan Raymond (whose work Reichardt had previously drawn from for Old Joy), shot over 20 days on location around Portland, and self-edited in her apartment in New York City. Reichardt’s vision of Wendy translates to film quite well, and she proves herself to be a director of startling control in crafting Wendy’s awareness of the day-to-day, veering away from the “big picture” because, in the end, Wendy can’t afford to cast her net so wide. I did find some nagging things unforgivably problematic, though: The way this film “resolves” between Wendy and Lucy feels like much was left on the cutting room floor, though I got the impression from Reichardt that this wasn't the case. If Wendy decides that Lucy would be much better off to live in the backyard of some old guy's house outside of Portland, we're gonna need a lot more convincing of this fact than just a fence-enclosed yard and the old guy owning a Prius. For Wendy to decide that Lucy has found a better home, I would also need a little bit more work done on Wendy's part (and not the filmmaker's) of reflexively understanding that her life is bare-bones to the point that she'd be doing the dog a favor by leaving her behind. Even though this point is made clear in the big picture of things, I never get the sense of that coming from Wendy herself.... and, I dunno, I feel like that's something integral to the story if this is the movie's closing statement.

There is another element to the film that seemed almost hyper-aware and heavy-handed, and I'm quite surprised none of the people who asked questions during the Q&A brought it up. I'll bet someone a cookie that not one minute of outdoor screentime goes past without the occurrence of the sound of a train. Seriously. Whistles, horns, squealing tracks, ratcheting. It's everywhere. Some of the time is forgivable, sure, but all of the time is the filmmaker stepping in and bitch-slapping the audience. I'm totally willing to go with it when trains are on screen, even some of the time off screen, but these train noises are at all hours. My careful and studied detective skills find that maybe the inspiring short story “Train Choir” might have something to do with that. The last shot of the movie is of Wendy staring out into the night woods from the open car of a freight train. Lots of train sounds. I am a lover of trains and they've been known to pop up from time to time in my own short fiction.... I suppose trains-as-symbol in Wendy and Lucy highlights the transience of Wendy's predicament.... but there's just too much. Maybe some subtlety should be in order.

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-- New York Film Festival --

necrophilia for all

2008-09-08T12:42:00.000-04:00

Although in recent years I've turned into a voracious reader, it only happens once or twice a year that I find a work of literary fiction that grabs me by the lapels and pulls me to the end in a breathless flurry of page-turning. This year’s most recent recipient of this honor: Waste by Eugene Marten.

Marten seems to be one of those underground lit writers who have little attention paid to them yet develop a small but excitable and loyal cult following. Think Gary Lutz or Dawn Raffel. Like both Lutz and Raffel, Marten is a "disciple" of Gordon Lish (he who launched Raymond Carver’s career, and he who can be tied by one degree of separation to (ballpark) 75% of the best contemporary literary fiction writers out there).... although I don’t believe that Marten was taught or schooled by Lish. To hear Lish’s raves in the blurbs he’s given to Marten for both Waste and his previously published novel In the Blind, it sounds as though Marten is more of a Lish discovery than a Lish student. Not much is publicly known about the guy (google searches don’t turn up much).... what little digging I’ve managed to do makes it sound like Waste was self-published first, followed by Lish’s championing to get In the Blind sold to an actual publishing house. Waste finally got its professional publishing treatment just last month. With this guy’s first two (and only two) novels, I'm a rabid fan.

Both novels provide a very close-up perspective on two lonely, disaffected men. Both novels give the reader an inside view of these two men’s occupations (the former of a locksmith, the latter of a skyscraper janitor) and beautifully illuminates the minutiae of these jobs into something almost symphonic.... and once we're able to see past the details and fixations on these jobs, the greater character study comes into play.

Where In the Blind provides more historical context to allow us to see how the protagonist evolves into the person he is, Waste plays all its cards at once. I'd hate to get categorical, but Waste seems to follow directly in the footsteps of the Southern Gothic tradition (language-wise, certainly.... think William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy). I don't have a truckload of literary criticism to back this up, but let's just say that our protagonist loner also has an affinity for necrophilia.

What is it about having sex with dead people that is so fascinating to writers of this oeuvre? Hell, it's fascinating to readers like me, so clearly there's a market. And this isn't a rare occurrence: think McCarthy's Child of God (you get a whole cavern full of dead girls there), think William Gay's recent novel Twilight (undertaker takes advantage of his clientèle, so to speak), think Faulkner's short story classic "A Rose for Emily" (with gender roles reversed, this woman keeps her lover in her bed years long after he's expired). Even outside of the Southern Gothic box you can point to examples of classic British literature: In Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, you've got one of the main characters digging up his beloved and having his way with the exhumed body. Of course, with a more Victorian sensibility the prose is subtle as hell to describe his actions.... but oh yes, he's having sex with a corpse.

Marten takes a cue from McCarthy's book of tricks and just goes for the gusto. I'm certainly the kind of reader who goes crazy for imagery (minimalism be damned!), and despite how graphic and unsettling it is, the quality of the writing is so elevated and beautiful that you can only help but tag along. Why bother shrouding necrophilia in innuendo when you can just come out and tell it like it is? Both protagonists of Waste and Child of God first happen to stumble upon their deceased sex objects by accident: one in a dumpster, the other in an abandoned car. Perhaps it's this idea that the characters are so helpless to their hidden urges that the fact they accidentally come across the bodies makes them more identifiable? Identity with the protagonists, at least in terms of what turns them on, isn't what concerns us readers: I'm sure we're in it in part for the lurid show of it all, but I think there's a bit of acknowledgment of the curiosity that desperation can engender as well.

It's interesting, though, how literary fiction as "art" with regards to something this heinous can get away with this.... but the "art" applied to film may not be so forgiving. I can't imagine fare such as Child of God or Twilight or Waste translating to film without seriously compromising the integrity of the story. I mean, how exactly could you film something like that? [side note: I have similar concerns about the forthcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winner The Road. Although no dead people are sexually exploited, the subject matter of the novel is pitch black and awfully bleak (cannibalism among one of the more sensational topics), and I'll be interested to see how audiences respond to something like that.... also interested to see if the filmmakers dare to inject some levity in there somewhere.]

Necrophilia aside, Eugene Marten is a fantastic literary talent who deserves a broader audience so that he can stand aside heavyweights like McCarthy. I'm just hoping he's got another finished novel out there he's ready to kick into distribution.....

sometimes blogger

2008-09-08T08:27:00.003-04:00

I took the summer off! And traveled from coast to coast.... quite a few times.

But still, damn it, the blog calls for me to air my opinions. Despite the Election '08! crap that is spewed on every minute of every news program, I WILL NOT be writing about politics. Never. It only inspires ire on the part of all parties involved.

But I have read a few good books. And saw a few good movies, thanks to the 35th Telluride Film Festival, where I was a volunteer.

And, I ask all two of you, aren't you excited to hear more?

a few (grudgingly relented) words on the unholy mess of the 2008 presidential race

2008-05-14T14:41:00.006-04:00

I suppose it can't be ignored. I finally have to write about the damn 2008 race for president.

Major gripes (to get them out of the way):

***1*** There is such an obscene amount of attention paid to this Democratic Party nomination mumbo-jumbo, you can't get through ten minutes of ANY newscast without it popping up. Is it because Hillary Clinton is a woman? Is it because Barack Obama is black? Is it because the race of delegates is so close the media is itching to declare one or the other dead? How about the real agenda: let's take the news off the war in Iraq!

***2*** About the itch to declare one of the potential nominees dead: The media's been chomping at the bit to toss the first fistful of dirt onto Hillary Clinton's coffin for months. But she's the motherfucking Energizer Bunny and she's not going anywhere until it is a done deal. I don't quite imagine her taking this to a 2004-Manchurian Candidate level (as JJ posits), but she's not stepping aside that easily.

***3*** Exit polls. At this stage the odds may be against Clinton, but they're not impossible. And yet people are screaming for her to get out of the race? If people seem so convinced by exit polls, then why bother with an election in the first place? The political pundits (who become more and more disgusting the more I see them.... I'm talking to you, George Stephanopoulos) appear literally offended by the idea that Clinton will take this race all the way to the convention. God forbid.... but wait. Isn't that the point of a political party convention? To announce the candidate?

***4*** Polarizing the Democractic party. Why are people so so so willing to spew vitriol about whether Obama or Clinton is a better candidate? To this day I still don't see much of a difference between the two.... they both would make fine presidents. Their policies are so much the same that one would really have to nitpick to get to anything resembling a marked difference. That said, there are people in this world who would rant and rave to their dying day that this isn't the case. One has to be better than the other, right? Or maybe that's just what the news is trying to make you think.

As I grow older, the less enamored I am with the news media. Of course I still somewhat fetishize local news anchors, but that doesn't change the fact that the media becomes so much more transparent with each passing month about trying to inform your opinion of just about anything. And nothing like a presidential race to get them all warm and tingly inside. The race for the Democratic nominee is not (and never was) locked up tight, so it just seems that by piling on the attention to it they want you to polarize. They want you to have strong feelings about one or the other. They want you to put aside your feelings on whether or not Clinton or Obama will actually be good at the job. They want you to develop your gut instinct. They want to get dirty.

As I grow older, I also hate politics more and more. I hate getting in political conversations with people because it's the perfect place for people to feel comfortable to at last voice their opinion. And oh the opinions people have. I have my own opinions (opinions are like assholes.... everybody's got one), and I don't care enough about them to get into a neck-straining argument with someone over it. I just don't care that much. Maybe I'm the perfect example of a jaded American who thinks they can't make a difference.... because that's the way I feel. Picking Obama or Clinton, in the long run, isn't going to make a bit of difference; they probably would make the same plans and do the same things. They both campaign on their promise of change (a tactically sneaky docket to be on, considering of course the flagrant display of dick-measuring the Bush administration has forced on the world), but somehow someone warped that into Obama as the only one seeking change. Obama talks and talks and talks about how he won't pander to all the special interest groups that use our government like marionettes, in hopes that you'll believe that Clinton is someone that would. The ugly truth is that Obama is (or will be) just as entangled with special interest groups as he claims Clinton already is. That's just how things work. In fact, EVERY presidential candidate, on both sides of the aisle, pontificate versions of this down-with-special-interests campaign. They really do. Find me one presidential candidate who hasn't.

All that said, I really don't care who becomes the Democratic nominee. I really don't. Just get it over with and be done with it already. I've come to the point where I just won't watch or read or listen to anything involving the 2008 presidential race. I turn off the TV. The talk and talk and talk has been so cloying and so predictive and so nauseatingly similar that I just can't have that shit in my head. No thanks.

I suppose I have my reasons why I prefer Clinton over Obama, and for that matter why I prefer Obama over Clinton, but they're not enough to get riled up about. I don't have one of those flaky "I just don't like him/her" arguments that the news loves to sneak in there with their on-the-street interviews. That's just not good enough. The things that Obama and Clinton say are not their own words.... they're the words of careful campaign planning set at a steady simmer. They'll say whatever they have to say to get your vote. Is Obama really that good of a speaker? I don't think so, but that's what everyone wants you to think. Is Clinton really that much of a doer? Probably not, because that woman's got a lot of baggage in the way. Besides, I think Obama AND Clinton, whoever ends up as the nominee, have such an uphill battle in the way of the crap that's left behind in the White House, neither of them can really flip everything around.

And so that leads me to a few words about John McCain. If there's somebody's sincerity I believe, it's his. Certainly his over Obama's or Clinton's. The problem is.... I really don't like what he's got planned. Perpetuating the cancer of the Bush administration on our country and our planet is really really really not what I'm going for, so unless he plans on completely changing his strategy, he will not be getting my vote. I'd like to say something less substantial like "Oh, he's too old", but that's a fickle argument. That didn't bother people who voted for Ronald Reagan, who was well on his way to La-La-Land even in his first term. It didn't bother people who voted for Bush with Dick Cheney, he of brimstone smile and occluded arteries. Even if it is cute to poke fun of McCain's age, at say this blog for instance (the Golden Gate Bridge! ha!), it's not that big of a reason to vote against him. Unless of course he chooses a real whack-job for a vice president, who would take charge in the event McCain dies in office.

I'd like for one of these three candidates, honestly, to address the fascist slum den that the United States government has become. I want them to address the fact that someone has neutered both the Senate and the House of Representatives. I want them to address that "checks and balances" has kicked the Supreme Court out of the car a hundred miles back at some abandoned gas station. I want them to address the fact that somehow the title of President has allowed a horrifying perversion of executive-branch power. I want them to address the people who are guilty of these crimes, and I want them to address the fact that these people are accountable for those crimes.

And that'll get my vote.

papal choice awards

2008-04-15T14:53:00.007-04:00

Pope Benedict XVI is coming to the United States today for the first time in his papal career. The news here in New York City just can't enough of it. The plane the dude is on hasn't even touched American soil and everyone is atwitter.

(Bonus info: The Pope's plane is called Shepherd 1. Shepherd 1!? Isn't that hilarious? And those news casters don't even crack a smile! I'm also quite amused that it is commonplace to refer to the Pope's motorcade as the "Popemobile".)

I'm not sure what all the hulabaloo is about. Is it because the Pope is going to visit President Bush? If I were coming to the United States for the first time as Pope, I'd find better things to do than visit that whackjob. Once the Pope comes up to New York, apparently he's going to hang out with a bunch of rabbis at a synagogue for a few hours. And during Passover, wouldn't you know. Why is this news? Is it all that shocking that leaders of different faiths talk to each other? People, it's not the Crusades anymore.

Not only is the news jumping on the apparently sensational fact that this guy would actually speak to a Jew, they also keep "expecting" the Pope to address the sex abuse scandal that seems to be looming over the American Catholic church.... if the guy does have anything to say about it, it's not going to be terribly surprising that he'll condemn it. Does the press seriously expect him to support it? If anything, this is probably the best public opportunity of any importance to state that the United States is the master at demonstrating to the world to never underestimate the power of denial.

At least Benedict XVI is by no means as decrepit as John Paul II was. Despite how geriatric that guy got, he still paraded the planet like a Catholic rockstar.... no matter how much he grimaced in holy pain or how much baby food had to be spooned to him. The news keeps showing pictures of John Paul II hunched over and waving to people inside a bulletproof-glass box, like he's Eva Peron's corpse or something.

I'm curious though.... During the course of all this Pope-pourri on TV, it occurred to me that this guy goes by quite a number of titles:

--> Pope
--> Pontiff
--> Holy Father
--> His Holiness

....not to mention the endless Papal/Papacy conglomerates. How many synonymous titles does the Pope really need? In any case, the terms "papal" and "papacy" just make me think of the word papilla (which means something shaped like a nipple), or papule or pustule or pimple, or even polyp for that matter. I wonder if all these words have some sort of common etymological ancestor.

Maybe I should refer to the guy as His Papalness.

naming convention

2008-04-08T15:23:00.006-04:00

Let's talk Don DeLillo.

After being eviscerated by Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times (who, in a way, herself has become a cartoon character of vitriolic literary criticism) for his latest novel Falling Man in May 2007, I imagine he's probably working on another massive tome analyzing the trajectory of American culture in a (soon-to-be but not-soon-enough) post-George W. Bush United States. Considering nearly all of his novels are carefully sculpted studies of Americans and American perceptions (I've read six of his fifteen), I suppose this is what the DeLillo fan base is expecting.... The man has enough imagination to create a neverending list of varied events and characters in novels (all of them well-spoken and wont to deliver intricately woven self-aware monologues), so I always have faith that a DeLillo novel will not bore me.

That said, sometimes I get thrown off the wagon. Having just finished reading The Names, DeLillo's first novel to practically pitch him onto the literary scene as a household name and figure in many a Jeopardy answer, I'm stumbling upon a disappointing observation about the works of his that I've read. The Names was published in 1982 (his eighth novel at the time!) and was positioned in his literary career as the predecessor to White Noise. DeLillo certainly has a flair for setting and character, and his novels usually grab me without fail or without too much wriggling, but I reach a point somewhere in the last quarter of the book where I lose my footing. In The Names, for instance, I had been following the first-person narrator of an American journalist/writer-of-some-sort throughout his short time in Greece with his wife and child, to include his separation from that wife, to include his traveling about the Middle East and India, to include his fascination and subsequent investigation of a cult implicated in a serious of brutal murders based on typographical coinicidence.... and then suddenly I'm forced to focus in his 3rd person on a peripheral character who travails the Himalayan foothills of India. There's something about a lady going on a hunger strike too.

I finished The Names and considered it an okay read, but I was disappointed that the ending felt like a shoehorned non-sequitir. That said, I never lost confidence in DeLillo's intent on telling this story, despite pulling a ninety-degree turn on me.... I just kind of wanted him to finish telling me the story he started with. This is the same exact problem I ran into when I finished reading Running Dog, predecessor to The Names.... Running Dog had a much more playful story (it's about a porn/snuff film starring Adolf Hitler, yes, Adolf Hitler, and about the madcap crew of murdering underground art dealers that will do anything to get their hands on the footage), but the end seemed to trickle off with a seocndary character reenacting some kind of wartime training in the deserts of west Texas. Both Running Dog and The Names span a lot of locations, the former taking us from New York to Washington DC to Texas, the latter volleying between Greece and Jordan and India.... but neither novel has much of a commitment to circularity, oftentimes throwing us off the horse we rode in, in terms of both character and story. It seems what either of these novels is about, so to speak, doesn't really matter as the novel comes to a close.... they both seem to lift up into some existential ether that I'm not prepared for.

It's funny, because I can ascribe similar feelings to DeLillo's post-White Noise effort Mao II. Arguably a much easier read than the other three, Mao II seems to lose focus by switching between the dual lives of a Salinger/Pynchon-style hermit writer and his hidden passion for suicide-bomber-directing duties.

There's part of me that wishes that DeLillo would deliver on his promise from the get-go of his novels. Even the tail end of White Noise seems to derail into a meta-comic meditation not exactly congruent with the tone of the rest of the novel. He exhibits such control and a good sense of pacing, but it seems that somewhere around when the ending should appear, he gets bored or decides to ninja star his way through what he started and put us somewhere new. In the case of White Noise I'd say he's most successful.... and I'm not saying that because it's one of my favorite novels of all time. Terrorism, of all kinds, is an unarguable theme through the lot of DeLillo's work, but I think sometimes it gets the best of him.... whereas the world of White Noise is terrorized by a noxious cloud of gas, Running Dog and The Names and Mao II seem more apt to transport us from a world we know and are firmly established in for 200+ pages into a somewhat-sensational boobs-booze-'n'-bombs spyglass. For instance, when I start a novel about a reporter on the hunt to find a mythic Hitler porn film (already a plot description that sells for me all the way), I don't want to end the book crawling on hands and knees through sagebrush and in Texas with an black ops army trainee turned art broker turned terrorist trainee. There's something about that that I didn't sign up for.

silver tranny ferocia

2008-04-07T15:57:00.006-04:00

Perhaps one of the greatest SNL parodies in recent memory. The best way to skewer a cartoon character borne of a reality show is to play it as close to real life as possible.

Amy Poehler = comedic impression genius

my television is still on

2008-04-03T13:40:00.009-04:00

Instead of apologizing to my faithful readership of three about the infrequency of blog posts, instead I shall apologize for the lack of literary oomph that I wish I gave these infrequent rantings. By literary, I mean books. I'm reading all the time and never seem to comment much about it, usually reserving my soap box steam for how television shows are f-ing up the chance to actually do something worth quality.

But before I get to the books.... I might as well revel in my standard charms:

* I recently got turned on to the SciFi channel's "Battlestar Galactica".... I haven't heard one bad word about it in the midst of its current four year run, and now I see why. Having barely scraped the tip of the iceberg in Season 1, this show has all the tight writing and tricky reveals that I want without being overtly smug or unconfident. (Did you hear that, executives of "Lost"?) I want to fly up to speed on this show because the fourth season premiere is.... tomorrow, I believe.

* "Top Chef" has returned for a fourth season in a conspicuously summery Chicago, and although the game is the same (Padma predictably gorgeous, Colicchio predictably cranky, Gail Simmons predictably part-time, and Ted Allen predictably useless) I'm starting to see some cracks in its reality-competition facade. There is a small part of me that wants to believe that the judges actually do vote off those whose dishes don't come up to snuff, but the last two episodes have shown some blatant favoritism for those who have the potential to stir up drama down the road. Two weeks ago they voted off biker-with-a-heart-of-gold Erik in favor of Zoi, who composes 1/2 of the four-year-long lesbian relationship "Top Chef" threw in to stir the pot. And this week they dumped Manuel, who I guess came off as too boring on screen, in favor of Spike, who is a shit-eating-grin scruffy-faced bowler-hat-wearing douchebag.

the 2008 oscars: my 1/50 of a U.S. dollar

2008-03-04T13:51:00.013-05:00

So, it's been now just over a week since the Oscars have come and gone, and like I have most years, this year I holed up beside my TV with wine and white trash picnic food. The hullabaloo about "will there or won't there be an Oscars this year?!?" because of the increasingly self-indulgent WGA strike seemed like such a moot point. Like all things in the media (re: Clinton vs. Obama), it was being made a much bigger deal than it actually was. Once upon a time, the Oscars wasn't even televised at all, so why would there be concern? If actors threaten not to show up because of the strike.... then don't televise it! Let them have the damn ceremony anyway. It would be better than the embarrassing auto-fellatio of the Golden Globes "press conference" this year which announced the winners in lieu of the typical drinking party. I couldn't get past more than five minutes of that without my stomach turning.

But I'm beating a dead horse. These were all potential snags which in the end didn't happen. The Oscars was its usual slightly-boring self (hence the necessity for wine and frito pie). Everyone got prettied up, awards went to mostly everyone that was expected (bravo to you people who chose Tilda Swinton in your respective Oscar pools), the hosting and presentation of awards was unmemorable, blah blah blah.

And now, my belated thoughts on some of the movies that were nominated and awarded:

*** Cate Blanchett. It’s no secret I love her. That said, I thought I’m Not There was kind of slow, maybe too self-indulgent with it’s Bob-Dylan-but-wait-it’s-not-Bob-Dylan premise, and too much a blitz of ACTING!!! on behalf of each and every one of the main cast. So, I thought her performance in the film was more of a hat-trick (re: acting for the sake of acting) than something passionate and transcendent. Also: Why is everyone hating on Elizabeth: The Golden Age? The movie, folks, really wasn’t terrible at all, but people felt the need to beat up on it anyway. That, and Blanchett’s fiery performance plays as a nice evolution from the first Elizabeth and was certainly deserving of the nomination she got. (Oscar trivia: Three women over the last twenty-ish years to be nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year (Sigourney Weaver, Julianne Moore, and this year Cate Blanchett) have had a three-for-three losing streak. All the men who’ve been nominated twice for acting in the Oscars' history, though, have won at least one of their categories.)

*** Juno. Cute movie. I quite liked it. Best Picture worthy? Hell no. I find it somewhat disturbing that when teenage pregnancy is depicted on film or television, it’s usually a cute romp (re: Saved!, Juno).... except that’s almost resolutely NOT how it happens in real life. I think it’d be a bigger challenge to show how teenage pregnancy actually plays, sans the usual sass-talking precocious teenager. I’m getting a little tired of too-wise-for-their-age acid-tongued teens in movies; I think they show up so much because that’s how writers and producers wished they were as teenagers, and not a reflection of how the vast majority of teenagers actually are. My marks against Juno are mostly about the quippy dialogue (aside from Dwight Schrute playing Dwight Schrute, a character that doesn’t even belong in the world that Juno establishes, and is one of the most derailing openings to a movie I have ever seen).... most reviled by me is the line “honest to blog”, which I have a hard time hearing aloud let alone allowing myself to believe that kids think that that’s cool to say. Also: Diablo Cody, writer of Juno, wins Best Original Screenplay, and accepts the award dressed like Pebbles Flintstone. Last week’s "Saturday Night Live" offered a brilliant parody during Ellen Page’s (star of Juno, host of last week’s "SNL") opening monologue, with Andy Samberg dressed in Diablo Cody drag. Samberg’s firing of the tiresome over-witty dialogue from Juno (including “honest to blog”) was pitch-perfect, and offered a much needed lambaste of a film whose detractors have been driven into hiding.

*** Tilda Swinton. Great actress. She looked like a cadaver.

*** No Country For Old Men. Great movie. Even greater book. Nice to see Cormac McCarthy in the audience be the first to stand and applaud for them.... because it’s his story, after all. Too bad the Coen Brothers won Best Adapted Screenplay.... the adaptation is so faithful they practically dropped McCarthy’s book into an automatic screenplay generator. I think another film deserved the award instead (Away From Her, anyone?).

*** Gary Busey kissed Jennifer Garner’s neck on the red carpet. Inappropriate: absolutely. Reflection of what we all deep-down wanted to do: absolutely.

In other news, I’m (hopefully) jumping back on the blog wagon after a hiatus to be a writer. Now the book is done, so I can turn my writerly hobby to more cynical pursuits.

the great american collection of short stories

2008-01-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

....turns out I'm writing one, and it's due the first week in March.

Sorry to all those who were thinking this post would be about Flannery O'Connor. I've got my own writing to freak out about, lest I compare myself to the master herself.

Never fear. Hiatuses can be broken for my two cents about this year's oscars.

my guilty pleasure hath a name: American Gladiators

2008-01-21T19:28:00.000-05:00

To my knowledge, the recently exhumed incarnation of "American Gladiators" has received some pretty crappy reviews. Those crappy reviews, however, don't keep me away from the show.... a show that (when I first heard the news of its resurrection) I couldn't wait to start.

Why?

Flashback to the early 1990s camp-a-thon "American Gladiators", where steroid-pumped failed actors with stage names like "Nitro" and "Thunder" kicked the shit out of everyday-American peons who thought that nerf jousting looked easier than it actually was. This show was very much a staple of my childhood primetime television lineup.

Now, with a re-jigged set and reality show makeover (instead of everyday peons fighting for a new car and a lot of cash, these new contestants fight for a position as Gladiator (stage name to be determined) and a lot of cash), "American Gladiators" is reaping the benefits of the WGA strike wasteland of non-scripted television. Hosted by Hulk Hogan (yes!) and Laila Ali (who?), this show is also reining in the viewers who loved WWF in the 1980s and 1990s on sheer Hulk love alone. I don't feel there's much to explain about my guilty pleasure drive to watch the show, just the fact that it's vapid entertainment that I can cheer along to the TV with. I usually can't stomach any form of reality show (except for my beloved "Top Chef", the 4th season of which is starting soon), but "Gladiators" kind of skirts that issue by reigniting the original cheez-fest with a late 2000s gloss and burying the whole prize-winning aspect beneath the timed tests of strength and agility.

Instead of swathed in comic book red-white-and-blue spandex, the new gladiators squeeze themselves into silver and black, and (thankfully) look less freakish than those in the early 1990s. Not all gladiators are the exception, though, including overactors "Wolf" (the picture at left should say it all) and "Toa" (right), who is trying much too hard to channel an Aztec warlord or something. The silvery loincloth he wears probably isn't helping. Bodybuilding women have never been an appealing set to me, so thankfully these gladiator girls are less muscle-pumped and a little more feminine, while still exuding the sexy allure of being able to kick your ass. Gladiator Hottie Award goes to "Crush" (left), whereas Gladiator Tranny Award goes to "Fury", with "Hellga" (both right, and needfully smaller-sized) being a runner-up. *shudder*

My favorite renovation of the show? ASSAULT, where the contestant attempts to dodge a tennis ball pitching machine wielded by a gladiator in hopes of hitting a bullseye above said gladiator's head. When the target is hit, the gladiator gets launched into a pool. How awesome is that?

In related news, I hope the writers' strike doesn't go on forever.

[Side note: Does anyone remember the episode of "Family Matters" where Urkel and Carl were contestants on "American Gladiators"? Filmed at the height of Gladiator popularity, that episode very well may have been the most effective cross-programmatic advertising for the sitcom-viewing set I have ever seen.]

judging a movie by its inanely crappy title

2008-01-13T20:06:00.001-05:00

Pardon my recent vacations. I've missed you all too.

Now onto more pressing concerns:

Can someone in Hollywood PLEASE stop greenlighting movies with shitty titles? Exhibit 1: Definitely, Maybe. Horrible premise, problematic casting, and an excruciatingly terribly title. Would you go to a movie called "Definitely, Maybe" on the title alone? What the hell are you supposed to know about a movie called that? Think even more baseline: would you bother picking up a book called "Definitely, Maybe"? A magazine? A free newspaper? Even if just for the crossword puzzle?

Let's not even get into the problems that this title runs into in the correct-English department. Is it too much to ask to have appropriately syntactic titles as well?

The movie looks to be a grotesque redemptive feel-good have-faith-in-families love story where no one ends up angry and characters who should end up hating others likely don't. Ryan Reynolds (who?) plays a single dad to young Oscar-nominated Abigail Breslin. Wait a minute.... did this character have his daughter when he was 12? Ryan Reynolds looks about old enough to still get carded in bars. And he's sort of cross-eyed. Meanwhile, Breslin gets to play the precocious and too-smart-for-her-age little girl who has a better barometer for her father's well-being than he does. Reality check: are there any movies or TV shows anymore that don't have pre-teens who have a better handle on life than their elders?

twas the night before christmas

2007-12-24T10:10:00.000-05:00

When I think of what I most love aesthetically about Christmas, I always come back to the paintings of Scott Gustafson in an edition of Clement C. Moore's poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (the more popularized name, but the original is titled "A Visit from St. Nicholas"), my favorite of which is below:

And now I posit a Christmas conundrum. Sugarplums: tasty holiday treat, or magical dancing Victorian gremlins?

Merry Christmas!

(I swear I'm not just posting pictures for blog filler. In the case of this post, I really do love this painting.)

a brief window into the extremes of my sense of humor

2007-12-09T16:44:00.001-05:00

Provided to be my whirling phoenix, who really knows me all too well:

Thanksgiving, with all the fixings of a short film

2007-12-06T22:11:00.000-05:00

"White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved."

....brought to you by
seul-le-cinema's & culture snob's
Short Film Week 2007 blog-a-thon

Back in April of this year came the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino schlock film spectacular Grindhouse, a double whammy homage to the dead art of low-budget camp cinema. Rodriguez first gave the zombie gore-fest Planet Terror (my favorite part: zombies that explode on impact when hit by a truck), followed by Tarantino's talkier revenge flick Death Proof (my favorite part: Rosario Dawson's cowboy boots). But in between, the two directors had to ice the cake with the true grindhouse cinema experience: trailers for more schlock. What's interesting is that these trailers are all spoof.... they're not referring to actual forthcoming films, but instead each are made as a kind of movie within a movie.

So.... some see the much-enjoyed Grindhouse trailers as a bit of easter-egg fun. But, after seeing them a handful of times, I think Rodriguez and Tarantino aspire them to be (and in some cases, have each achieve being) their own short films.

Hence, my favorite: Thanksgiving. If every other holiday gets their own direct-to-VHS campy horror movie, guest director Eli Roth bestows upon us a slasher film for Turkey Day, with everything we could ever hope for in just under two and a half minutes.

What makes Thanksgiving particularly special, though, is its attention to detail of what it parodies. It's no surprise that the best spoofs are those that worship the ground that the originals walk on, and Roth (I imagine) is no stranger to the dusty video-rental shelf of horror schlock. His previous films fall into the unfortunate genre of belligerent torture porn (a sub-sect of horror that does not interest me in the least bit, for it sacrifices story for the most intricate and brutal death one can imagine, ad nauseum), such as Hostel and Cabin Fever. But for Roth to want to bring movies like these to light, he must have been reared on the never-heard-of-'em low budget horror movies that sneak their way onto late-night cable. So, needless to say, a movie such as what the trailer for Thanksgiving purports to be is reaching only to be trash, with a high teenage body count and a lot of fake blood.... hence why this trailer (read: short film) is so hilarious.

Because of this self-awareness, because of this wink to the they're-not-joking-around trailers for movies of grindhouse cinema, because of the loving over-the-top detail, a trailer like Thanksgiving, to me, seems more like a short film. I don't necessarily have an argument for what makes a short film and what makes a campy experiment, but Thanksgiving seems to tell its whole story to us, using the unique lens of format like a movie trailer: Random serial killer slasher stalks Plymouth, Massachusetts and kills members of the Thanksgiving parade, kills lots of high school students wearing letterman jackets, and kills a neighborly grandmother after she's done fixing the Thanksgiving meal. How is this any different, might you ask, than your average uninspired slasher film? Exactly.... except to wink at it and make it absolutely ludicrous is what elevates the material.... this slasher movie (short film) is inspired.

And that's where Roth gets to have his fun.... the schlock horror standards are in place (masked slasher, high school students, gratuitous boob shots, lots of oral sex), so why not throw in a hilarious trying-to-be-deep-voiced narrator? ("This Thanksgiving, there will be no leftovers.") A turkey that oozes blood? Lots of split-second decapitations? A shirtless cheerleader who lands the splits on a trampoline.... with a knife sticking up out of it? Or, my favorite, what to do with the neighborly grandmother after she's been roasted?

I don't have some grand conclusion here about the bending-of-rules of short filmmaking.... I suppose that when I learned about the opportunity to write about my reaction to short films in general, thanks to Ed of Only the Cinema, the trailers from Grindhouse are what sprung to mind first. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the world of short films and wish that I had a chance to see them more often, because they're as much a mode of storytelling as a novel or a short story or a play or a movie.

Besides, it should be noted, the very first of Grindhouse's (hilarious) trailers, Machete ("They just fucked with the wrong Mexican"), is actually going to be made into a film, directed by Robert Rodriguez. How's that for short film inspiration? Fancy that.

flaw flaunt

2007-11-30T19:12:00.000-05:00

It seems common sense to me that a protagonist (main character, etc, call it what you will) should have inner complications, a sort of personal struggle with what he/she considers right versus wrong in the face of what the world considers right versus wrong. I've been learning about this since the first writing workshop I set foot into, and it seems I still loll back into the same old non-complicating ways. Put into practice in my own fiction, I find making my main characters multi-faceted in this regard to be more difficult than I would imagine it to be.... I wouldn't say that they're not flawed, but they tend to be "normal" or single-minded in a world of more colorful characters. I think I'm afraid of making my main characters ugly, or at least giving them the ability to do ugly things. This is something I need to get over. Complicated and flawed central protagonists are more interesting than one-note benevolent do-gooders.

Leading to another bullet of storytelling maxim: main characters should incite action, not let action happen to them. Too often I have things happen to the main character instead of the main character making things happen. Like I said before, it's a cop out, and it's easy, and I think that's why I keep stumbling over it. Oh, but I'm not the only one.

Instead of listing all the wonderful examples of flawed/warped/ugly central protagonists (you won't have to look hard, they're often times the very element that makes a story/novel/movie as good as it is), I thought I'd bring to light two examples that present the opposite.

1. Dave Eggers' novel What is the What, finalist for this year's National Book Award in fiction, is the story of a Sudanese refugee recounting his horrific nomad childhood as he lives and schools in the United States as an adult. I'm almost finished with the book, and as is the case with all of Eggers' writing, it's quite enjoyable. I don't think it's his most accessible read, but I find myself wrapped in the story and gaining a history lesson and awareness of political oppression in eastern Africa. The problem? The main character, Valentino Achak Deng (told from the first person, based on true accounts of the actual person mixed with tales of other Sudanese refugees), seems to be utterly flawless. As we read, we're viewing the world through the lens of his awareness of the absolute chaos reigning over southern Sudan and the devastating plight of refugees across eastern Africa. At every point, Valentino is the subject of events that are always happening upon his people.... and this is not a bad thing if it is the inciting incident of the novel, but instead the entire novel is fraught with his passive participation. Not many people can seem worse than the faceless horde of mass murderers that the Sudanese government is made out to be, but Valentino is positively angelic. We trace his adolescence and his naiveté with little regard to any *personality* on his part. He's always a witness, doe-eyed and a passive participant of it all. We're given the impression that he becomes an active speaker and demonstrator once he arrives in the United States, but not given much proof that he has a personality to be such a person. Even in the present plane of the novel in "today's" United States, Valentino is *still* the victim of events; he is robbed and beaten in his own house and is neglected by the staff at a hospital.

2. Maybe you've noticed ABC's recent attempt at resurrecting the nighttime soap with freshman show "Dirty Sexy Money". The basic premise is that a filthy rich New York socialite family can't put on their underwear without the help of a family lawyer, and they hire a family friend to do so in the wake of said lawyer's death. The main character here, played by "Six Feet Under" alum (not to mention from "Cybill" too, a favorite of mine from eleven or twelve years ago) Peter Krause, struggles against the over-the-top decadence of this family and mops up their messes at every turn. I don't need to go into detail about each of the family members' dysfunctions (though Donald Sutherland is perfectly cast as the pristine patriarch), except for the fact that the writers of the show have decided to make Krause's character absolutely perfect. This guy can do no wrong. He even donates the money he earns to build parks for disadvantaged city children! He is every step the moral center, has his head screwed on straighter than anyone else in this world, has an infinite amount of patience, and in his spare time is trying on his Nancy Drew shoes to find out if his father was murdered (the show's attempt at a serial storyline). It doesn't matter what mess what family member has gotten themselves into, Krause's character is always there to hold their hand and guide them to the light, grudgingly or not. What gets me the most? He knows *from the very pilot episode* that this family will be his undoing (and likely the completely unsurprising catalyst for his divorce.... stay tuned for Season 2, I guess) and that they're troublesome ways are more trouble than they're worth; i.e. he never incites action, but instead the family incites action on him. But he plugs along, with more ethics than a sunny early 1960s sitcom.

Bottom line: What is the What and "Dirty Sexy Money" aren't bad, but they'd be miles and miles more interesting if their main characters carried more weight instead of the story doing it for them in the background. For my money, What is the What is more worthwhile and "Dirty Sexy Money" needs some massive retooling in order to be more inherently interesting. I do find it curious, though, that these two are so popular in the face of such a fundamental storytelling flaw.

food network bobble-heads induce nightmares

2007-11-28T20:48:00.000-05:00

Every year the Food Network sends up the holiday season with "Season's Eatings" (ah, the punnery) and usually one-hour specials abound. This year, their marketing campaign features these frightening spectres:

I'm wondering who exactly on the Food Network totem pole finds these things appealing to the eye? Deciding that their home-grown celebrities (they prefer the term "All-Stars" for above-mentioned one-hour specials) were undeniably the recognizable pull to viewers' sensibilities, they decided that low-budget CGI bobble-heads of their All-Stars were the best way to ring in the holiday ratings. Missing from this line up as pictured above is Food Network darling Rachael Ray, but believe me, she has a wide-smiled bobble-head of her own too.

These things terrify me. More terrifying: the word "holidazzle", tacked to their billboards of these demon-creatures. "Holidazzle" is perhaps newly my least favorite advertising-spawned word.

Even scarier are the animated commercials on the Food Network, each character voiced by its actual human counterpart, using coined phrases by the human counterparts as they hawk non-denominational holiday dishes. Even more visible is the terrible production quality of these bobble-heads, with choppy animation and unnatural joint movements. Exactly who was behind designing these unholy beasts? Giada "knocked-up" DeLaurentiis should be offended by the harmonica-shaped smile they bestowed her CGI doppelganger. Paula Deen comes somewhat closer to reality where Alton Brown (I suppose that's him) is unrecognizable. Both Bobby Flay (yuck) and Guy Fieri (from a growing and disturbingly long line of "Next Food Network Star"s) look demonic, and Fieri more so like a stegosaur. I bet you Guy is stoked that he's been promoted up the "All-Star" ladder enough to earn himself his own hideous bobble-head.

Dear Food Network, what the f*ck were you thinking?

creepy factor: HIGH

the greatest thanksgiving scene ever committed to film

2007-11-22T10:26:00.000-05:00

Here's to hoping that the powers that be at youtube don't strike this from the web. This movie is comedic brilliance.

padma cameth

2007-11-20T15:31:00.000-05:00

So, last night myself and a gaggle of friends (well, three of us in total) went to see Padma Lakshmi come to read from her new cookbook, Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet at the Strand (as previously ogled about). Having only hastily flipped through the cookbook, I thought it was a bunch of international-flair recipes and not enough photos of Padma. But not the case! There are beautiful full color pictures of Padma cooking and eating! And she writes personal essays about her love of food! So I bought the book, and had her sign it for good measure.

Just a quick few starf*cker notes:

Ladies and gentlemen, if you thought Padma was beautiful on television, it doesn't even compare to how striking she is in person.

She was very warm and personable, and I guess I never quite noticed what a commanding voice she has.... perfect for radio. Padma may have a future career on "60 Minutes"....? Who knows. She was kind and patient with the audience and their questions (luckily no whackjobs took center stage to ask something uncomfortable); it should be noted, however, that the cross-section of the attendees at the reading bore a wide margin (including the frumpy 60-something guy next to me who was hunched over and picking his nose). The personal essays she read from her cookbook were very colorfully drawn.... she definitely got me wanting to have some of her food (Mexican macaroni and cheese?! Yes, thank you.). I, too, share Padma's love of American bacon. I think she used sentimentality just the right way when evoking food-related stories from her childhood (including a nice little tale of a peanut vendor on the beach in Madras when she was a girl), and was able to speckle her stories with humor simply by using a different tone of voice when reading them. I'm curious: did a certain ex-husband of hers help her a bit with tidying up the narrative?

She did mention during the little Q&A that men have come up to her on the street and want her to tell them "Please pack your knives and go." Admittedly kinky, I feel that I may have been one of the men in this "Top Chef"-viewing set until she mentioned how creepy it is. So, the question remains: did I score bonus points for mentioning to her at the book-signing table that I specifically resisted wanting her to tell me to please pack my knives and go?

To support her in the audience were Top Chef superstar judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons. Gail looks a bit different in person (perhaps much more subdued because she wasn't talking.... but wasn't she once a model?) and Tom Colicchio was hiding underneath a baseball cap and high-collared jacket. Sorry to break it you, Tom, but I don't think you're exactly going to get hounded on the street.

And, in a do-or-die moment after she signed my book, I asked for a picture, artfully rendered here (the damn flash wasn't on, so it's a bit blurry). How could I not get my picture with Padma? That would be insanity.

recalibrating the oscar buzz radar

2007-11-18T20:10:00.001-05:00

I don't really have a strong position, per se, on "oscar buzz", except that I find it ridiculous when it seems unwarranted. I'm even guilty of getting wrapped up in it from time to time (well, maybe a little more than that), especially when I feel passionately about a specific performance or director or writer.... but "buzz" is something that is generated before a movie is even released, a term anointed on films that are conceived with the awards it intends to win before it is even made. Last year, Christopher Guest's movie For Your Consideration was a great little romp that skewered the concept of oscar buzz by letting it hit a fever pitch on the set of a movie currently in production (just watch it for Jane Lynch, a comedic genius, who in this movie steals every frame of film she's in).... this is a great example of what gets to me the most about "oscar buzz".

But then there are movies that seem to have buzz and then lose it very quickly, especially once the movie hits the big screen. I remember a couple of years ago, film blog websites had Diane Keaton as an undeniable lock for a Best Supporting Actress nomination for the holiday dramedy The Family Stone (which I haven't seen, but have been told it's quite enjoyable).... but then the movie came out and her name dropped from lists with such a lack of fanfare that perhaps those people generating oscar buzz were afraid to admit they were wrong.

This year I am troubled by the lugubrious amount of oscar buzz attributed to the yet-to-be-released oscar-bait Atonement.... the novel, written by Ian McEwan, arguably Great Britain's most prolific living writer, was just okay (in my opinion) and it seems only inevitable that it would make the leap to film. The trailers and ads make it seem like Keira Knightley is the star (which is not the case, unless the screenplay has taken a good amount of liberty with her character from the novel), and already film blogs are signing her up for an oscar nomination. But wait.... not just her, but three other actresses who play the novel's/film's main character (three actresses, including Vanessa Redgrave, for the three stages of the character's life), each of whom are also being sprinkled with oscar fairy dust. I see these rumors everywhere.... film bloggers and other generators of oscar buzz seem pretty sure that this film will clean up in the acting nomination department.

Isn't that pushing it, though? Throwing so much weight behind acting nominations for just one movie.... that hasn't even been released yet? Atonement, judging by its trailer, is one of those movies made to win awards, and it disheartens me with all the hype it's generating. It probably doesn't help that the novel itself didn't blow me away, so I don't have particularly high hopes for the movie. It's not unheard of for a single movie to jeopardize all the acting oscar nominations (Network, a great film, won three acting oscars of five (!) across the four categories in 1977), but in every instance I do think it's awfully narrow-minded and not exactly inclusive of other great performances in countless other films released in a year. But, I'm not dumb enough to really think that the oscars are the be-all end-all of truly great filmmaking each year.... it all comes down to marketing every year and what studio has enough clout to get the Academy buzzing about, unfortunately enough.

So, why does this pique my interest today? I just saw Margot at the Wedding, written and directed by Noam Baumbach (whose previous film was The Squid and the Whale), and I thought it was a fantastic film. Lately I've noticed I'm starting to quite favor realist dramas about rotten people, and this movie doesn't disappoint. It's a dark movie that hits a chord about family interplay that a lot of movies try but many don't quite succeed, especially when making loved ones seem as terrible as they sometimes can actually be. Where did this film's oscar buzz go? The Squid and the Whale was an underdog favorite two years ago (and was even oscar nominated for Best Original Screenplay), but this new effort seemed to make a blip awhile back and now has been virtually swallowed whole. In an age where it seems original screenplays are a dying art (take a look at the movies and you'll find everything is based on something else), Margot at the Wedding is a beautiful work of storytelling.

Part of me thinks that oscar buzz was squashed for Margot by the fact that Nicole Kidman is in the film. I don't know when people decided that she wasn't great anymore.... she was riding high just a few years ago. But after her oscar win for Best Actress in The Hours (an indelible performance that was actually a supporting role), it seems that she's not worthy of oscar attention. Why the hell not? She's great in this movie, playing a character so loathsome of herself but inarticulate of it and ultimately terrible to those she loves most.... and she wholeheartedly deserves a nomination for this work. Kidman's been dabbling in glitzier Hollywood movies as of late, so to turn in such a mannered performance in a quiet independent film is a breath of fresh air. There something about the information she transmits in her facial expressions that says it all, and makes her (likely) one of the greatest actresses of her generation.... She and Jennifer Jason Leigh (a great surprise and a warm performance here) both deserve some oscar attention for this movie, but I'm afraid they won't get it because of whatever kind of unjustly-appointed celebrity overkill Kidman brings with her. It's too bad. But I'm crossing my fingers for her, and silently hoping Atonement turns out to be an overwrought piece of crap.

heaven and hell and where the angels have gone in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

2007-11-08T23:03:00.000-05:00

....brought to you by
strange culture's
Film + Faith blog-a-thon

Meet Laura Palmer. Beloved high school sweetheart in a sleepy Pacific Northwest hamlet. Homecoming queen. Meals-on-Wheels volunteer. Tutor in English. Loyal diary-keeper. Coke addict, part-time hooker at a Canadian brothel, dating two guys, having sex with quite a few others, and being stalked and raped by an evil spirit named Bob. And she's gonna get killed. But this is information we already know, thanks to the television show "Twin Peaks"; a show whose premise surrounded the mystery of Laura's death and airs the dirty laundry of everyone else in her tiny hometown. The image of her dead body, wrapped in plastic, was just the beginning of the show. After the show ran its (prematurely canceled) two season run in 1990, its prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), illuminates all the dark corners of Laura's pre-mortem life and serves in a few sneaky scenes as a time-warped sequel to the television program.

After the resolution of the central mystery of "Who killed Laura Palmer?" came to light in the TV series, the show meandered and then regained its footing with a larger goal: tackling the meaning of heaven and hell. This is only intuited in the television series whereas the movie deals with it a bit more substantially.... Laura, who's life looked candy-coated on the outside but seethed with poison on the inside, is caught in a kind of purgatory after her death (revealed to us as "the waiting room" in the series' finale episode), and ultimately there is struggle (and some dimension-bending) to make sure she gets to heaven. Sound too kitschy? This movie is perhaps one of Lynch's darkest films; shot with an intensity of color from burning red (where Laura's seedy life is exposed) to cool and vanquished blues (the extinguisher of the fire, a symbol of hope and an acknowledgment of loss), much is paid attention to the photography of these scenes so that it directly complements the moods of the darkness from which the film is written. What makes this film particularly dark is that its subject matter is rooted in the real (whereas fare like Eraserhead and Lost Highway are not) and with that he's able to connect it to the surreal. Laura's life of drugs and illicit sex (and yes, incest) are all things that are happening somewhere out there in the world right now, and when it seems all hope is lost for Laura (to the point where she must accept her death head-on, the alternative being subsumed by the dark heart of Bob) does this mean she will be left in hell?

The movie picks up at a time when things for Laura aren't looking so great, and she knows it. Sheryl Lee has quite an uphill battle in playing Laura Palmer in life, and all the anguish and hopelessness shows, and this performance anchors the darkness of the movie; we see how she is lost, we feel how she is lost, and we know walking into the film that she's not going to make it out. Laura can feel the end coming but can't articulate it; her life is caught in a feedback loop of misery. When girl-talk with her best friend Donna (Moira Kelly, played with a noticeably different tambour than how Lara Flynn Boyle did in the series) prompts Laura to reveal how she would imagine falling in space, and answers with complete certainty: "Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything, and then you'd burst into fire, forever. And the angels wouldn't help you because they've all gone away." This girl is like the un-saved; not even the angels can help her now, and she knows this. When the end is near, the signals are all there.... even the painting above her desk of a friendly angel tending to three young children shifts and changes: the angel disappears before her eyes.

Now, reminding myself that this isn't a movie review, I won't go into lugubrious plot specifics. Suffice it to say, the television series left us with an understanding that Laura was trapped in purgatory (the Red Room, the "waiting room" between the White Lodge and the Black Lodge.... I'll let you connect the dots which symbolizes heaven and which symbolizes hell). Fire Walk With Me shows us how she got there in the first place. The night Laura is murdered, she is with her bad-girl friend Ronette Pulaski; both are kidnapped and tied up and (presumably) raped and when it seems that they're both on death's door, Ronette starts to pray. A scene like this is particularly hard to watch because of the humility and futility behind it.... Ronette appeals to God ("Father") to let her die peacefully (she even goes so far to admit in rock-bottom embarrassment "I'm so dirty"), and Laura watches as Ronette (in essence) is saved: an angel appears to her.
Privy to the TV series, we know full well that Ronette survives the evening. On the contrary, Laura does not pray for help.... she has accepted her fate and is willing to die to end the pain of her life. Bob wants, literally, to be Laura, and Laura chooses death over a life as a vessel for the devil.

I know you're probably thinking that angels-as-saviors isn't the most original theme for a movie, but this is only part of the whole package and ultimately what I was inspired to write about when I first learned of RC-of-stange-culture's "Film + Faith" blog-a-thon. I wish I could articulate the care with which this religious symbology is inserted into the film.... this isn't a "message" movie, and it certainly isn't trying to make some kind of Christian religious statement; it treats angels (don't worry, they don't speak or anything) much as only a conduit to safety. I've always been intrigued in the line drawn in the sand between heaven and hell, and how Lynch chooses to represent this in the Red Room, a place where the denizens of heaven commune with those from hell. Lynch even displays these angels as stereotypes: pale-skinned, beautiful, and peaceful, these women wear white robes and white wings.... he's playing off this stereotype to accent the pitch-black core of the movie's themes. In the television series he hints at this too; supernatural beings who provide a kind of protection are pale and light-colored (like the giant, seen in the Red Room at last in the series' finale, and the white horse that appears to Laura's mother when Bob goes after her daughter).

This is a movie close to me because the whole "Twin Peaks" world is close to me, and it's a movie that will knock the breath out of you with how heavy a story it tells. Where the television show merely revealed this darkness, the film plays it out brushstroke by brushstroke. It offers closure on Laura's life, gives us a glimpse of what life might have been like after "Twin Peaks" with characters we're more familiar with (Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is absolutely necessary to this film, but only inasmuch about what becomes of him at the TV series' end), and reminds us about the town of Twin Peaks in all the ways the movie takes pains to contrast against it.

Because Laura is so aware and conscious of her own demise (and its ultimate necessity), it's only fitting that Lynch rewards her (and rewards the entire "Twin Peaks" saga, in a satisfying and devastating way) as ending the film with her bittersweet ascent to the White Lodge, to heaven. Laura admits to falling into a world where the angels have all gone away, and he shows us this as the angel disappears from the painting in her bedroom.... and at last, through her tumultuous travel, Laura receives her own angel. Why? Because a death unenlightened is not worth suffering.

padma cometh

2007-11-04T10:01:00.000-05:00

Despite my borderline-illness of always leaving the Strand Bookstore with two books in hand to buy, I do like to loiter about when I get a chance.... once a week, usually. And yesterday, at the table of cookbooks, proudly displaying Padma's new tome of recipes, a placard happily announced the Padma Lakshmi Event on Monday, November 19th. Padma Lakshmi Event?! She's coming to New York to hawk her cookbook. I'm still curious how involved she was in the actual generation of these recipes. Maybe she'll actually demonstrate to us what exactly is so Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet. In which case I'll be in the front row.

day 4: four days with three scary movies each

2007-10-31T17:14:00.000-04:00

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

To be fair, I went into The Blair Witch Project making fun of it. I remember seeing it in the theatre and sort of being bored.... there was a lot of marketing hype around it (this being the first film to utilize the internet as a means of major underground marketing) and it felt silly and self-indulgent to me. In retrospect, I think this is part of the movie's genius. The concept is that we're seeing found footage from three amateur filmmakers who set out to learn about the "Blair Witch", a local scary story, in the woods of rural Maryland. The whole time already knowing that the movie wasn't exactly real found footage, I wanted to be jaded about it and started looking for flaws. But isn't this the point? We're watching the unedited clips from amateur documentarians who, in a way, are making fun of themselves as they go about interviewing town residents and set off into the woods themselves to find the Blair Witch. It is, of course, once they get in the woods that things starts getting spooky.... they get lost or seem to travel in circles. They hear screaming in the night. Their tent gets rustled around in the dark. They find creepy handcrafted symbols hanging in the trees. I guess this all seemed silly to me too.... until they get to the Blair Witch's house, a crumbling old piece of construction with children's handprints peppered across the walls. The last ten minutes or so of this movie are truly terrifying, and I mean that in every sense of the word. The brilliance of how this movie is filmed, as seen from the claustrophobic view of the handheld video camera, is in part what makes it so scary. We are denied seeing what's just outside the realm of the camera, even though we're following the characters as they film.... it's a first-person viewing experience and thereby we are locked into seeing only what the camera wishes to see. The movie's got balls and it sticks to its premise.... it ramps up at the end to a high-pitch freakout and then cuts to black; nothing more, no explanation. Because, you see, it's only found footage, and we can't fill in the blanks of that which hasn't been filmed.

Misery (1990)

Kathy Bates didn't really stand out much as an actress before this film (in this same year she had a two-line part as a court reporter in the wonderful Dick Tracy), and I'm curious to see what she would've been like as a younger actress, because she is truly one of the greatest of our time. The Oscars and their nominations are often not kind to movies outside the drama category, and Misery, for which Bates won a fully-deserved Best Actress oscar, was a surprise to turn up in one of the Big 5 categories because it's an out-and-out thriller. Bates, as psycho fangirl Annie Wilkes, really is that good. Haven't seen the film? I dare you to tell me that she doesn't freak you the hell out. This movie takes fan-based obsession to the next level; based on Stephen Kings' novel (of which movie adaptations of his work are really hit or miss), James Caan plays a writer who's trying to escape the rut of a continuing series of his books. Just so happens after he wrecks his car and goes missing, one of his biggest fans saves him and nurses him back to health.... and then traps him in her home so that she can "tend" to him and dictate how she'd like his next book to go. Kathy Bates really invests in the part, you can see that, and her psychotic calm gets under your skin quite quickly. Some of the most tense scenes in the movie are where Caan's character makes attempts at escape.... but he fails to notice that his wheelchair bumped around some very meticulously arranged figurines in the living room, and Annie connects the dots on his escapade out of his room and goes ape-shit on him. I still can't watch the scene where she manages to keep him wheelchair-bound for quite awhile longer by taking a sledgehammer to his ankles (to the tune of Beethoven piano music).... I mean it, I curl into a ball and cover my face.... I can't watch that shit, it scares the crap out of me. In any case, when the AFI did their "100 Years, 100 Heroes & Villains" TV special, they interviewed Kathy Bates about playing Annie Wilkes (#17 on the villains list).... and she refused to say anything negative about the character. This, I think, is a great testament to Bates' acting prowess; she had to justify and fully believe in what Annie was doing in order to pull off the role.... and she's got her very own Oscar to polish for it.

The Descent (2006)

I saw this movie for the first time in January of this year and it blew me away, in the best possible way; I've found that my favorite movies of all time are the ones that take me completely by surprise, and The Descent is so one of my favorite movies of all time. This is the horror movie that people who appreciate film have been waiting for. It's too bad, though, that in the United States (the film is British, with a British director and mostly British actors) it was marketed similarly to a lot of the throw-away torture-porn horror movie junk of recent years and likely didn't register on the radar of many movie-goers. But this is not that kind of movie.... this is a horror movie with a sense of purpose and art, with an eye for characterization and storytelling, and is beautifully directed by Neil Marshall, who is able to pay homage all throughout to (likely) some of his favorite classic horror films. (It's hard, really, to try and list them all, but among some of my favorites are undeniable winks to Deliverance, The Blair Witch Project, Night of the Living Dead, and Carrie.) Marshall proves himself to have a skillful eye; where most of the movie takes place in tight and closed spaces, he films the outside world with such space that it really dovetails into a beautiful contrast when you recognize it. It would be negligent of me not to note that I probably also like this film because it has hot chicks that kick ass.... what can I say, I'm a fan of that in movies too. Shauna MacDonald and Natalie Mendoza (a pair of strikingly beautiful women, if I do say so myself) give some visceral and fearless performances here, and once they pick up their ice axes to start fighting, I dare you not to feel a tingle of giddy glee. The basic premise here: five daredevil women go cave diving somewhere in the mountains of rural North Carolina, and they stumble across things in the dark that they weren't planning on stumbling across. In so, the film treads through a bit of sci-fi territory.... the villains here aren't psychotic killers or zombies, but rather vicious humanoid monsters who've adapted to living in the dark. The first shot where you see one of these monsters (they're filmed so well that they're terrifying to look at whenever they're on screen) is the one that lingers longest with me, a kind of "wait, is that a man down there?" shot from far away that immediately puts you on edge. One of my favorite aspects of the film is that it eases you into the horror; there's plenty of blood and guts, but you wouldn't think so as the film opens or at least during the first forty-five minutes (the way the opening sequence ends, though, definitely grabs you for the ride). Another is the concept of "the descent", not just a literal reading of the ladies' trip down into the caves, but even on a more metaphorical level as in descending to a more primal state of being.... by having to fight these hungry beasts, MacDonald's and Mendoza's characters become primordial animal killers to protect themselves and their compadres. Apparently the ending was edited for the American theatrical release (which I didn't see), but I know that it's a somewhat "happier" ending than that on the DVD (and original British) release.... the original ending I prefer far and away much more; it adds a kind of bleakness that I think is necessary to the film, and it also visually ties the bow on a recurring motif of flashback to MacDonald's character's daughter. This bleakness, after all, is what sticks with you days and weeks after you've watched the film. So, in closing, I still scream out loud in parts when watching this, even when I know what's coming. One thing is for sure, this movie will turn you against ever wanting to go cave exploring.

Now go watch some scary movies.... Happy Halloween.

day 3: four days with three scary movies each

2007-10-30T20:52:00.000-04:00

The Innocents (1961)

My very second blog post ever references this (somewhat forgotten) scary movie gem.... and I probably said it best over there. Deborah Kerr (who just recently passed away and whose film archives are likely being combed to compile a fifteen second "In Memoriam" clip for countless awards shows this coming year) plays a British governess who comes to care for two pretty disturbed little tykes. This is a perfectly freaky ghost story (all the bump-in-the-night creeps are there), filmed in crisp black and white, that has some horrifying reveals in the bright light.... sometimes what we can see clearly can be a lot more terrifying than what is shrouded in shadow (David Lynch uses this technique to shows us some of the scariest stuff he's got in his films). My favorite is when Kerr glances up across the lake to see the distant (and all-too-real) apparition of a woman staring at her (watch it here!). Ultimately these kids are a possessed little lot, and toward the end we get some rather squirm-in-your-seat screentime logged of a ten year old boy making out with his thirty-something babysitter. If you haven't seen this film, go rent it now in time for Halloween and watch it with lights off.

The Ring (2002)

Naomi Watts stars in (what I believe is) the first of the Americanized Japanese-horror-film remakes (see also: The Grudge and Dark Water).... and in this case I think the first is probably the best. Gore Verbinski (better known for directing the Bruckheimer-a-thon Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) proves himself to be a director with a good eye for mood.... the shots in this film are rich in color, setting, and atmosphere, and he paces the film just right to keep us unsettled the whole way throughout. Even the final sequence of the film worked on me.... usually it's clear that once you think the killer is dead the killer actually isn't quite dead, but I was successfully duped this time around. Despite the presence of the tired expressionless-little-kid stereotype, the film succeeds in taking us around to another creepy little kid who likes to kill people via VHS. Of course, once you watch this tape-from-hell you've got a ticking clock of seven days to live, thanks to the angsty revenge of a little girl who haunts from the bottom of a covered-up wishing well. The surrealist/uncanny reanimated movements of the girl-from-beyond-the-grave/beyond-the-white-noise (filmed at the end, especially, in plain sight) are freaky as hell.... I think that might stand the scary movie test of time alone. Some of my favorite bits have to do with Verbinski's sly fitting-in of "ring" imagery throughout.... sudden flash cuts of "the ring", and (my favorite) the stain left behind from a coffee mug. No joke.

Psycho (1960)

Probably not a shock to find this movie on the list, as it is likely considered the greatest horror/thriller movie of cinema history. I had heard about it a lot before I had seen it, and when I finally did see it I wasn't disappointed.... terrified in parts, actually. The writer in me is fascinated by this film because of the uncharted territory it breaks on a storytelling level.... never before have we seen our protagonist killed after the first act. Quite a brilliant little trick on Hitchcock's part to recruit a screen star like Janet Leigh to dupe us into thinking this movie was going to be about her.... the entire first act is fraught with her backstory and a bit of intrigue about what she's going to do with her life, which comes to a quick close once she meets her maker in the shower. So who do we identify with now? We're stuck with Norman Bates, someone we hadn't exactly planned on following along as our anchor. I don't know of many rule-bending examples of three act screenplay structure that have blown apart the box like this one.... I do have to say though, as a cute wink to Psycho as the granddaddy of modern horror movies, Scream (see yesterday's post) plays a similar trick by opening the movie with blond-and-sunny-smiled Drew Barrymore only to have her strung up by her intestines ten minutes in. Psycho definitely has its freak-out moments.... not only the shower scene (watch it and notice that we don't really see Marion Crane getting stabbed, but instead her visceral reaction to the stabbing.... coupled of course with the frightening strings on the soundtrack), but also the reveal about where Norman Bates' mother actually is. My favorite (and most terrifying) part: when Inspector Arbogast decides to enter the Bates homestead to ask "Mother" some questions and gets sliced down the face and tumbles down the stairs. What makes this particular scene so unsettling is the camera angle at which Hitchcock decides to shoot it at: directly above. Something about this unnatural angle immediately puts you on the edge, and the speed with which Mother comes tearing out of her bedroom with her knife raised freaks me the hell out every time.

....and tomorrow, the final three.... including two of my favorite scary movies of all time.

day 2: four days with three scary movies each

2007-10-29T22:43:00.000-04:00

Scream (1996)

Scream may have done a lot of things -- resurrected the slasher film, Wes Craven's directing career, and Drew Barrymore's acting career -- but it also signaled a kind of hallmark for the horror genre: a horror movie that makes fun of itself while still being a horror movie. This meta play would have seemed too elevated for the genre at one time, but it works here to great effect. Not only does it use tired slasher film tropes (while gleefully acknowledging them) but it also uses a not-so-scary Halloween costume as the killer's disguise. (This is perhaps the greatest sleight of hand to the movie trilogy's creepiness.... the fact that this costume can be found everywhere and is so diluted among the droves of Halloween costumes makes the fact that there could be a real killer among them a terrorizing aspect that satisfies.) Scream also welcomed the entrance of the cell phone as a plot device.... no movie before managed to hinge so much on the use of telephone, and from the very first scene the phone is perhaps the greatest weapon. The fact that the mobility of the cell phone adds to the killer's menace is, my guess, a subconscious stroke of genius. Scream (and its two sequels, Scream 3 being perhaps my favorite of the lot) earns itself a spot in film history with its bending of rules.... and is still a joy to watch (with the lights off) eleven years after the fact and after countless other horror movies tried aping what Scream already apes best.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

I'm not so much a fan of zombie movies (maybe they disturb me too much, maybe I find zombies to be sort of boring villains on the whole).... but I think First Contact is the first (quality) film to take zombies into space, and so the Borg just might be the best of the zombies. Sure, I'm a Trekkie (yes, I've been to a Star Trek convention, more than one even), but First Contact succeeds on its own; it carries its own weight, transcends the dorky stigma, and is probably the most accessible of all of the Star Trek films. The fact that this film relies on a backstory shown first during the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" television series and makes the leap to film to be the most successful of the Star Trek movies goes to show that the franchise (at the time) was at its zenith. The Borg got a feature-film makeover here, going from the pale-skinned junkyard-part extras on TV to the KY-glossed bug-eyed half-mechanized extras for the big screen (Oscar-nominated for best makeup.... but lost to The Nutty Professor.... why?!). The makeup effects are so convincing and terrifying that I still don't like to watch this movie in the dark. The Borg even get a queen for their hive, played deliciously menacing (and sexy? who would've thought?) by South African actress Alice Krige. There are a lot of things right with this movie (the charismatic acting chemistry between Patrick Stewart and Alfre Woodard, for instance, is magical), but I think the greatest achievement is to show us that Star Trek can tackle horror, and does so by presenting a terrifying and hopeless end to each of us and our culture in the form of bionic zombies. Social statement? Maybe. Quality filmmaking? Absolutely.

Hannibal (2001)

This is a movie I will defend to the end, and I think gets a bad rap simply because it isn't The Silence of the Lambs. Serving as its sequel, though, I think everyone wants it to be the same psychological thriller.... but the story of Hannibal isn't, and its probably hard to accept that it doesn't fall into the same genre as its predecessor. Hard too to see Julianne Moore (stunning here) filling the shoes of a noticeably absent Jodie Foster, who turned down continuing the role of FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling because she found the film too lurid. My argument here is that this wouldn't be the same movie if it wasn't so lurid.... that's part of the fun. This is, ultimately, a horror movie... a horror love story even. Directed by Ridley Scott (beautifully) and written by David Mamet (!), we pick up ten years later with a more hardened Starling and a more playful Hannibal Lecter, with more tricks up his sleeve now that he's assimilated himself back into the world. Ladies and Gentlemen, Anthony Hopkins is my favorite actor. Some people complain that he overstays his welcome as Lecter in this film, and I say every frame he's on screen is a pleasure (with thanks, of course, to some crackling pitch-perfect lines by Mamet). There's so much bizarre humor in his performance that it makes Lecter's horrific murders that much more disturbing. The creepy factor in this movie comes, ultimately, to some unflinching gross-out scenes.... and some fearlessly despicable characters played by Gary Oldman, the counterpoint villain hidden under some nasty facial-scar makeup (who meets his end with his face in the jaws of a hungry boar), and tough-guy Ray Liotta, who logs a memorable performance as a sleazy government cronie who has probably the most disturbing last meal to be shown on film (after he asks what's for dinner, Lecter says, "You should never ask... It spoils the surprise"). A lesser director could have made this film fall flat on its face, but Scott has you buying it line for line.... and I'm in for each course of the meal.

....more scary movies tomorrow....

day 1: four days with three scary movies each

2007-10-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

Certainly lists of the "top" movies of whatever genre are already everywhere and already somewhat exhaustive that any such list I would make would only serve my purposes to be applicable to my own likes and desires.

So.... I present you with a countdown of sorts to Halloween with twelve movies (three movies each for the four days leading up to All Hallow's Eve) of twelve movies (in no particular order) that spook the crap out of me. And, more importantly, particular elements of these films that do the trick. These are not all the movies I've seen that do so, of course, but they are all well-liked by me, and on the whole are pretty undebatably terrifying in parts. Besides, I think it's about time I pay my respects to the cinema of the scary.... it's an art form that I think that has been degraded too much by dimensionless and storyless torture-porn in the tradition of the endless Saw movie franchise and other horror schlock of the desensitized era.

....*drum roll*....

Lost Highway (1997)

I suppose it's no secret I'm a little bit of a fan of David Lynch. That said, I bet you were thinking that Eraserhead is the more appropriate of the Lynch canon to be considered a "horror" movie on the whole. To be honest, all of Lynch's films have elements that creep me the hell out (yes, the G-rated Walt-Disney-presents The Straight Story counts). But the creepiest on the whole for me is easily Lost Highway, perhaps one of the richest-filmed but most unevenly plotted of Lynch's movies. The movie suffers on the whole from really not knowing what story it's trying to tell, but there's lots of meaty Lynch-isms everywhere and can be at times quite intriguing. The majority of the creep factor comes from the performance of now-acquitted once-accused murderer Robert Blake who plays, for all intents and purposes, the Devil. Blake's sheer calm creates such an indelible menace that's hard to deny.... the scene, in fact, where Robert Loggia's mob boss character passes the phone to Blake, who has been standing just off screen for minutes without us being aware still gives me the shivers. The 2005 French film Cache is in many ways an ugly rip-off of this film (the inital premise, folks, is identical), but likely succeeds in logical ways that this does not. Unfortunately, thanks to Blake's recent trial-debacle, Lost Highway may not see the light of legitimate DVD release for some time. Because, after all, Blake does play the Devil. But he does it so well.

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Barbara Stanwyck, perhaps the screen siren of film noir, stars in a tweaked variation on a haunted house movie in Sorry, Wrong Number, a movie that slowly and painlessly digs its talons into you until you try to pull away. She also picked up her fourth (and last) Oscar nomination for the role. Bottom line: rich/bored/lonely woman picks up the phone to make a call one night and, thanks to a crossed line, overhears a plot to murder. (If this were to be remade, it wouldn't be so much a crossed line as a garbled reception error on a cell phone.) The genius of the movie comes as Stanwyck starts to get more harried as time passes, letting her mind take her in all kinds of directions about how to stop this plan.... her calls to the police and the phone company make her seem like she's raving mad. The greatest revelation though...? Wouldn't you know it, the victim in question of the overheard murder plan happens to be herself. Looking for a good suspense movie in a world that is quickly ignoring the genre? Fire up your netflix for this.

The Birds (1963)

I saw this movie at a young age and it did a good amount of damage. Who would think birds to be a device for one of the greatest horror movies of all time? The movie, Alfred Hitchcock's first to hit the screen after his magnum opus Psycho, is pretty widely known, and that's likely thanks to the fact that it gets under our skin so easily. Basic premise: birds of all kinds (birds of a feather? heh.... eh) swoop down in droves to terrorize a Northern California coastal hamlet. People are pecked to death. People have eyes gouged out by beaks. That's terrifying enough for me still, no less at the tender age of eight or however old I was when I first saw it. Perhaps the most unsettling point of the movie is that the droves of bird attacks aren't explained.... Tippi Hedren, plucky and young and ultra-mod and as damsel-y as they come, decides to buy two love birds on a whim to deliver to some guy she falls for on the spot in a pet shop (as Hitchcock nonchalantly strolls by on screen with two schnauzers). Perhaps she's the cause of the bird attack? Is it the love birds? Who knows. I'm still spooked the hell out to see a bird perched on a jungle gym.

....and three more tomorrow....

I Can Be America

2007-10-18T13:22:00.000-04:00

It's true that it disgusts me, just a little bit, that I am now one of the myriad bloggers who feels he needs to get in his say about Stephen Colbert's run for president. But that doesn't bother me, per se, more than the fact that the man (or his publishers) don't have a grasp of grammar.

Colbert just released a (political essay collection? comedy rant?) book called I Am America (And So Can You!). This title alone, plastered about the New York City subway system in advertisements for the book, irritates the writer in me. The writer in me, folks, is at my core. There's a plain-as-day verb disagreement in the context that makes the title grossly grammatically incorrect:

I Am America (And So Can You!)

"So Can You" implies that the "I" can do something.... but the "I" isn't doing anything; the "I" simply "is" (as in "am"), so "you" needs to be modified by the verb "to be".... Or, in the other case, the "I" isn't purporting to be able to do anything (there's no "I Can").

I Am America (And So You Can Be Too!)
I Can Be America (And So Can You!)

Or, more to the point, "can" can only be modified by a verb in the infinitive form. You can't "am" anything.

Maybe I'm being too nitpicky, but the fact remains. Is this part of the joke? I certainly hope not, because if it is, I'm afraid a good majority of the American public isn't going to get it. Colbert should stick to his political skewering and truthiness and all that and perhaps stay away from making overly subtle grammar jokes that make him (or more like his character) sound foolish.

So, what does that say about Colbert's "character"? He announced on his Comedy Central program on Tuesday that he's running for President of the United States in 2008, on both Republican and Democratic platforms. But his "character" is a foaming-at-the-mouth Republican, whereas the man himself is a Democrat. Who is he running as? His chances of winning aren't even worth pretending about, but at the same time I have to scratch my head and wonder if the guy is running purely as a stunt or if he actually wants to make a difference for the country. There's a whole lot of conflict in there about his "character" being the one who's running, not the actor. Stephen Colbert the actor bases his comedy around how ludicrous Stephen Colbert the character actually is. So, what's the gain in this stunt? When the character and the actor aren't congruent, what's the statement he's trying to make? Somehow this seems like it has the potential to backfire, but only if his campaign gains a whole lot of sudden popularity.

Ultimately I have less of an opinion on the matter than I am confused by it. But it's on my mind.

I brought this up to a friend of mine last night, and he countered with the statement that all the candidates running for president are "characters" and not actually running wholly as themselves.... they all have to compromise their true positions to pander to public opinion and their political party (be it reasonable or not; in my humble opinion, the whole political party is system is so so broken) to ensure that they win the election. That's a disturbing reality, isn't it? But in the end, it's really quite true.

movie advertising not targeted toward me

2007-10-07T23:30:00.000-04:00

Study, if you will, the following teaser poster for the forthcoming Saw: Ad Nauseum....

I guess the Saw movie franchise is among the more successful recent examples of high-gloss torture porn (see also: "24"). It's not my kind of horror movie though.... I'm not terribly interested in movies whose sole function is to display unthinkable deaths with a showcase of creative makeup, special effects, and/or camera wizardry. Nor do I particularly seek out movies about serial killers with disposable amounts of time and income to create overly elaborate ruses in which they are able to creatively murder people by the tens and twenties. I do think that the horror genre is absolutely necessary for film, but I prefer horror movies that are more than simply one-dimensional. I don't mind a good dose of gore.... but how about making the movie worth watching, too? The Descent, my favorite movie of 2006, was marketed to be trashy shlock like Saw, but was in fact a masterwork of filmmaking and transcended the horror genre to remind me (and the rest of us) that these kind of movies can actually have depth while simultaneously scaring the crap out of you.

So, back to the poster. Is this supposed to be scary? Is this supposed to hail the arrival of a terrifying new horror movie about to hit the big screen? Let's see....

Swine with bad wig wearing a red burka and fetishist leather stiletto boots is chained to a motorized wheelchair fitted with cranks.

Is this supposed to fill me (i.e. the average movie-goer passing the theatre) with dread? How exactly does this poster even get a fan of Saw excited to the see the movie? Maybe I'm missing something, having never seen any of the movies. Is there some kind of terrifying pig-in-fetishwear twist I missed out on? Perhaps.

In the end, I see this poster and all I can think is, "what the fuck?"

the egg timer runs out on Top Chef

2007-10-03T14:47:00.000-04:00

Tonight is the season finale of "Top Chef: Miami", the show's third (glitizer, higher-production value) season. The show, which whittled its way through 15 "chefs" (Season 2 had a high number of do-it-yourself line cooks, the final four of which weren't any older than 26) has now made its way down to three for the final showdown in Aspen, Colorado.

Why, oh why did I get hooked on this show? I remember hearing write procrastinator's fair warnings in the past when I was still binging on the Food Network (a network whose very soul has hardened into a dry kibble of sensational trash). My introduction to the show came last winter when I was on a JetBlue flight from the Bay Area back to NYC, a red-eye flight no less, and instead of sleeping I caught Bravo's full-scale "Top Chef" second season marathon into the wee hours of morning. From that point forward I was able to watch the last four episodes as they aired each week, and waited with bated breath until it begun anew this summer.

And then the third season came. And I realized that perhaps the biggest draw (oddly) to the show are its judges.

Padma, of course, is the crowning reason why anyone should flip the remote to Bravo in the first place. She was a new addition to the second season, serving as host.... apparently Season 1's host, who I don't know because I haven't had the liberty to see Season 1, was either not smart enough or not food-related enough or not camera-friendly enough (or most likely not sexy in a I-want-to-watch-you-suck-whipped-cream-off-a-strawberry way enough). Padma (recent divorcee of fatwa-ee/knigthed/Booker-Prize-of-Booker-Prize Award winning author Salman Rushdie) has all the right moves, a delicious ease before the camera, and is certainly easy on the eyes. Probably helps that she's a model. She has a cute sense of playfulness (re: the episode where she has the chefs make her breakfast, and wakes them up by practically jumping on their beds) and a sense of humor (re: joking that the massive scar on her arm was inflicted whilst tiger hunting in Bengal) and a soft side (re: episodes closer to the end where you can tell she has a hard time, wincing even, when telling a chef to "pack [their] knives and go"). And hey, she looks pretty damn good. She has a perfectly-tuned radio voice (next career move: Padma as network television news anchor?), fits into remarkably tight pink jeans, and has a beautiful smile. Ah, the Padma worship.

But what about her food cred, you say? Why choose her to host "Top Chef"? She happens to be the author of two cookbooks (including the just-released-yesterday Tangy, Tart, Hot, and Sweet.... a title of which I'm sure the irony is not lost). Not sure if she actually does much cooking, but she used her clout to ink a book deal.... so good for her, I guess.

Tom Colicchio (also interestingly suave and sexy) is executive chef of umpteen glamorous restaurants in New York (and Las Vegas, and coming soon a stake in trade at Foxwood's forthcoming MGM Grand in Middle of Nowhere, Connecticut).... including one depot of his Craft kingdom on the ground floor of the very building I work in. Have yet to try the food.... guess I'm waiting for that next promotion.

Gail Simmons (sometimes there, sometimes not), irresistibly Canadian and the snarkiest of the good-ol'-standby regulars, is something of a down-market Padma. She's an editor at Food & Wine magazine, one of "Top Chef"'s benefactors, and she always shows up at the judges' table looking beautifully dressed up.... but you just can't shake the feeling that she's like the dowdy cousin who always looked up to the statuesque and nearly sexually-active older cousin, and thereby happily parrotted everything she said and tagged along mercilessly during family get-togethers.

Other judges that come and go include Anthony Bourdain, who in my opinion tries too hard to be shocking or sardonic or look-at-me-I'm-an-asshole! or clever with his tongue (I'm talking about what he says here, people), some dude from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" who's contract with Bravo apparently hadn't run out, and a motley crew of world-famous chefs (one per episode, please) who are all now independently wealthy and have indecipherable accents. I suppose their lives now consist of pool-side afternoons in the Dordogne and waiting for Bravo's phone call.

So, after tonight we'll have a winner.... with the conclusion of tonight's "live" finale. Why make it live? Seems like two steps too much fanfare.

Coming up to the finishing line:

Casey, who at first seemed like a bitch for criticizing poor Clay, he of Southern accent and broken home, for not knowing what an amuse bouche was, is packing heat. She seemed unremarkable at first but has begun wiping the walls with the elimination challenges towards the end. And you know what? She just seems generally likeable, one who would step for you because you've earmed her respect. And she's a great chef, too.

Dale, another quite likeable and quick-witted contestant, is slightly jittery but knows his food. He busted out on the restaurant wars where he worked the front room of a makeshift diner-from-the-ground-up-in-24-hours like he's been master of restaurant hosting for years. He claims breakfast is his specialty too, which is a refreshing change when cooking shows just show you how to make dinner and dessert. I rather like his soliloquy commentary because he's not afraid to call out douchebaggery on....

Hung, who has been my least favorite chef since Episode 1. I suppose it should come as no shock that Hung is friends with Season 2 runner-up and fellow douchebag Marcel (as revealed in the top-four-of Season 1 versus top-four-of Season 2 special aired this summer). This kid gets every chance he can to gloat about his skills, and when a judge isn't digging it, Hung simply just can't accept it, and instead has to whine about how they just don't "get it". That, and when a judge likes his work, he gets all goopy and blushy and too eager to please. I just want him to shut the hell up. It's some consolation, I guess, that the other contestants clearly don't like him.

Tonight's reveal will likely be good television because "Top Chef" knows how to milk the tension, especially for its viewers that have held on for this long. Who knew we'd get so excited about someone winning a chance to become a media whore for Gladware kitchen products? What do I care that this person gets to fulfill their culinary dreams? Simply folks, I'm in it to see Hung's face get rubbed into the Colorado dirt. Comeuppance is nigh, douchebag.

who you calling lame-o?

2007-10-01T18:03:00.000-04:00

shecanfilmit, the friend I do believe that got me started blogging in the first place, passed along a meme (these dreaded, dreaded memes!) that gives me a chance to prove just how cool I think I am. Here goes:

TO DO: List 5 things that certain people (who are not deserving of being your friend anyway) may consider to be “totally lame,” but you, despite the possible stigma, are totally proud of. Own it. Tag 5 others:

1. I don't consider New York City pizza to be the best in the world. That honor falls to Blondie's Pizza in Berkeley, California. (Also: I don't fold the slice in half length-wise to eat it. If I wanted pizza that way, I'd just order a calzone.)

2. I like Star Trek. I'll even go out on a limb and say that "Deep Space Nine" is my favorite series (and Avery Brooks as The Sisko rocks my socks off). Sure, lots of people dis Star Trek.... but why? It's my theory that everyone actually likes it or would like it if they gave it a chance, whether they're afraid to admit it or not.

3. A good vodka & tonic is perhaps my favorite cocktail drink. I've been told it's an old lady drink. I think not! But if that's the case, I guess old ladies have good taste in booze.

4. I love to watch "60 Minutes". Always insightful and on-target reporting, always with a slightly (and unabashedly) liberal spark for good measure. I guess I'm just in touch with my inner 65 year old. I also have a crush on Lesley Stahl.

5. Taco Bell is my fast food downfall. Mind you, I'm not a big fast food eater, I try to avoid it actually, but Taco Bell is one of those places I walk into and everything on the menu looks good. The very mention of Taco Bell makes my mouth water. Rumor has it their "beef" is mostly beef-flavored soy product. I still love it.... ALL of it.

Feel free to tag amongst yourselves.

Brothers and Sisters and mothers and illegitimate daughters and sexually-ambiguous uncles

2007-09-30T19:45:00.000-04:00

Sally Field, who acted her ass off during last year's inaugural season of "Brothers & Sisters", rightfully picked up an Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama Series for her role as a plate-spinning new widow with a whole lot of free time and a son who's been pulled for a tour of duty to the war in Iraq. (Her anti-war acceptance speech at the Emmys, interestingly, was censored thanks to the three-second live feed delay on Fox, because she said "goddamned", a word Fox must find so offensive that the fact that it was said during a speech critical of this country's current state of war must have been like killing two birds with one stone, certainly a coincidence.... right? right?) If there's any reason to watch this show, it's because of her.

So why do I keep crawling back? Sally Field alone, despite her furious acting chops, isn't enough of a pull. Tonight is the premiere of the second season, and I'm strangely looking forward to it. "Brothers & Sisters"'s biggest downfall is a storyline that can't get enough of itself. It's trying to pack as many complicated dramatic tropes (shying away from the trashier soap opera standbys such as good/evil identical twins and amnesia) as it can into just one little season, and (much more frustratingly) it seems not to have much of an idea of its direction, having abandoned its original trajectory and settled into a plot arc not congruent with how the show was originally established.

The second season has quite an uphill climb in the drama department.... aside from the not-as-dramatic-as-they-want-it-to-be second tour of duty for Nora's (played by Field) youngest son, we've got a marriage in shambles, a competing family business with the dead-patriarch's long-term mistress, and a peppy illegitimate daughter (Rebecca, played by some-WB-show alumnus Emily VanCamp) between said dead-patriarch and mistress (whose character would've been much better off saved for a more opportune first appearance later down the line) who might be on the verge of causing some trouble. (Major gripe: this character came swooping in too quickly and was integrated too easily, and therefore has lost a lot of the inherent complication she should have offered and instead seems to be accepted as "one of the gang" despite the fact her whereabouts where concealed for preesumably 20 years.)

The only way I can describe this show is through its characters and how they're used, so here goes:

In a trend that I can only surmise is borne of unfortunate "Grey's Anatomy" afterbirth, the show seems borderline sex-crazed. This troupe of siblings seems to be rather active in the bedroom. Two of the five (Rachel Griffiths as Sarah, Balthazar Getty as Tommy) are married to spouses who have first-billing screen credit but are conspicuously absent at family gatherings. They've also got kids (three and a once-seen-now-forgotten step-child among them total) and relatively healthy sex lives (one couple likes to film themselves going at it, the other couple has gratuitous on-screen sex in the shower). The other three complain when they're single, but don't seem to stay single for very long....

Calista Flockheart's Kitty entered the show with a fiancé, kicked him to the curb in favor of her newly minted talk show co-host, and seems to forget about them both once Rob Lowe struts onto the screen in an extended "special guest star" role as a California (Republican! ha!) senator with eyes on the White House.... and picks him up as her second fiancé in a year.

Matthew Rhys' Kevin, the token gay brother, also seems to have a token harem. How many boyfriends, exactly, can this guy fall in love with? The writing seems to want to treat Kevin's romantic relationships as something much more serious than they are.... we see him meet and discard at least three different guys (with one or two one-night stands along the way) throughout the first season, but it seems either he or a dumped-boyfriend-in-question leaves with a broken heart.... just in one year here, people.

Dave Annable's Justin, the Iraq-bound Narcotics-Anonymous-dwelling razor-deficient little brother, also picks up a handful of girlfriends, finally settling on one who apparently went to high school with him once upon a time, has a unsettlingly boyish name (Tyler?! Who names their little baby girl Tyler?), and is awfully forgiving of his relapses into needle drugs.

Ron Rifkin plays Nora's brother Saul, and he seems to act the role as if he's forgotten he's no longer playing über-villain Sloane on "Alias". His role has been non-descript and ultimately forgettable, but at the season finale the writers decided to not-so-subtly hint that he might have had a romantic dalliance turned unrequited and bitter with some college best friend of his, who *gulp* is a guy. Is this supposed to be shocking? It might have been, had I cared about the character at all or if the writers hadn't gleefully spent all their capital on homosexual relationships with Kevin.

And last but not least comes "Thirtysomething" alumnus Patricia Wettig as Holly, always a welcome appearance in television roles (including a brief recurring spot on "Alias" but not sharing screentime with Rifkin, and a more compelling and fire-starting recurring role in the first season of the terrible "Prison Break" whose somewhat pivotal character's disappearance was unexplained after she picked up top-billing on "Brothers & Sisters"). She plays the previously-mentioned long-term mistress of Nora's dead husband; her character's very agency is built on creating tension. She was an actress with otherwise little employable skills until an unexpected endowment from dead-patriarch's pre-mortem money laundering suddenly made her a business mogul, a role she too easily fit into for a supposed out-of-work actress.

So I know this whole post has taken a bit of a negative gloss, but only because I'm mystified as to why I'm really hanging onto the show. The long-term arc of the show is sloppy and the tone is infected with the "am I a drama? am I a goofy comedy?" seesaw disease prevalent in other overrated ABC semi-soaps like "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy". The show gets flack from its detractors for being overly political, which is quite true (I think) but doesn't seem to bother me so much.... the politics of the show and its continual stabs at "right here, right now" issues seem ultimately the point of the show. This is a political family drama dressed as a soap opera, not a soap opera dressed in fancy politics.

Let's circle back to Sally Field, though.... there's something so honest and raw about the way she portrays this mother character of hers, that I can't help but think she's the anchor of it all. I buy everything she puts out, even when she too gets in her bedroom time with the family contractor. She's likely the reason why this show isn't actually all that bad.... a lesser actress probably wouldn't be able to hold it together (in fact, Betty Buckley, maybe not a lesser actress, originally had the role in the unaired pilot but was mysteriously jettisoned in favor of Field, who was likely tired of collecting her paychecks for post-menopause osteoporosis medication commercials). That said, I'm afraid the show might be relying too heavily on Sally Field to hold it together.... without her, the whole thing would just fall apart.

I wish for this season that the show decides to settle on a continuous story that flows between episodes instead of a "family dramatic moment of the week" cycle with some connective tissue between episodes here and there. How about less sex and more conniving, too? We'll see how it goes.... do you think this show will settle down and get comfortable, or will they up the antics? Only time will tell, and usually my patience thins before time around gets to telling.

UPDATE (10/01/2007): Turns out I made it about 20 minutes into the show before I felt more compelled to turn it off and head to bed where I could begin reading William Gay's new novel Twilight. Probably not a good sign.

thoughts on death

2007-09-27T23:52:00.000-04:00

I do think he just may be my favorite character on "Family Guy".

I dunno, it's something about when they start providing a life for him that he really gets to shine..... ironic, huh?

....and that chick had just been touched after preaching, "You can't hug your children with nuclear arms."

on the radar, nine months later

2007-09-23T19:34:00.000-04:00

Wow. Nine months since a blog post. Kind of ludicrous, right? I'll be lucky if this thing gets read anymore. Children have been conceived and born in that time. Just reading over my minor blog-resurrection back in January, it feels like it's been a long time.

I've been doing a lot of reading.

I've been doing a lot of writing.

And lately, I've been seeing a lot of movies....

--> The Brave One
Fully entertaining Jodie Foster vigilante fare. Another example of a movie whose target audience is me.... nouveau revenge film where wronged woman gets to make things right by taking out the bad guys (even with a crowbar through the head). Why reviewers keep wanting to to compare it to Taxi Driver I do not know (perhaps because the comparison is too juicy, too ripe to want to place Foster's role as teeny-bopper hooker in that movie to ass-kicking mama-san in this one). It seemed to have a lot of precursor steam, but generally negative reviews might punch away Foster's chance at an (fully deserved) Oscar nomination for Best Actress this year.

--> 3:10 to Yuma
Apparently it's a remake, apparently it's based on an Elmore Leonard short story. Still, this movie falls into a recent rut of crappy titles for films. That said, it took me by complete surprise.... I love westerns, especially the newer reincarnation of westerns (see also: Open Range), and this was a movie that held me from the start. Sometimes I think the western genre might try to plunger too many excuses for shoot-outs down our throats, but this movie seemed paced just right; a kind of "road picture" western that shows two men match wits and come to a truce in a satisfying, fulfilling way for us viewers. (Side note: Ben Foster seethes creepiness all over every scene he's in. Nice job.)

--> Across the Universe
Julie Taymor's directorial style is something unmatched in film today, and I wish the woman would make more movies. Frida (her previous foray into film) wasn't the best movie in the world but was shocking and gorgeous in its visual imagination. Taymor also wielded her wizardy as choreographer-cum-puppeteer on stage with the Broadway production of The Lion King (truly a breathtaking theatre experience). This film is, basically, a 60's coming of age musical woven together taking from the span of the complete repertoire of the Beatles, and it succeeds in leaps and bounds, and gives us a treat to the beautiful and the bizarre. I'd argue this is a movie whose experience wouldn't be the same if you just wait to rent it on DVD.

More movies to come.... I for one keep getting chills when I watch the trailer for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Also, No Country for Old Men, which was an f-ing phenomenal book (one of my favorites, certainly one of the best I read this year), which looks like it will be one f-ing phenomenal bloodbath of a movie, directed by the Coen Brothers. Don't expect this to be some sprightly dark comedy, though.... the book was about evil to the core, and I hope the movie stays true.

In other news: check out stinkylulu's Supporting Actress Sundays post on one of the best acting performances I've ever seen on film.... that of Diane Ladd in David Lynch's Wild at Heart.

so nice that the 2006 movie season has some redemption

2007-01-21T22:54:00.000-05:00

I'm not exactly surprised that Notes on a Scandal rocked my world. It's basically a story about a lonely old woman who tends to get obsessive with her younger and hotter female cohorts. But don't let that poor pitch stand in your way; this is a seething melodrama with teeth, and perhaps one of the best dual-actress showcases seen in recent movie history.

No, I haven't seen The Queen. Yes, Helen Mirren will win her Oscar for it. I've moved on. People tire of Judi Dench because they think she locks up nominations left and right simply for showing up to work.... but compare the stately Judi Dench with her roles in the recent James Bond flicks and something like last year's Mrs. Henderson Presents up against the monster of a character she's got in Notes on a Scandal. This woman so much deserves a nomination (and a win? Why not?) just in the nuance and ferocity of her performance.... she becomes someone else while still maintaining her Judi Dench-ness, and is all the more terrifying for it. She underplays her desperation until she can make it pounce like some kind of feral cat, and there are some tense scenes where you can see the balance of power tipping in her favor that make you feel creepy all over.

The object of Dench's affection in this film? Cate Blanchett. I've read many places that people feel she's miscast here.... I would tend to disagree. Blanchett plays a young-ish school teacher who just happens to fall in with a 15-year old student of hers.... and by "fall in" I mean have dirty sex on abandoned train tracks. But her character's life is so fully wrought and displayed in a such a cool and subtle manner that I never become totally unconvinced of her character's actions. She's got a happy marriage (I guess, I suppose this is up to debate) and two children she loves with all of her heart.... but she gets swept up and accidentally (or something like that) falls in love with the kid, silly to forget that he's just 15 and will easily toss her aside like kleenex. There comes an awesome and very-filmic and somewhat creepy/beautiful scene where we see Blanchett try to go back to her teenage youth by slapping on some harloty makeup. All throughout the movie, too, she's screaming hot.... very downplayed, very sexy, and it works. Certainly in the vein that Judi Dench's character gets a little bit (okay, a lot) attached, and likes to play a kinky arm-stroking game with her too.

Bottom line: Cate Blanchett, for all I care, can step up to the podium and claim her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this. I feel for her, felt sorry for her, and loved the explosive energy she eviscerates from herself toward the end when she gets to confront Judi Dench and then go ape-shit in front of the reporters waiting for her outside.... I bought it, and I can imagine this character losing it like that. This scene, particularly with Dench, is some tight and tense moviemaking.... well-written, well-acted, well-enjoyed by me.

What stands in Blanchett's way of swiping a second Oscar for herself? The unevenly reviewed musical and Beyoncé-wardrobe showcase that is Dreamgirls. I have not seen the movie, but likely will.... if only because my interest is piqued that Eddie Murphy can actually recover from the recent career lows of wasting away in unfunny family comedies. For some reason ex-"American Idol" alumnus Jennifer Hudson has all the Oscar buzz wrapped around every one of her digits for Best Supporting Actress. To my knowledge, this is all because she knocks it out of the park because of some solo she has in the middle of the movie. Okay.... but can she act? Don't immediately auction off an Oscar just because the chick can sing. Does her role have any more oomph than just some powerful solo? (Well.... keep in mind that rapper-turned-actress-turned-Pizza Hut spokeswoman Queen Latifah scored an Oscar nomination off a solo song in Chicago.... she must have just off the song, because her role was somewhat nonexistent otherwise.)

So, is Notes on a Scandal my favorite movie of 2006? Let's go with second favorite; I certainly look forward to adding it to my movie shelf. It's totally dark and twisted and hits you with the right amount of sub-campy force and intensity that's necessary for a quality rock-your-socks-off melodrama. The top of the list for the year deserves its own post upon rewatching in the near future. Just to keep you all in drooling suspense.

blogiversary, plus one day

2007-01-19T17:44:00.000-05:00

A year ago and a day to this day I inaugurated this blog. I have no plans to be self-reflexive and commemorative about why I started a blog or what I wanted to write about. I just think it's kind of cool that I've had it for a year. Weird to think about where I was and what I was doing a year ago, and although it's not totally different, it's really not the same. That's all, really. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm under house arrest until I finish revising this damn story. It's about a late-summer hurricane. Poignant, consider yesterday was the first time this season that it snowed in Manhattan. Where is the winter?

reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

2007-01-14T13:31:00.000-05:00

Ah, a new year. Never before have I actually felt that a new year is really an opportunity for a new beginning, but after the last three-ish months of a relative veritable hell, I'm ready for a stab in the dark to start anew. Or something like that. I'm not that deep, I swear.

Things to look forward to:

--> The Golden Globes, the annual celebrity fellating that is the head of the class when it comes to Oscar precursors. To be honest, I only watch to see which celebrity gets shit-faced from the Hollywood Foreign Press open bar. I'm curious: who exactly are the Hollywood Foreign Press? Do they sit in an elevated darkened room over the Golden Globe ceremonies, similar to the banker in "Deal or No Deal"? I'd kind of like to see that. Unfortunately, this awards season will provide little shock and awe, only because both Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker have been steamrolling every award they can get their hands on, thus taking the surprise (and thereby fun) of the whole movie-awards season hoopla. I haven't seen The Queen or The Last King of Scotland (oddly both regally-titled films), and I'm not sure if I'll get to them. I'd rather see:

--> Notes on a Scandal. If there was ever a movie that catered to my taste in f-ed up storylines, this one would be it. Besides, Judi Dench (who, admit it, is pretty amazing) looks positively evil. And (despite my loathsomeness toward The Aviator) I rather enjoy Cate Blanchett. I've heard nothing but good things about this movie, and it looks totally twisted. It probably helps that it's written by Patrick Marber, who also penned Closer, also a pretty f-ed up story, which was my favorite film of 2004.

--> A blog post in the near future about my favorite film of 2006. I'll keep all two of you who frequently read this lying in suspense, though. Just know this: it isn't exactly a film I thought would be my favorite of the year.

--> The season premiere of "24". In my mind, the golden heyday of "24" has long been over, and the show has devolved into a steaming pile of predictable crap. Does this mean I won't watch? Of course not. But: if this season starts with the usual jerking-around plotless nonsense that it's started to rely on, I may have to bid this show goodbye. Here's to hoping they do something surprising and complicating to the story for a change. (Notice the sexed-up presence of Chloe, who's eternally safe from character death, and Karen Hayes, who has the potential to do something pretty cool, which, knowing the producers, means she's a goner.)

--> My first blogiversary. Time to break out the balloons and streamers. What the hell, I'll bake a cake.

Happy New Year.

movie meme, kind of

2006-11-17T13:19:00.000-05:00

JJ tagged me.... and if I've learned one thing about this meme business, no matter how much I half-loathe/half-am-intrigued by answering them, I just can't say no. Besides, this one's about movies.... so I'll bite.

1. Popcorn or candy?

Candy, usually. I'm a fan of things gummy and sour. But, I don't renounce popcorn: I've learned some nifty tricks to ensure that the popcorn pump butter is evenly distributed throughout the length of the tub. It's all in the disposbale straws.

2. Name a movie you've been meaning to see forever.

Hmmmm.... I know there's one, it's just not coming to me. I've had The Grifters on my Netflix queue forever. Still haven't seen The Color Purple either.

3. You are given the power to recall one Oscar: Who loses theirs and to whom?

I could go on for days with this question.... but I am given only one choice. And the answer to that, HANDS DOWN, would be removing the Oscar from Opie's (aka Ron Howard) sentimentalizing hands for A Beautiful Mind and giving the statue to its rightful owner, David Lynch, for Mulholland Drive. No specifics necessary, that's just how it is.

4. Steal one costume from a movie for your wardrobe. Which will it be?

I have no idea. There are tons of cool clothes in movies. My answers would all be boring. Maybe I should say something a little more expected of a question like this.... Ghostbusters uniforms?

5. Your favorite film franchise is....

Star Trek. Yeah, that's right, don't knock it. I'm a screaming fan of everything Star Trek VI and onward (Star Trek: First Contact almost transcends the franchise on its own weight), and I don't have to be ashamed. Let's see.... if not Star Trek, I have an unusual affinity for the first two Jurassic Park movies....

6. Invite five movie people over for dinner. Who are they? Why'd you invite them? What do you feed them?

This question feels too much like I'm being tested. How about this for an answer: Last year I was at this small seminar where Philip Roth was coming to talk about whatever it was he felt was important to self-reflexively talk about with grad students. The windbag organizer of the event was so enamored with the possiblity of the students aksing Philip Roth earth-shaking questions of absolute poignancy that he scoffed at the idea we ask him anything not on par with preeminent genius. He said, for instance, that we should never ask him what it was like to have dinner with Nicole Kidman (Roth wrote The Human Stain, so I imagine his connection to the film adaptation of his novel which starred Nicole Kidman would be cause for at least one dinner together). I say why the hell not? That would be exactly the question I'd want to ask.

7. What is the appropriate punishment for people who answer cell phones in the movie theater?

Drawn and quartered. All of them. To be honest, I'm actually surprised that people dare do that. But they do. Medieval torture for all.

8. Choose a female bodyguard: Ripley from Aliens. Mystique from X-Men. Sarah Connor from Terminator 2. The Bride from Kill Bill. Mace from Strange Days.

I haven't seen Strange Days, so maybe I'm not totally qualified to answer this question. That, and Linda Hamilton is more Dante's Peak than Terminator for me. I'd say a tie between Ripley and The Bride.... they're both badass but for completely different reasons. Sure they're both tough and both irresistibly sexy, but both for different reasons too.

9. What's the scariest thing you've ever seen in a movie?

I'm sure there's something scarier, but I was genuinely and thoroughly creeped out by the long-haired demon girl from The Ring crawling out of the television set and ambling like some kind of reanimated sloth toward her prey.

10. Your favorite genre (excluding "comedy" and "drama") is....

Psychological thriller? That genre on its own sounds so disgusting.... I'm not talking movie adaptations of James Patterson trash. But hey, if you can give me a puzzle box of a mindfuck movie and intrigue me enough to want to figure it out (at least with the promise that it can be done, and done so without spoonfeeding), you win.

11. You are given the power to greenlight movies at a major studio for one year. How do you wield this power?

Wow. This is a power I have not asked for. I agree that too many crappy movies are being made.... definitely go for quality over quantity. The other thing would be to get rid of prefabricated casting.... let the movie come before the star. Stop writing movies for actors and actually have actors come and audition for the leads.

12. Bonnie or Clyde?

I'd have to agree with JJ on this one.... the two go together. You cannot have one without the other. Besides, it's less fun to only choose one person to shoot the hell out of something with an automatic rifle.

13. Who am I tagging to answer this survey?

Those who feel inspired. Besides, I'd love to hear which Oscars you folks would recall.

hiatus

2006-11-03T23:06:00.000-05:00

It's amazing to think about how much different (i.e. sedentary) my life was not two months ago. I hardly have time to check email anymore. Recent developments that have struck my radar:

1) "Lost" has gone completely bonkers. Why make the impetus of Season 2 about a whole new cast of characters only to kill ALL of them off? The producers spit things like "the actor didn't want to make a commitment to a series" or "we ran out of stories to tell with that character". So, ahem, why bother hiring them and introducing them in the first place?!? Idiot showrunners. In any case, the show has no narrative confidence whatsoever as we begin Season 3, and it so painfully shows. The only good thing they have going for them is the steely hotness of new cast member Elizabeth Mitchell. How do I type out a sexy growl?

2) I've been reading short stories like crazy, like it's my job. Funny, because it is kind of my job. Lorrie Moore (my new not-so-secret favorite writer) just had a story published in the New Yorker, which is amazing, and the first paragraph alone has some virtuoso language going for it. Could this mean she has a new story collection coming around the bend? Bring it on, Lorrie. We're waiting.

3) Mark your calendars for the Giada DeLaurentiis vs. Rachael Ray Iron Chef showdown. This is perhaps the best new thing the Food Network has on its schedule except for Nigella Lawson's amazing/hilarious cooking show where she cooks things very Britishly (more on this below). I'm putting my money on Giada, given the fact that she is an actual ordianed chef whereas Rachael Ray is now a part-time Food Network cash cow and obnoxious syndicated talk show host. When the Food Network has sunk so far, this is actually a trashy glimmer of hope. Rue be the day "The Next Food Network Star" comes around; their new "celebrities" make me want to vomit blood, in somewhere public.

4) The first time I ever saw Nigella Lawson, it was on the television screen in front of me on a Virgin Atlantic flight from London to San Francisco. This was maybe six, seven years ago. The woman is luminous, and she cooked bizzare things with cream and roasts of beef and gelatin. BUT.... her show was absolutely intoxicating, and I scoured the American airwaves to find it. No luck, we never had BBC. Now the Food Network has snagged Nigella (on the appropriately named "Nigella Feasts", which if you say it too fast, sounds like "Nigella Feets"), and she is so very watchable. Recent Food Network hotshot Ellie Krieger got too dull too quickly, so hopefully Nigella will bring a good burst of non-hallucinogenic/antidepressant-fueled energy to the programming. Of course, I've only seen one of her episodes, because I never have time to breathe anymore let alone watch TV.

5) I tend not to be too spontaneous a person, but suddenly I'll be spending my weekend in Boston reunited with a friend I haven't seen in awhile. This will be the perfect medicine, despite the fact that I want to hibernate in my apartment and never leave: the claustrophobia of NYC has reached a suffocating level.

lit meme

2006-10-14T10:44:00.000-04:00

A meme for books, the gauntlet thrown down by write procrastinator.

1 ) One book that changed your life:

Is this statement for real? Well, I guess if I really thought about it, I'm sure there are a few books that have changed my life, movies too. It just sounds so cheesy to say something "changed your life". In terms of content, I have no idea. But, there came a weird turning point where I started to really appreciate language and the construction of words together, in a way that I never had thought of before. Now, I'm obsessed with language.... it's almost as if the story doesn't matter in favor of nailing the language. One of the first books I read where this lightbulb went off was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (which I am a fan of, despite other detractors who jump on the Dave-Eggers-isn't-cool-anymore bandwagon).

2) One book that you’d read more than once:

No joke, I've read Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton more than 5 times, at least. It's been awhile, but I have a deep affection for this book. It's also one of those books I read at a young enough age where I first realized that the original novel is almost always better than the movie adaptation.

3) One book you’d want on a deserted island:

It's got to be entertaining, redeeming, fulfilling. Part of me thinks I'd prefer to have a book of short stories because of the varying topics and the different world each story can create.... meaning that just one novel can maybe get a little suffocating. I'm totally smitten with Birds of America by Lorrie Moore right now, but I also have uneneding dedication to White Noise by Don DeLillo.

4) One book that made you laugh:

Most recently? Home Land by Sam Lipsyte.... it takes a lot for a book to actually make me laugh out loud (in public, reading on the subway no less), and parts of this book did the trick. Barbed and sardonic.... I love it.

5) One book that made you cry:

I'm not exactly a big weeper, so this question doesn't really apply.... Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is so bleak but at the same time so wrenchingly beautiful, somehow I can't imagine people getting through it without a dry eye. It's hard to pitch this book and tell them to read it, because it is the polar opposite of a feel-good read.... but when you do read it, you realize you have perhaps read something perfect, one of the greatest novels of our time.

6) One book you wish you’d written:

Ah, the green-with-envy question. Well, I'm in awe of a lot of literature.... but I don't know if that necessarily means I wish I wrote some of it. I feel like that I'm learning so much from the short stories by Lorrie Moore, so I want to say that I wrote one of her books because her writing is incredible. But.... I have to admit that I'm a screaming Beatle-mania fan of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, only because it comes so close to virtuosity; I admire the structure and the style and the balls-to-the-wall ambition.

7) One book you wish had never been written:

One book? How about chick-lit as a genre. Most books I find cluttering the "New Fiction" shelves at bookstores all have pink covers and cartoon drawings of legs or purses. Meanwhile struggling quality lit-fiction writers out there are consistently being turned away by publishers.

8) One book you’re currently reading:

Well, aside from some of the not-so-interesting stuff I've been tasked to read for classes (including Washington Square by Henry James: my nemesis, he hath returned), I'm trying to get to books that I want to read instead. I've started to read Joe College by Tom Perrotta, but I'm not convinced I like it all that much.

9) One book you’ve been meaning to read:

The short stories of Raymond Carver in Where I'm Calling From. There's also Underworld by Don DeLillo, but let's be honest, I'm just scared of how damn big it is.

10) Tag, you're it.

another one bites the dust

2006-10-07T11:01:00.000-04:00

One of the least-coveted titles for a new television show is that of the first-canceled television show, across all networks. The (un)lucky winner this year: "Smith"

Bummer.

The show had such promise too. At this point it's only been "taken off the schedule", but headstones are already being prepared. If you look at the history of heist shows, though, they tend not to do so well.... so, "Smith" had an uphill climb from the start. I guess no matter how good the writing, acting, and production values are.... if your show doesn't pick up an audience, it's over. All this goes without saying, though.

It seems none of the new television shows this season are doing so hot. There doesn't seem to be one great standout of the new year.... Strange when critics and networks are heralding their own self-proclaimed renaissance of quality television.... it seems all the viewing public really wants is "CSI" and "Grey's Anatomy".... even "Lost" noticed a dip in ratings for its season premiere. This is no surprise either.... year after year after year, television viewing audiences prefer the kid gloves, not the challenging stuff. Dr. McDreamy et. al. are television fluff and an unstoppable juggernaut of female wish fulfillment drama.

Looks like now I'm gonna have to start watching "Heroes", just like everyone else in the country.

ruminations, and why good short fiction trumps all

2006-09-29T14:36:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been busy. Too busy. A kind of busy I like, the kind of busy that far eclipses the not-busy boredom I was afflicted with regularly this summer. There's something to be said about boredom.... it's kind of a zen-state of procrastination, where things that need to get done do not get done because they are not pressing, undesirable, easily hidden. Funny that in those pockets of time where I now do not have something scheduled or planned or on the to-do list, I find myself crushingly bored. Things that need to be done come off as chores.

There's a glut of new TV shows out there that I'm trying my best to weed through. "Smith" is great, "Heroes" is good if maybe leaning toward stodgy. I have yet to see "Brothers and Sisters", but its soapy allure won't keep me far from it for too long. "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" might be better if it didn't come off as self-important, "Six Degrees" has a concept that ran out before the pilot episode was even finished, and "The Nine" (premiering next week) is uninteresting trash masquerading as nail-biting television. I wish some shows would stop with the bravado like the writers know what they're doing when it's clear they have a vague idea about what only one or two episodes in the future will be like. Poignant that ABC has scheduled the "The Nine" with "Lost" as its lead-in, when the two shows seem to share an obsession with information-deprivation (for all parties, including the writers).

So, with TV kind of an afterthought and/or casualty of me being too busy, I've been sifting my way through literature. I just read Haruki Murakami for the first time just a week or so ago.... my inital reaction to the novel I read is that I liked it (I still do), but I think it was most successful in the mood/tone department. He seems to be so wildly popular, yet the novel I read seemed to have some questionably gaping holes in the story that make me think that this guy has been given the carte-blanche publishing card just like Joyce Carol Oates has.

But what a comfort it is to melt into perfect short stories. she can film it posted recently about how finding really good short fiction is an experience worth waiting for. Of course, I feel her pain about wading through the slush piles from hell of really bad short story submissions for publication.... it's so so rare to find something that you want to stand up and scream about, so rare in fact that when you do find it, you do stand up and scream about it (or at least I do).

When I first heard about Lorrie Moore maybe four or five years ago, I had absolutely no idea who she was. But people gushed. They made her seem like she was the real deal. And then I sort of forgot about her.... her books weren't exactly littering bookstore shelves, nor were people always gushing about her work in my other classes. For the last year or two I've been keeping my eye out for her star-making book of short stories Birds of America and then finally found it at the Strand last month and felt like I had hit the lottery. And now I'm reading it, and it is amazing. The command of language is so clean and strong, but not minimalist or part of the minimalist craze of a lot of contemporary lit fiction. I haven't come across a story I have disliked, because everything hits true, everything rings all the right bells. Her fiction is very witty and amusing but isn't trying for laughs.... it's effortless and beautiful. It's the kind of fiction I want to bathe in, and a good road map (I think) for the kind of stuff I write. It's easy to lose myself in, it's easy to pine for.

Lorrie Moore tends to stick exclusively with short stories (her novels seem to be less-popular), so I'm probably going to be perusing bookstore shelves for her next book. Apparently Self-Help is a book of her short stories that are all written in the second person, a point of view that I love in writing perhaps because it is so dangerous and easily prone to failure.... but when it succeeds, the second person floors everything like a devastating shock wave, it can be that good. It irritates me that everyone and their mother associates second-person narrative with Jay McInerney (thanks to his dare-I-say-one-hit-wonder Bright Lights, Big City, a book I quite enjoy), like second person belongs to him or something. Feh.

More reporting to follow. I dream that one day I'll start writing really acrid-but-devastatingly-funny blog posts like they do on Defamer, my new favorite vacuous outlet to procrastinate on while at work.

Smith: what you should be watching

2006-09-18T13:33:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the myriad wonders of the internet, I've gotten a sneak peak and a handful of pilot episodes for new dramas forthcoming from the television networks this season. I've already narrowed my list from what seems inherently interesting to what seems any good at all, because in this day and age where every moment is precious, I don't want to waste my time watching crappy TV.

The solution: Tune in to CBS this Tuesday night and watch "Smith".

Probably the worst thing going for the show is the title. Who tunes in to something called "Smith"? I wouldn't. In a typically unsurprising move on the parts of TV executives and TV writers, they have selected an unspectacular title that really doesn't mean much of anything. Why does this keep happening? At least it's not a gerund-infested gramatically incorrect maddener, in the style of "Judging Amy", "Watching Ellie", "Crossing Jordan", etc. The uninteresting title could ultimately be what hurts it most, but no matter. Shows with really poppy eye-grabbing titles (like "Desperate Housewives", for instance) sometimes turn out to be steaming clumps of loose stool.

So, get over the bad title and watch. You like heist movies? "Smith" is probably for you.... keep in mind it's not altogether uncommon to see caper shows pop up on the TV line up (for instance last season's offerings of "Heist" and "Thief", both of which I did not see, both of which did not make it). A few seasons back they had that caper-type show "Thieves" starring Uncle Jessie and Melissa George (who wasn't all that great in "Alias", but was successful as plot-keystone eye-candy in Mulholland Drive), but the show sunk under its own weight of episodic romantic comedy.

Which poses a potential problem: it's unclear after the pilot if "Smith" will be a boring caper-of-the-week episodic drama, or if it will develop and kind of build off its own heists in a serial story. The writers would be smart to play it the latter way; the idea of having a new thing to go steal each week would get boring really fast. Things certainly look shaped up to travel in the direction of serial.... or at least some of the way (like "ER" or "The West Wing" or a bunch of similar serial/episodic hybrids). Throughout the pilot we're introduced to Ray Liotta's character Bobby, the lead, who works as some kind of executive in a boring office atmosphere by day and as a slinky art thief by night. He's got a group of five or six henchmen to help pull it off with him (most exciting of which is Amy Smart, who rocks pretty hard and is undeniably sexy weilding a taser gun), and they set their sights on a museum in Pittsburgh to make their claim. Bobby gets his jobs from Charlie, played with such alluring nonchalance by the one and only Shohreh Aghdashloo (quickly rising to be my favorite actress), who seems to be an untouchable power broker. Bottom line: they get to Pittsburgh, they steal their paintings, and then narrowly miss getting caught, and one of henchmen ends up dead. Hence, the cops are on their trail.... and so begins the season.

I think I'm endeared to the pilot episode because it threw in some very creative twists and turns that I didn't see coming. The structure of the epsiode shows you the aftermath of the mess in Pittsburgh first, rewinds to show us how they got there (and deepens the cast of characters with backstory here and there), and then replays the art heist in more detail (and with some surprising and badass additions we didn't get to see the first time around.... *ahem* taser gun). We see bits and pieces of how this group of art thieves tripped up, which could lend much needed clues to the cops (and thereby gives us a linked serial sturcture between episodes). The fantastic addition of Virginia Madsen (luminous) as Ray Liotta's wife is a lot of fun too.... what we see first is a cheery soccer mom, but as the episode plays out we get a great twist that suggests she might be more privvy to her husband's nighttime escapades than we (the viewer) was allowed to think at first. Good stuff.

I've stayed out of the way of reviews of this show, in hopes that it won't tarnish my high. I'm invested to see where it's going, in hopes it turns out to be as good as the pilot promises. It's beautifully filmed, all on location it seems, and it all feels very solid: directing, editing, acting, writing. The end of the episode kind of sandwiches in a law-enforcement-hot-on-the-case angle which, to be honest, I could take or leave; the episode succeeded just fine without it, but it kind of fits hand-in-hand with the whole used-to-be-on-parole background of Ray Liotta's Bobby. But what good caper show doesn't raise the stakes with the cops after them? This too could be the lynchpin to the entire series, telling us little by little more about Virginia Madsen's past, more about Amy Smart's showgirl day job and her power over others who rely on her (some for drugs, it seems), more about why that dude from "The Guardian" is a cold-blooded killer with a sniper rifle, and more about why Virginia Madsen's character and Shohreh Aghdashloo's character apparently don't get along.

So, yes. This Tuesday. CBS. 10 pm. Go to it.

the novel that shocked the nation

2006-09-10T21:06:00.000-04:00

Our entertainment media has gotten too tame lately. People seem offended too easily, or maybe it's just a few people who scream too loudly when they see something they don't like. There’s all this talk about values, and punishment for those who don’t hold them. Certainly on television things have been racier and edgier than ever before, and once they flirt with too racy or too edgy the FCC descends from somewhere and slaps fines based on rules that aren’t published anywhere. And then the taming happens.

The last great medium where there are no rules: the written word. One of the myriad reasons why I like it so much.

Heard of Peyton Place? Yes, it was a movie, and yes, it was a television show.... but first and foremost it was a novel, and it had everyone talking. It was a wildly successful blockbuster, but since its heyday it seems to have disappeared off the radar. The movie version came along a year after its publication, and was nominated for nine oscars, five of those for performances.

I’ve owned the book for years and tried reading it awhile back and put it down. I just picked it up again and blazed though it.... and you know what? I rather like it. It's kind of like a refreshing breath of air if you're searching for some quality shock value, the only problem is that you have to put yourself in a 1956 state of mind to appreciate it.

Peyton Place is probably floating around at the top of the list that inspired or borne the modern genre novel, but because its roots go back so far it kind of falls into the literary canon, I guess. Don't get me wrong, the quality of the writing is nothing special (I emphasize this.... at times it was downright bad) and would have loads of lit snobs putting the book down after the first page.... but this is not a book you read because of its command of language; you read it because it is a master juggler of multiple storylines, a trait that I think the novel has given up on.

The book is all soap opera, and doesn't disappoint. Written by Grace Metalious, apparent young hotblood of the literary scene in the 1950s, we learn about the denizens of the New England hamlet of Peyton Place and all their dirty laundry. Metalious probably got her ideas from the tradition of radio serial and newfound television soap operas, and she pulls out all the stops. Want nudity? Check. Incest? You got it. Campy threats, murder, historical intrigue, and adolescent anguish? You've come to the right place.

Because the book takes place in the 1940s, it's interesting to witness the mindset of characters and how they manipulated people that would never work (or at least not seem as threatening) today. One teenage girl gets herself pregnant by the son of the most powerful man in town, and thinks that she can leverage her pregnancy to be married and set for life.... so the town patriarch bribes her father to keep her mouth shut. She thinks she can tussle, and comes storming into the patriarch's office all pissed about the bribe. He doesn't bat an eye though, and threatens to have her taken to court: "Do you know how many witnesses it takes to testify against a girl and have her declared a prostitute in this state?" he asks her. "Only six." And he reminds her that he employs quite a bit more than six men.

Some other wacky stuff happens.... a grizzled housekeeper hangs herself in her employer's bedroom, a teenage girl has her arm snapped off by a defective carnival ride, and there are a handful of steamy sex scenes that probably got a few people blushing back in 1956. A girl who had been abused by her stepfather beats him to death with a hot poker from the fire. All in a sleepy New Hampshire town.

Metalious tells her story very calmly, and I think this is what I like most about it. She's not out to keep you interested in the arc of one character; she wants you to watch everybody and judge for yourself. At any one time we're learning about five, six, or seven different stories, and we see how they connect to one another and we know that not all of them do. The town is connective tissue enough. (Are you hearing this, TV studio executives? Why not look back to the model of what it means to be a serial program and find your roots back at the soap opera? I think a modern day Peyton Place on television would set a good example.)

Novels don't traditionally try to pull off the multiple storyline feat.... but I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong. Dual narratives seem to be a perennial favorite, though. Jennifer Egan's Look at Me walked away with a National Book Award nomination a few years ago, and the entire novel is like a tennis match between two completely separate storylines. Zadie Smith took on more than just two with White Teeth (which in its own right could be described as a post-post-modern British Peyton Place, and this is in every way a compliment), and despite torpedoing the last quarter of the book, it launched for her a very successful writing career. Both of these novels juggle their multiple storylines more or less in real time.... i.e. the action of the story moves forward as we learn about each story. Metalious does the same thing, but her stories seem to have been equalized somehow, and this, in part, makes them more interesting to me. Although I rather liked Look at Me and White Teeth, some of the stories that I had to read through were downright uninteresting in the face of the much poppier material they had earlier. Look at Me is about a supermodel who had her face destroyed in a horrific car accident.... so why do I spend half the novel learning about a teenage girl in the midwest falling in love with a terrorist? By keeping the tension high and the same emphasis (more or less) on the events of what happens in the town of Peyton Place, no matter how different they are, the novel of the same name remains equally interetsting throughout.

And, I have to say it, this is exactly what makes some serial television shows more watchable than others. Are you listening, TV executives?

Vanished: better off vanishing from primetime

2006-09-01T21:55:00.000-04:00

Knowing ahead of time that I will practically have no time to watch much new TV of the 2006-2007 season, I'm trying to do my best by getting a preview of new shows that exhibit some promise. Fox's latest offering "Vanished" is not one of these shows.

I only feel compelled to write about it because it misses the mark on so many levels, it's kind of maddening to think about why it was greenlighted. Basic premise: Senator's wife disappears, FBI gets involved, Senator's wife has shady dealings revealed (surprise, surprise), mystic symbols somehow relating to the disappearance start appearing in all the right places at all the right times.

Let's see how "Vanished" plays up to bat.

* Identity crisis: Is this a serial drama or an episodic drama? It seems to be a procedural that wants badly to be a serial. Each episode provides a high body count for a convenient FBI autopsy. Each episode gives us new FBI tricks to deepen the investigation (ATM camera with high-tech digital imaging quality, all within the hour; high-tech call center with instant-access organizational charts at the press of a button). Each episode features the Senator's teenage brood in some kind of trouble. But hold the phone.... we get random Celtic-like symbols at crime scenes! The senator has an ex-wife in town who's talked about a lot but apparently hasn't been casted yet! Keep tuning in viewer, questions will be answered! STRIKE ONE.

* Serial television tunnel vision. "Vanished" is all based around the disappearance of the Senator's wife. So, what happens when she's found? Show's over, plain and simple. No getting around that fact. They can't possibly drag this out for more than a season, two at its biggest stretch. Why are networks greenlighting serial shows that don't have a prayer for longevity? STRIKE TWO.

* Trashy smash cuts between scenes. Dear Fox: Computer generated cuts do not make good TV, they waste screentime. They're not good for "Prison Break", and they're not good for "Vanished". This is a kind of unfortunate afterbirth from "CSI", with its "let's follow the bullet as it entered the body!" sequences in flashback, giving us a gory pin-hole trajectory through a body coupled with gooshy sound effects. Maybe it worked for "CSI"'s first season way back when, but it's really old now. "Vanished" goes for variations on a theme, like computer-generated cuts as we follow the data as travels through the internet! We follow telephone calls as they travel through the wires! We also get white noise dissolves to commericals, as if we're looking through television static. Très artsy, now please stop. This is all a minor gripe, but still a gripe, and one that lessens the quality of the show. BALL ONE.

* (side note: Any show that relies on the audience to read emails sent to a character who is mentioned but never seen, or to read text messages between characters, is in dire danger. This violates the very tenets of screenwriting. Visual writing is paramount: what is seen must be written, and to maintain high energy there must be movement. Forcing the viewer to piece together overtly ominous plot points by watching some kid write e-mails to his offscreen may-or-may-not-be criminal mother is the opposite of energetic writing with movement.)

* Who's story is this anyway? The viewer is being asked to follow a couple of different storylines that don't gel together very well. Unfortunately, this makes their characters misguided, too. "Vanished" has three compartments: the FBI investigation into the disappearance, the Senator and his family issues, and the media coverage of the disappearance. Now, all good serial dramas balance multiple storylines with a large cast of characters that don't exactly always interact with each and every one another. "Vanished" goes to pains to try to keep each of these stories on the same track, all pointed in the direction of tracking down this missing wife.... thereby eliminating much room for growth. This seems to be a problem of a lot of serial television concepts, tying right back to the impossibility of multi-season longevity. This is something they're going to have to hammer out, and hammer out soon, so they get a pass, with strong suggestions to get in shape. BALL TWO.

* The cast. Some things look good on paper, such as Ming Na as a spunky FBI agent. Too bad she seems more content taking orders rather than carving out an interesting character for herself. Rebecca "The Noxema Girl" Gayheart plays a sexy/take-no-prisoners/predictably-smarmy television news reporter. Unfortunately she doesn't have the poise of an actual television news reporter and delivers each of her lines like an actor. At least she'll always have Urban Legend.... which she rocked in. The other characters are swimming through stereotype (the lead FBI agent guy plays the hardened officer committed to his cases, barking orders and slamming things around, but damn it he wants to get to the bottom of this! The senator character kind of bumbles around in shock over his goodie-goodie wife's apparently intricate past, just like we'd expect him to). Didn't the writers have a plan to write about anybody interesting? The characters are the key to the show, and if they suck, your show sucks. STRIKE THREE.

This show blows.

And bad news: "The Nine", forthcoming from ABC, isn't all that great either, and falls prey to the same serial television tunnel vision problem. But that's for another post.

emmy diarrhea

2006-08-27T21:33:00.000-04:00

I got home from a short weekend trip out of the city later than I expected because the bus I was on decided it would be more fun to take an obscure tour of central New Jersey and stop at a creepy abandoned gas station with a broken vending machine rather than just stay on the turnpike and give us a shiny well-lit rest stop with fast food and a Starbucks.

So I get home and turn on the TV and unpack, and what do I find but the Emmys. Unfortunately for the Emmys, I could care less. Those awards mean nothing to me because they don't tend to reflect much of the small percentage of true quality television; I lost interest long ago. The only passing interest I had remained in whether or not "The West Wing" would sweep its nominated categories as a pat on the back for a final season well done -- it didn't. I also was curious if Ellen Burstyn would walk away with an emmy for a 14 second performance for the TV movie Mrs. Harris (watch the performance in its entirety here) -- she didn't.

So, I started flipping back and forth between NBC (a station I never seem to watch, so all those promos for their forthcoming fall shows I probably won't watch caught me off guard) and the old-standby Food Network. Sunday programming on the Food Network tends always to be competitions and reruns of "Unwrapped" that I have absolutely no interest in.... but last night they featured the "Food Network Challenge: Bartender Battle". At first it seemed kind of cool, because I find the trait of spinning liquor bottles around in your hands and actually making a drink in the process kind of sexy. The problem? The contestants didn't really show off their bartending skills all that well. They should have had a bouncer round or something. I don't want to ruin your view of tricky bottle-twirling, but the realm of "entertainment flair bartending" (or whatever they call it) is just glorified juggling at the end of the day. Not even glorified, really.... just juggling liquor bottles. One guy juggled empty liquor bottles. Where's the fun of spilling booze on people? Bottom line: I wanted Coyote Ugly, and instead I got a low rent circus act with dirty-ish Las Vegas bartenders. I think I'm sworn off Food Network weekend programming forever now, (except of course for the morning block of real cooking shows).

So then I ended up flipping back to the Emmys, where the Charlie's Angels came together after some long standing feud I didn't know existed. They held hands and paid tribute to Aaron "stroke of genius" Spelling. Farrah Fawcett, who used to be plastered to the tank of a toilet in the house I lived at in college, looks like she's hiding gravity's wrath with a big blond wig. Thanks to what I can only guess is generous plastic surgery, Kate Jackson looks disturbingly like an alien from the original Star Trek now. I remember watching her in some TV movie in the early 1990s about the bubonic plague breaking out in modern day New York City, and I decided at my young age that I liked her voice. At that age, the movie was scary and captivating too. That's all I have on Kate Jackson.

What little I saw of the Emmys was just like every other awards show on the planet. They're always the same, and yet no one has quite clued in to the monotony it seems. Part of me is thankful there aren't fourteen different awards shows for television like there are for movies, though.

Also: another Aaron Spelling tributeer, Joan Collins, doesn't look half bad at all. Strange though: she looks pretty much the same as she did in "Dynasty" twenty years ago.... and let's keep in mind she wasn't all that young then. This leads me to believe that she perhaps is the real-life version of Death Becomes Her.

a pink slip of celestial proportions

2006-08-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

Well folks, the astronomers have deemed it true. Pluto is no longer officially classified as a planet, pass it on.

There's not much to say really, except this is a pretty big piece of news to report. It kind of awakens the little kid in me that loved space. It's not everyday when people just go and reclassify heavenly bodies. I'm interested, really, why the controversy over what exactly a planet happens to be is just now making news. So, with Pluto's "demotion" what becomes of its legacy? Now grade school kids have eight planets to count about instead of nine. Pluto has always been a gimp planet to begin with, with its tilted orbit and the fact that it makes its way into Neptune's orbit during its year (i.e. its own orbit around the sun), which comes to about 248 Earth years. (Doesn't saying "Earth years" sound like you're in some corny 1950s space movie? I've always wanted a ray gun.) Because of this, Pluto can actually be closer to the sun than Neptune ever gets, sometimes. The fact that it swerves into Neptune's orbit makes it possible for Pluto to collide right into Neptune, doesn't it? When (if?) that happens, talk about a celestial shitstorm.

Planets now have a checklist for official classification, so a bunch of those chunks of frozen gases way the hell out there in our solar system no longer appear to be even tinier planets. Part of me remembers that Pluto had a bunch of moons (three "official" moons, and a lot of other space junk orbiting it too).... I guess those are nameless non-lunar lumps of ice now too. I'm curious to know if our solar system has more stuff orbiting it than your average solar system.... maybe the typical solar system out there only has three or four planets? We have a big old asteroid belt too. I'm surprised that objects as far away from the sun as Pluto et. al. actually maintain something of an orbit. All that stuff way out there now classifies as "trans-Neptunian". Pretty cool name, I think. I'm no astronomer, but maybe all things floating in space have to be in the orbit of something....? You can't just have rogue rocks kicking around out there, can you?

never one to turn down a challenge, the meme edition

2006-08-19T22:57:00.000-04:00

I won't lie and say I enjoy filling out online surveys for all to read. More often than not the survey questions are written by thirteen year olds, designing questions that not so subtly allow them to brag about themselves to their MySpace friends.

Loyal reader write procrastinator tagged me, and it would be impolite of me to ignore him. This survey-style meme seems not terribly invasive, so here goes nothing.

* 10 years ago:
Not one of my better years. Still learning that humans are naturally evil.

* 5 years ago:
Being brought to my knees in my physical science classes became pretty commonplace. I was cooking dinners weekly for sixty people. I started having a lot of fun.

* 1 year ago:
Temporarily living in Virginia and about to move to New York, blindfolded.

* 5 songs I know all the words to:
I could really embarrass myself with this category. But I won't.

--"Let Down", Radiohead
--"Don't Come Around Here No More", Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
--"Soldier's Poem", Muse
--"Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" (dare me, I know those lyrics)
--"Super Trouper", ABBA (I will not hang my head in shame)

* 5 snacks I love and wish I could eat:
To be honest I'm not exactly the biggest snacker. But eating out, oh baby bring it on.

--burritos at Gordo, my favorite branches in Berkeley on College or in San Francisco in the Outer Richmond at 19th Ave & Geary.
--turkey burgers at Bongo Burger, all branches in Berkeley. (my heart burns for their hummus or onion rings with low quality ranch.... *drool*)
--sushi at Pink Godzilla in Capitola.
--fondue. (how about the Fondue Festival on Van Ness?)
--Texas barbecue. (brisket and smoked turkey breast at Stubbs BBQ in Austin, TX.... *drool*)

* 5 places I would run away to:

--the Bay Area.
(more specifically: San Francisco, Santa Cruz County, Stinson Beach, Berkeley, Half Moon Bay)
--the Pacific Northwest.
(more specifically: Portland, Mt. St. Helens, the Columbia River Gorge, Seattle)
--Piano di Sorrento, Italy.
--somewhere hidden in the mountains, like Montana or Wyoming.... for a little bit.
--somewhere tropical with white beaches and warm water.... for a little bit.

* 5 things I would never wear:
This happens to be one of those stupid MySpace-style survey questions. Omigod, what would I never wear!? Who the hell cares.

* 5 favorite TV shows:
Why not have a five favorite movies question? Perhaps for another meme. There happens to be a handy-dandy list sitting over in the righthand column that addresses this very question of TV shows for all to read at any time. Read carefully, folks, the following are quality television:

--"Twin Peaks"
--"Once and Again"
--"Star Trek: The Next Generation" (that's right, I said it; it's sentimentality factor)
--"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (I'm serious, folks)
--"24", the first three seasons and the first half of the fourth season only, though

* 5 greatest joys:

--urban hiking in San Francisco
--beaches during winter storms
--watching thunderstorms
--vaguely, beautiful language in the written word
--vaguely, the confluence of excellent filmmaking in movies and TV

* 5 favorite toys:

--my laptop, delivery system of the internet and my music collection and word processing for all this silly writing I do
--my shiny new hassle-free iPod shuffle
--my beautiful new 8" Wüsthof chef's knife
--my digital piano
--my TV, an appliance I sadly cannot live without

Apparently I have to tag someone to carry on this chain letter survey business. Because my sitemeter indicates that this blog is read by all two of you and occasionally somebody from Brazil, I don't know if tagging is the best way to spread the chain letter.

UPDATE (08/22/2006): I hereby rescind this tagging business. Consider it a gift. But, if you (yes, YOU dear reader) want to adapt this meme for your own blog, please do. Maybe you'll learn something new about yourself.

shore leave, part II

2006-08-09T00:02:00.000-04:00

I won't be complaining about some Caribbean beach time.

How does that lime in the coconut jingle go?

phoning it in on your own food network show

2006-08-08T12:04:00.000-04:00

I suppose it's only a matter of time before all single-genre television networks start running out of ideas. Lately the Food Network has been sagging under its own weight (which could explain the rash of peripherally-involved cooking shows that keep popping up), and my patience as a viewer is growing thin. This could be a symptom of my changing taste, or perhaps my irritability at things I really like turning sloppy before my eyes. But this isn't group counseling.

Ultimately I love cooking shows because they offer pure escapism. I watch because I want to hold on to the artifice that I'm in these chef's kitchens and I'm watching them prepare food that they've had time-honored recipes for. I watch because I believe they're showing me a trick of their own trade; I'm stepping into their kitchen for them to show me their own skills and culinary prowess to provide food that just maybe I could learn to cook for myself.

Lately though, doesn't it seem like the Food Network personalities are just phoning it in?

It's becoming clear that Paula Deen's arsenal of recipes is actually not all that impressive, now that her shows have resorted to trying out recipes culled from her viewers' letter writing campaigns. Probably no surprise.... with a show that originally specialized in down home cooking (i.e. "Southern"), there are only so many times she can brag about her fried chicken. I don't tune in to "Paula's Home Cooking" to watch her bumble through some recipe she's never cooked before, nor do I have much desire to hear her engage in some borderline-psychotic-event one-way dialogue with the author of the recipe she's trying to get through. Yesterday's episode involved a paltry menu of "Mexican" dishes that in some way resembled the same "Mexican" dishes one could get from the grocer's freezer. The woman was on some kind of frantic auto-pilot; she'd never even thought of making what she was on camera before she woke up and the producers told her what was on the schedule. Further evidence of her producers running out of ideas: creative culinary stretches, such as Paula's blind stabs at French cooking. If the Food Network one-hour special of sending Paula Deen and her Santa-Claus-meets-Hell-Angels husband to Paris wasn't enough, the viewer has to suffer through Paula pretending that she's had French meals up her sleeve all along. I don't buy it. So, when it comes down to it, Paula is on the air solely because of her charm and original promise of cooking ability.... I just wish she was better at bullshitting her way through recipes to make it seem like she just maybe would prepare them for her own family from time to time.

I have a little more faith in Rachael Ray, and I do somewhat believe that she maybe has test drived her wacky recipe canon on her unsuspecting new husband. What concerns me is just how wacky her recipes are starting to become. Maple Chipotle Chicken? Whatever kind of bizarre Latin-Vermont fusion that is, I have no idea; insult to injury comes when she keeps mentioning how it looks just like Chinese takeout. If this recipe really is her own doing and not from the two-beer-buzz imagination of a Food Network test kitchen staffer, she could at least pretend that she's familiar with the ingredients she's using. I'm tuning in on the false pretense that this is her kitchen (re-labeled food and million dollar 1950's-design appliances and all), so when she opens her pantry and is surprised at what she finds inside, it's all too clear that she's practically coasting on cue cards. Besides, she's got a syndicated talk show to plan for; this "30 Minute Meals" crap is old hat to her by now.

The Food Network feels like it's losing some of its homey-ness and natural attitude in favor of something more fast-paced and a kind of labotomized user-friendly. Sandra Lee's valium-hangover sunniness and instant pudding mix-based recipes come to mind. Their cavalry of personalities seem to have been annointed infallible, and thus we get to watch them stretch the bounds of what it means to have a cooking show. Is it so much to ask that maybe they take a cue from the more cozy cooking shows of PBS's Saturday morning instead? Or maybe that's just a bygone era now.

heat wave

2006-08-03T17:14:00.000-04:00

I visited New York City for the first time just about this week three years ago. I remember wandering the city in a blaze of tourism, which meant I spent most of my hours outdoors in the soupy heat. The hostel I stayed in didn't have air conditioning, and I believe that has been the closest I've experienced to the heat of hell. I thought it was hot then.... but I would have to say the current state of weather has trumped that. Keep in mind I live here now, have a better grasp and appreciation of the city, and am smart enough to spend all available hours (while not in transit somewhere) in zones of air conditioning. The weather is so miserable now, and happens to be everywhere in the country except for minor oases of Pacific marine layer, I can't even put it into words. Everybody feels this way here in the city too; people sweat through their clothes in helpless misery on the subway and on the street. People are dropping dead with heat-related ailments across the country. I wonder what it was like before air conditioners out here.... particularly when waiting underground for the subway, which is a minor hell of its own in this heat. It's funny to see the train arrive in the station, packed with people, and then one car will pass that is absolutely empty. Empty, of course, because it isn't air conditioned. What did people do before the subways were air conditioned? I can't even imagine.

So, some "cold front" is apparently coming in tonight, which will bring the New York City metropolitan area down to a frigid 90 degrees opposed to hovering at three digits of Fahrenheit as it has for the past three days.

A friend of mine recently moved to Tucson, Arizona. I'm not even sure how they can bear the heat there.... but I am reminded that west of the Rockies humidity isn't even a factor in hot weather, and I'll take a dry heat wave over a humid heat wave any day of the week. So, when observing the mere two or three degrees difference between New York City and southern Arizona right now, I am at pains. So is my air conditioner, struggling.

So, with this massive heat wave and nationwide record-breaking temperatures, of course my mind wanders to the subject of global warming. If there's one subject that makes me uneasy about events beyond my control it's this one. Video footage of glaciers cracking apart induces a strange fight-or-flight response from me, and I feel helpless and antsy. I rant to people about the benefits of public transit. I rant to people about the benefits of soy fuel (which, to be honest, I find kind of a funny prospect.... but hey, it works and it's better for our environment than the alternative), or buying hybrid engine vehicles, or refitting diesel engines to run on canola oil. At this point, it's probably cheaper to go to Costco and stock up on palettes of Wesson than to go fill up with gas. I have no energy to stand on a soapbox about what we need to do to help our environment and all that; I think it's becoming more aware in the American consciousness now. Sure it's a worldwide issue, but we have to start somewhere. That said, I must plug Al Gore's terrific and entertaining (yes, entertaining and important) documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which is a must for everyone to see. Everyone as in you. Have you seen it yet? Well, you might as well go tonight. Bring some friends. Bring neighbors if you see them fanning themselves on the porch. Don't pout, or be afraid.... It's not some doomsday vehicle at all; it's actually quite hopeful. I wish that my undergrad chemistry classes had such informative and understandable presentations. I'll leave it at that.

Back to when I first visited NYC: I was with two of my friends, both who lived in New England at the time, and I told them, while sweltering underground waiting for a local subway train that took too long to arrive, that I would take an East Coast winter over an East Coast summer in a heartbeat. I was guessing, of course, having grown up on the beach in California. They both said in unison, "No you wouldn't." Three years later, I'd still pick the snowy winter, hands down.

tv showrunners talk too much

2006-07-26T20:08:00.000-04:00

It's probably not unreasonable to say that I do too much reading about television happenings (i.e. gossip) online.... but lately I've come across a disturbing trend.

Producers and showrunners talk too much. They should spend more time coming up with challenging storylines and aiming for good writing than gloating about how great their show is. The last two weeks or so have given a cavalcade of upcoming fall season previews by the major networks for television critics. At every reception and gala and panel they have proud television executives and producers and writers and the occasional star all showing up with bright smiles to talk about their next big hit. Of course, this is their job: to plug their show, to make sure people watch, to make money. Whether the show is actually good or not is an afterthought. (And sometimes, this question sneaks in on the faces of those smiling folks onstage).

But there comes a point when this goes a step too far. For instance, producers dropping tidbit after tidbit after vague tidbit after mannerism so that feverish geeks (i.e. me) can look up what they said/intuited in transcripts posted online. Let's take for instance The Powers That Be behind fans-are-foaming-at-the-mouth smash hits like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives". "Lost" is already starting to flirt too heavily with advertising addenda, with junky 'mobisodes' and fictional commercials and myriad self-sponsored websites (opposed from independent fan sites) and podcast after podcast of the producers talking in circles about their vision for the show or whatever. Similar leakage is happening with the creatively putrefying "Desperate Housewives", with the showrunner admitting that this last season sucked really bad and how he has a brilliant plan to bring it all back, and opening bags of breadcrumbs to give us gratuitous hints of what he has in mind. I say don't worry, dear showrunners, your shows are unstoppable right now, and will be well into the next season.

My gripe: when you talk too much about your show, when you talk about the goings on behind it, when you talk about the process, it destroys the whole allure of the show in the first place. In a way, it's breaking the contract with the viewer to have the story remain self-contained. Someone who I think agrees with my line of thinking is Shonda Rhimes, the showrunner of another foaming-at-the-mouth hit, "Grey's Anatomy". She's garnered a reputation for herself among TV critcs and gossip raggers as a spoiler nazi, keeping the behind-the-scenes planning of her show under close watch and out of the loose lips of the critics and columnists. But.... isn't that her job? So far it's working.... "Grey's Anatomy" (despite the disturbing and potentially naughty title) is white-hot.

Yes, I understand that all that extra stuff (podcasts, mobisodes (?), trick websites, "The Lost Experience") is an advertising goldmine.... but as it rakes in cash, it starts eating away at the integrity of the show and of the canon of the story. All this isn't anything new, though.... networks have paraded their shows with fearless plastic stoicism since the beginning of television. They've all tried advertising gimmickery many times before.... it's inevitable for any hit, really. But keep in mind, the networks are in it for the money, not for the art. Sure they want the show to be successful on an artistic/storyline level, but only if it's successful in raking in revenue for the network (hence why truly fantastic television sometimes gets unceremonoiously canned). It's the job of the writers and showrunners, not the executives, to keep the integrity of the story alive and not to dangle morsels of gossip like meat on a hook to their greedy audience. In the end, that audience might be more grateful if things were kept under wraps, and the surprises to come would feel new and organic; that the show can stand on its own, and not planned and plotted and bragged about for everyone to read about.

food network programming déjà vu

2006-07-17T12:05:00.000-04:00

So far this summer when I'm not working or reading in Riverside Park or excessively loitering in bookstores or touring happy hours at my-kind-doesn't-belong-here swanky bars throughout the city, the television is likely on in my apartment. When it is on, it's usually tuned to the Food Network. Since I sacrificed my cable (and regained $40 a month), the basic package left behind mercifully includes the Food Network, aside from the other standard big 4 and a surprising number of Spanish-language stations, but that's about it. I don't really watch much TV currently because there's nothing to watch during the summer.... so for now it's serving mostly as a conduit for background noise. I've noticed, though, that if there's one thing the Food Network doesn't have, it's variety in its commercials.

With their commercials comes relentless advertising for a slough of new programming. Why, oh why are there so many travel-'n'-eating shows on the Food Network? What happened to good old cooking shows? It looks like the Food Network is slowly changing along the same lines as what happened to MTV, where MTV slowly shed everything that had to do with music to programming things only tangentially related to music (and now, not even that, I guess). Worse yet.... all these shows seem to be re-hashes of shows past. Out with the old, in with the new?

If the opening volley of Rachael Ray travel-'n'-eating shows from the past few years was a hint, now it seems like you can't watch a show without somebody traveling somewhere and relating it to food. The network is no stranger to this kind of show (citing now-golden oldies like "The Best Of..." and "Food Finds"), but I think they're approaching some kind of overkill. Keep in mind I haven't seen any of these new shows, because their commercials are already enough for me and I only like traditional cooking shows anyway.

Paula Deen's hunky sons get to tour the country on the Food Network's dime with "Road Tasted" (who gets paid to name these shows anyway?). They travel in a likely-it's-not-theirs vintage convertible and eat in mom-'n'-pop joints from coast to coast and tell you (yes, you!) the viewer how you can get these tasty treats at home. Wait a minute.... didn't the Food Network already have this covered with "Food Finds"? What's the matter.... Sandra Pinckney suddenly lost her charm? Also: has any one else noticed that the Deen brood's accents tend to be a bit uneven? That southern charm is part of their contract, people.

I'm not sure why Bobby Flay seems to be so popular; he must be testing extremely well in whatever markets the Food Network analysts are zeroing in on. Alas, "Throwdown with Bobby Flay" is yet another show where he gets to gloat about his cooking skills, and this time challenge you (yes, you!), America on how you cook your own down-home dishes. Doesn't Bobby Flay just seem mean? Maybe it's the perma-grimace. Maybe Food Network doesn't want to buy him out of his contract. A less invasive cousin of this show was in "Tyler's Ultimate", a relatively enjoyable variations-on-a-theme cooking show where Tyler Florence (gone extremely low profile as of late) globetrots and learns how real Italians make lasagna, real Spaniards make paella, and then sees how he matches up to par in is million dollar Manhattan kitchen.

Now for Alton Brown. Sometimes "Good Eats" can be charming and quite informative, but more often not it's like the Anal Retentive Guide to Cooking. Sometimes he just gets so tightly wound on how you (yes, you) MUST do what he says in the kitchen, and then goes overboard with self-consciously kitschy skits, that I can't stomach the show for weeks on end. Hopefully this won't be the case for "Feasting on Asphalt" (again, how much does this person get paid to come up with a sucky title like that?). Alton Brown tours the country on a motorcycle and acts as a one-man wikipedia on what food-related items he comes across. Food Network's first video blog, maybe?

Meanwhile, Rachael Ray's non-Food network talk show is picking up advertising steam; armchair cook cracks me up about this. I don't believe the Food Network is obligated to promote this future syndicated gabfest, so they don't.... but that doesn't stop local ABC networks from advertising how you can be a part of the show! (and with Rachael Ray suddenly calling herself "Rach") I just can't seem to warm up to the idea.... something about it is ringing fake all over the place for me. Maybe it's the fact that all talk shows ring fake. Maybe it's the promotional photographs of her in front of a wind machine mounting a motorcycle anchored to a sound stage.

most badass disney villain ever?

2006-07-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty.

Think about it:
* Not motivated by inadequacy or jealousy or fear.... Sleeping Beauty doesn't have anything that she wants per se; she's just motivated by plain old hatred.
* How to stop Prince Charming from getting to the castle? A forest of thorns, that's how.
* She turns herself into a motherf-ing dragon.... because she can.

Trust me, I honestly don't sit around everyday thinking of these things.... somehow they just happen to come up.

snippets of conversations I had at the Apple store today

2006-07-11T23:08:00.000-04:00

(at this store, actually. The store is underground, and smaller than you would think. Lots of people, lots of greasy fingerprints on merchandise. Imagine the picture during daylight and with an exodus of people milling around outside)

1)
Sales Representative (#1) with stained Apple Store uniform T-shirt: What seems to be the problem, sir?
Me: My iPod is broken.
Sales Rep #1: Have you....
Me: My computer won't read it. I've tried resetting it. I've tried putting it in disk mode.
Sale Rep #1: Well just go ahead and sign your name in the computer here.
Me: Do I have to use my real name?

2)
Sales Representative (#2), cleaner, with clipboard: I'm sorry sir, have you checked in yet?
Me: The guy [points to sour cream-like stain] told me to stand over here.
Sales Rep #2: Well, they won't call your name to the Genius Bar unless you double check with me.
Me: Looks like I'm double checking now. We're double checking.

3)
Sales Representative (#3), curly hair, curly beard: What brings you in to us today?
Me: My iPod is broken.
Sales Rep #3: Have you....
Me: The computer doesn't read it, it won't reset, disk mode does jack.
Sales Rep #3: Ah, it looks like your hard drive is on the way out.
Me: [curious if this Sales Rep needed a perm for that hair] Out where?
Sales Rep #3: Well, starting to fail, I mean. This particular model has been known to have these problems, especially if it gets jarred around a lot. Do you go running with it every day?
Me: No.
Sales Rep #3: Well, jogging I mean.
Me: No.
Sales Rep #3: Biking?
Me: No.
Sales Rep #3: Have you dropped it a few times?
Me: I suppose I could now, right?
Sales Rep #3: I don't think there's much we can do for this guy then. Sorry.
Me: Bummer. Can I use this exit, or do I go for the glass ceiling?

the emmys: more than just your typical hack awards show

2006-07-07T23:27:00.000-04:00

I have a bone to pick with the Emmys. The 2006 nominations were announced yesterday (the list of popular nominations to read at your leisure), and people are crying foul.

But first let me say this: I find it hard to really respect any awards show because I have lost faith that they can actually honor the best of a field, now that they have turned into marketing spectacles that tend to shift their accolades toward mediocrity and popular opinion. The Oscars have reserved a bit of fun and surprise, but oftentimes disappointment follows in its wake too. (I know as little as possible would argue that in some sense this is part of the fun and anticipation of the Oscars, and it's true that I kind of agree.)

The Emmys are in fact the grand poobah of hack awards shows; the Golden Globes come in a close second, mostly for their unabashed starfucking and also because they tend to be an accurate precursor of the Oscars and therefore kind of fan that flame. The Emmys carry no respect or any indications of awarding the best that television can offer, and have in fact historically settled for less. The question always remains: does the television academy actually watch television?

So, I have no build up or excitement for Emmy nominations, because in the end I could care less. Why? The last nail in the coffin: Susanna Thompson was flat out robbed of a rightful nomination in 2002 for "Once and Again"'s third season. I won't go into too much lush detail, but this woman pulled off perhaps the most heartwrenching story arc in recent network television history, and was ignored when Emmy nominations came around. Her performance was so affecting that it's an insult that she wasn't recognized.... isn't the point of the Emmys to award the best aspects of television in the year? The unfortunate story involved here is that a) "Once and Again" had been canceled and was receiving zero support from ABC for an awards campaign, b) viewership of the show dwindled so severely thanks to ABC's mistreatment of the show, and c) the Emmys traditionally didn't herald nominations from canceled shows. (A trend that ended with this year.... but more on that in a bit.)

This year, though, the Emmy nominations seemed to pull a more widely-perceived upset. Out of the gate with some kind of new-and-improved nomination system (out with the mass ballots and in with a top-secret panel of judges to handpick from a list of potential nominees), it looks like there was some kind of weird backfire. Oddly missing from the line-up: "Lost" scored no major acting nominations, nor one for Best Television Drama. In a year when "Lost" was red-hot, this is strangely of suspect. Also conspicuously missing from major categories were expected heavyweights like "Desperate Housewives" and "The Sopranos". I for one am tired of "The Sopranos" walking away with wheelbarrows of awards when the show is kind of loopy and misguided. As for "Desperate Housewives", good riddance. It's about time someone stepped up and publicly bitch-slapped this overrated drek, pointing out that the only thing going for the show in the first place was a suspiciously aggressive marketing campaign, becoming the first watercooler hit of ABC's programming renaissance before it even hit the air. The phenomenal Alfre Woodard gets the last laugh though; despite how underwritten and misused her character was on the show (she left at the end of the season), she walked away with "Desperate Housewives"'s only acting nomination.

So people were expecting this new nomination system to finally bring underdogs like "Gilmore Girls" (why?) and "Battlestar Galactica" to the light of Emmy attention.... but it didn't. In fact, it seemed to pull some obscure nominations out of the hat, many of them from already canceled shows (for instance a nod to "Commander in Chief" for Geena Davis). This is an interesting development, almost like a slap in the face to the networks that canceled shows that are now being nominated as the best in the field.... including triumphant (and very well-deserved) nominations to the dearly departed "Arrested Development" (for both Best Television Comedy, and to GOB for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Comedy). Too bad "Once and Again" couldn't have taken advantage of the new system when it needed it.

But, just like every Emmy year, too much non-challenging material is showered with praise: [insert vapid sitcoms here]. The Emmys also tend to show love to the same actors over and over again (Blythe Danner racked up three acting nominations last year for three different performances); thus Stockard Channing walks away with a nomination for some forgettable sitcom this year when she had already swept the decks clean with numerous historical "The West Wing" nominations and wins. Thankfully gone, however, are entire categories partitioned off by nominations for the same show (*ahem* "The Sopranos" and "The West Wing"), as seen in the past and jilting more deserving shows and performances of eking into a slot.

Award shows with respect to television always seem to jump the gun, unloading on the first seasons of promising shows nomination after nomination.... and in some cases impulsive wins, such as the usual Golden Globe win for actors on a show that has spent no more than two months on the air (see Jennifer Garner for "Alias" in 2002 and Geena Davis for "Commander in Chief" this year). They also tend to follow along with the yes-men nodding of high ratings and glowing reviews (hence a massive influx of HBO/Showtime programming stepping up to the plate in recent years). In a year where every damned article mentioning "24" has to gush about how the 5th season was its best, when in actuality it was its most bland and predictable, it seems the Emmys could only reciprocate. So, with enough gushing and enough prodding and lauding, "24" walks away with the most nominations of any show this year. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy that Jean Smart picked up a Best Supporting Actress in a Television Drama nomination for her eclectic (and enjoyable) performance as the First Lady, but somehow I can't help but think that another actress from "24"'s past deserved a nomination in the same category a few years ago.

So, some people think that this year's nominations are a total hack because the usual suspects didn't make an appearance, and others were holding out for the Susanna Thompsons of this year to land a surprise slot. What they don't understand is that the Emmys have always been a hack, and this year it's just been dragged into the light. I for one and am intrigued (and not exactly disappointed) that "Lost" ended up with diddly squat (and it should give something for those grandstanding podcast-happy producers of theirs to suck on for awhile) and that this "new" nomination system has dredged up some unexpected choices, as well as exposed a flaw in the networks' terminating of shows that had some more juice left in them.

no wining

2006-06-30T23:26:00.000-04:00

I've had my eye on this tasting room/wine bar in SoHo for a little over a month now. Somehow I convinced myself that I would make the perfect tasting room pourer, and I have targeted this place to be my new employer. They sell and serve only New York state wines. I've driven through North Fork Long Island wine country before; it's beautiful, but has nothing on Sonoma County. I don't know where the Finger Lakes are (just the name makes me want to go), but apparently they grow grapes up there too. This tasting room thing seems like an exciting detour: I'll pour wine for yuppies, sure. I really want to, strangely, and have accrued a strange amount of determination about the fact.... so much so that I bought Wine for Dummies rather impulsively. Some say that the Wine Bible is really the right choice, but that book didn't look exactly like light reading. Now if only I can stroll into the place when an eager manager happens to be on their shift.

I'm not really an expert on wine, and it's not like I've had a lifelong passion for it. I find it tasty most of the time, but I'm not terribly discriminatory.... meaning it's not unlikely to see me holding a glass of Carlo Rossi or Franzia from the box if the event I'm at happens to have it sitting on the refreshment table for all to have. I can appreciate all the wine-talk and searching for varying degrees of flavors (from tropical fruits to woods used for funiture all the way to cat piss.... no joke). That said, I have had wine that tasted like licking a basement. So I don't know.

I always found it funny that if you order a bottle of wine at a restaurant, the server will pour for you a tiny glass to taste to make sure the wine hasn't gone bad or something. Is it some kind of high society thing to taste the wine and send it back because it's lost its luster? Where exactly do you draw the line with sending back wine? Imagine if I sent back the bottle on principle, or just because. How would the restaurant know? That said, I drink Franzia and Two Buck Chuck, so I'm not likely to be sending back any bottles of wine in the near future.

When I was back at home in the Bay Area, she can film it and I went up to Healdsburg where we got a quick tour of this upscale winery that her sister works at. The wine tasting came with food tasting too, little vittles to change the flavor of the wines here and there. The tuna tartar was delicious, and so was this little cornbread cracker with a dollop of some creamy cheese. The duck pâté thing was going a little far though. We weren't a fan of that.

Flash forward a week and I'm camping in Mendocino County just outside of the Anderson Valley wine country (if you haven't been to Boonville, read the book and you'll get a over-the-top-wacky but at the same time somewhat accurate depiction of hippie California mountain towns.... I was assured by one Anderson Valley tasting room employee that most events and characters in the book actually are not fiction, despite the book's insistance that they are). So my friends and I decided wine tasting was in order. Seven or eight wineries later I'm reenacting scenes from Sideways and slurring my words and pretending I know the difference between the ages of oaken barrels and making bourgeois jokes like "what kind of people actually drink wine that comes from stainless steel barrels?" I think I may have said "I'm not drinking any fucking merlot!" with too much vigor at one poor tasting room employee offering up the selection. In the end I had a great time and decided that maybe five wineries would have been plenty, dessert wines are quite tasty, and that I didn't have enough room in my suitcase to pack the four bottles I had purachsed.... so I got my hands on a tote bag to make carry-on #2.

So back to the tasting room job propsect. How does one get a job at a tasting room in the city anyway?

a different View

2006-06-29T22:56:00.000-04:00

1. I am not a pop culture prostitute.
2. So, Barbara Walters gave Star Jones a public spanking after Star decided she was leaving "The View" before "The View" kicked her gastric bypassed ass out the door. I don't know much about Star Jones except that she's a lawyer (verified only by Tracy Morgan's hilarious performance as her in "The View" spoofs from mid-90's SNL) and that she did commercials for Payless Shoes. I don't know much about "The View", really, except that I really enjoyed those skits from SNL and think Cheri Oteri (who has disappeared) is a comedic genius. I think I saw Joy Behar on the street once when I first moved to New York.
3. Forever now Payless to me will be known as Star Jones Shoes.
4. It's too bad Barbara Walters and Star Jones couldn't have an actual spontaneous catfight onscreen.... "Dynasty"-style, with shoulder pads and fountains and all. That would have made good TV.
5. Barbara Walters would probably fight dirty and go for the eyes.

shore leave

2006-06-13T23:41:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I'm just tempted to put up photos and have them speak for themselves. Maybe not a bad idea while I enjoy the little time I have back at home.

mark of the beast

2006-06-06T21:11:00.000-04:00

So today is the mythic date of 06/06/06.... which is considerably less-mythic once you realize it happens every 100 years. Even to boil down the date to the Lucifer-heralding "666", you need to drop a bunch of zeroes and a two, so the whole superstition about today's date is hogwash. So, the only date this actually would work on would be in the year 6 A.D., but that year wasn't even established until the modern Christian calendar was developed sometime in the fifteenth century, or maybe even more recently than that. That said, it doesn't stop the local news from playing their cute little segment about it every half hour, getting reaction from people on the street. I must admit, though, that even I stop and think for a moment when my lunch across the street from work costs me $6.66.

So, I didn't have any idea what the 666 sequence even meant until I saw the actually-it's-really-bad-but-somewhat-enjoyably-campy Stay Tuned (1992) (hey, does anybody remember this movie?). Starring John Ritter (and Mindy from "Mork & Mindy") as a man who gets caught in his television after he buys a satellite dish from the devil (hence the occasional play on 666), and is forced to live as a part in hellish (ha) programming like "Northern Overexposure" and "Driving Over Miss Daisy". One can argue that such programming in our own real world probably isn't too far off.

Sticking with the devil theme, "The Simpsons" knocked one out of the park a few weeks ago when they aired an episode about creationism versus evolution being taught in schools. Some say that the show has lacked its spark for years now, but if I catch a new episode they reliably always have at least one joke that genuinely gets me to laugh out loud. This creationism episode was so much like the glory days of vintage "Simpsons", and they had some very smart and very barbed comedy: an exhibit about the "Myth of Creation" at the natural history museum with the hand of God sparking down against the earth, springing up fig-leaf clad Adam and Eve; the elementary school playing a video paid for by the Christian right, comparing the Bible with Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species written in dripping blood.... and then Darwin makes out with Satan. Absolutely brilliant. May "The Simpsons" remain on television forever.

So, whatever mythological Christian hooplah it is that has branded "666" as the "mark of the beast" I'm not sure, but to this day that term seems to me most appropriate for my high school Spanish 4 teacher.

bee fever

2006-06-01T22:11:00.000-04:00

I am totally mystified by the recent overwhelming popularity of spelling bees. There's been an influx in the last few years of books and movies about all things bee. Why? Have spelling bees ever been this popular? I knew that every year they televised the national spelling bee, held in Washington DC to make it seem more important and/or somehow affiliated with the government. This year interestingly enough, instead of banishing the televised national competition to some dark corner of ESPN2 weekend programming, it got a front seat in primetime on ABC tonight.

There was that oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound (2002), which I haven't seen but seems like it would be more about the stage parents instead of the stressed-out prepubescent spellers themselves; next, Bee Season (2005) about a girl and her dysfunctional family and how she gets through it by "seeing" the words or whatever; and then most recently the Starbucks-produced vehicle Akeelah and the Bee (2006) about another phenomenal girl speller with some family issues and the stock adult figures who either a) believe in her or b) don't and think spelling is a waste of time. An interesting and perhaps valid argument when it comes to the drama of a screenplay, but I digress. (Continuing with that digression, why can't Angela Bassett seem to get herself a nice juicy role on screen? We could use more of her.) Hell, there is even a deleted scene from Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) that brings up an uncomfortable family showdown at a spelling bee.

I seem to recall spelling bees being reserved for the smart-kid/nerd lot.... like I was/am. When I was in fifth grade I made it to third place in my school's spelling bee. The word that got me out: epitome. Be sure that I know how to spell that thing now, but I remember so well standing at that podium, having never heard that word in my entire life. Even the definition they provided to me was shrouded in mystery. Luckily they provided us a notepad to attempt to visualize the word (an advantage not provided to the national spelling bee-ers, it seems); I remember trying to spell the word with too many d's and m's, ending it with a y. I felt like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.
(For the record: I may not have won my fifth grade spelling bee, but I did win the geography bee that year, which I remember wasn't so difficult for me. I don't remember the winning question, though.... which is interesting, because I think the question one fails to answer stands out more than the question one succeeds with.)

The recent surge in spelling bee popularity is of suspect.... because the subject matter tends not to be the most thrilling. But lo and behold, they're able to construct entire movies around spelling bees, so there's an argument out there that spelling bees do have the right kind of narrative drama. I just don't see it.

But.... when it comes to airing it on television, I see an interesting trend. I guess most would consider the televised national spelling bee to fall in the same category as, say, sports programs. Like sports for the mind. But I see through to what those television executives are seething over: spelling bees are an untapped resource of reality television, and at a low cost because the people on screen don't have to be paid. Spelling bees aren't all that fun to watch anyway, but people do, likely, for two reasons:
1) they want to see all these crazy words they've never heard and never will hear again, and
2) they want to watch these kids fail,
because ultimately reality television is breeding a culture of competition and failure made for others' enjoyment. Do people really watch "Survivor" to see the trials or whatever the contestants play? Do people really watch to see the bugs they eat? No: they watch to see who gets voted off, who falls on their face, who fails. Same goes for the unstoppable juggernaut of "American Idol", except with that show emotionally unstable judges are thrown into the mix for theatrics. Tonight's bee still carried with it some level of expected respect that the whole reality television angle hasn't been able to tarnish and make trashy yet. However there was a gaggle of off-screen commentators (including my "Good Morning America" crush Robin Roberts), not surprisingly I guess, all assuming the holier-than-thou disapprovement likely learned from those horrible ice skating commentators.

The winning word tonight: ursprache. Yeah, I don't know it either. I'm all for understanding cognates between languages and all, but this word seems blatantly lifted straight from the Merriam-Webster German dictionary.

So, why are these competitions called spelling "bees" anyway? They'd be much more fun to watch on television if they actually introduced live bees into the mix.

above: one of my favorite scenes from Adaptation

Commander in Chief dies a quiet (and messy) death

2006-05-31T23:37:00.000-04:00

Tonight played the first of the three last unaired episodes of "Commander in Chief", a show that started out great and then was quickly and astronomically torpedoed by bad decision making at the executive level of television programming. I happened to accidentally stumble upon the episode, because it was so carefully swept under the radar that ABC probably didn't want to make too much of a fuss over the fact that it was on the air at all.

Much has been reported about how "Commander in Chief" went from highest rated and thereby most promising new show of the 2005-2006 season to ratings trainwreck just five months after its premiere. Now, as it slowly crawls toward cancellation, I'm not sure there's much to salvage save for the lesson this taught networks about how easily their own messed up politics destroy potentially good shows. The show was born under the auspices of Rod Lurie (hey, I'm still holding out for "Line of Fire" on DVD), and then he was removed by ABC in favor of Steven Bochco, who apparently had an attitude about how he wanted things done on this show that he hadn't created, and now he's been removed in favor of Dee Johnson (I guess the only person left standing), apparent apprentice of Lurie's and trying her best to restore the show's original look and style.

I stuck with the show from the beginning, and it definitely has its weak spots. After having fervently watched the first four seasons of "The West Wing" over the last three months courtesy of Netflix, I think the bar has been raised pretty high with regards to American presidential dramas. "Commander in Chief" had a lot of potential, but got severely sidetracked with Bochco's warped ninety-degree vision of where he wanted to take it. Lurie's style had an ice-slick and pop edge to it, and the storylines setup for the show were nontraditional and seemed focused more on family and interpersonal relations than inter-White House politics. Bochco came in and lightened the place up, enforced a more episodic structure to the stories, and whitewashed away Lurie's unique style and vision in favor of bland and predictable President-and-Nation-in-trouble stories. Then he mysteriously left, and then Johnson (who'd been with the show since the start) stepped up and picked up where Lurie left off. I think had that first shakeup not happened, it's likely "Commander"'s fate would have been somewhat different. If the show had more room to breathe and another season on the horizon, I think that it could have made up for lost time and started to challenge itself to become a great show. Certainly it looks like that's the direction it's moving in (behaving, almost, as if it doesn't know it's about to end); Donald Sutherland plays his Oval Office-hungry role with such effortless slime that it's almost uncomfortable to watch, and now that Geena Davis has vowed to assert her power against him, it looks like a lot of fun could be had.

I guess the only reason that ABC is airing the last episodes (yanked from the schedule last month for some reality-programming filler) is because they're under obligation to.... but they're certainly going out of their way not to advertise them because the show has become an embarrassment. I would argue so not because of the low ratings, but because of its deconstruction by their own bloody hands. Now it ends very, very quietly during the television-hangover wasteland of June programming.

But wait.... ABC is feeling remorseful? Rumor has it that there is interest in resurrecting the show as a TV movie sometime next season, with hopes that it might rekindle the series under the helm of Rod Lurie again. Strangely, this looks like the makings of basically rewriting Lurie's own The Contender (2000), an excellent movie that obviously spurned the nascent mechanics of "Commander in Chief".... but who knows? Maybe it could give the show another shot.

the season finale as art

2006-05-23T22:34:00.000-04:00

With the end of May comes the end of the television season, the summer ahead a wasteland of reruns and trashy made-for-TV filler and the occasional new series launched only so it can fail. I'm starting to get dangerously close to Food Network overexposure, so maybe it's a good thing that I take a break from TV for awhile. I just can't kill my TV or believe that the revolution will not be televised or whatever, so I hold onto it to watch the news in the morning before I go to work. I miss my Mornings on 2, but Lori Stokes on Channel 7 serves my groggy wake-up time just fine.

Last night came the finales of the fifth season of "24" and the series finale of "Alias" at the end of it's fifth season. Both were two hour events, and it was too bad they were staggered over each other. Both shows have traditionally loved to end their seasons with big bangs and cliffhangers and all that jazz, all with the hopes people will talk about it over the watercooler for four months until they return in the fall. I think it's too bad that all serial shows seem to be stuck with the expectation of ending with shocks and season-spanning cliffhangers.... you can trace this disease back to Patient Zero, the Who-Shot-JR episode of "Dallas" from once upon a time in 1981. I would argue that the impact of the cliffhanger depends on whether or not it comes as a surprise; I think serial television drama is doomed to have an audience always expecting a cliffhanger, and thus the bar gets set higher and higher and demands can never be met. I won't be surprised if a backlash comes from tomorrow night's season finale of "Lost", because the audience is expecting (and to some extent demanding) their shocking how-could-they-do-that cliffhanger, and no matter what they come up with (anywhere on the shock-value scale) some viewers will be let down. You can't please everybody, though, and it's not in a show's best interest to try to. People will keep watching from now to next season anyway.

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times (hey, last summer I drove her from the Long Island/Islip airport to Southampton.... long story) wrote an interesting article about the art of the season/series finale. I think it's too bad that finales only set themselves up for disappointment, and she makes a good argument about that. I believe that sometimes the best twists or most compelling episodes of television, if written just right, come in the middle of the season.... never the end, never the beginning. The season finale always seems to promise resolution but ends up asking more (and sometimes different) questions, and that's what hooks the audience. A serial television show cannot sustain itself on the same storyline conceit season after season, because the story must develop and evolve away from the inciting incident. Just look at soap operas.... they succeed because the drama is always running high and the story is constantly changing and the characters are constantly involved in different affairs (romantic and otherwise).

The ads ABC is running for "Lost" promise answers to the questions we've been asking all season, or something even more dramatic and tabloid-sounding. The problem: "Lost" is a series based on questions, and everytime something is almost answered, more questions arise in the resolution's wake. I'm afraid "Lost" will suffer a traumatic flame-out when it's ready to end because the questions are by far much more interesting than the answers.... Disappointment lurks around every corner; the audience keeps coming back every week because they are tantalized by the grand mystery, not the answer.

Take a look at "Twin Peaks", a series based on the question "Who killed Laura Palmer?" It's clear that the creators (David Lynch and Mark Frost) wanted the show to gently shake this question off and become about the characters in the town of Twin Peaks and their stories; Lynch has stated that if he had his way the question of Laura Palmer's killer would never be answered. The audience demanded the answer, though.... and once they got it (in perhaps the best episode of television ever filmed) they fled. Why? Because their question was answered. Simple as that.

A series based on questions like "Lost" must give answers (but can you imagine if the writers consciously didn't? Now that would be crazy). The writers know, though, that what keeps the audience coming back is the very mystery; they can't lose this. The very concept of the show has an invisible ticking clock resting on its shoulders, though.... the inital story-based conceit is permanently ingrained to whatever story evolves down the line. These people are stuck on an island; their lives have inexplicably intertwined before they even met.... so, WHY? This mystery of theirs will get old sooner or later. This doesn't mean that they can't have great stories along the way, but the writers will need to know to throw away the milk before it goes rancid.

This, interestingly, is an argument for the popularity of episodic television drama like "CSI" and "Without A Trace" and the continuous and seemingly never ending sequence of "Law and Order" spin-offs: there is no long-running mystery and there is no long-term investment. The stories that episodic dramas tell do not span outside their single episodes; the answers are promised and revealed week after week. This format can be extended just fine into the two-parter (with a juicy cliffhanger at the end of Part One; for an example, see almost every season finale of "Star Trek: The Next Generation"), because the tension is amped up, and the answers nonetheless are still promised and delivered.

Now the specifics: "24"'s finale wanted so badly to shock that the "shock" was not really shocking. In fact, they played it like the audience forgot that Jack pissed off the Chinese government in Season 4 and was wanted by them. Now that Jack is in the cargo hold of some freighter bound for Shanghai (not a pleasure cruise), the questions remain high for the next season of "24". I'd be hopeful.... except that every other time the show has left its season with a cliffhanger, the following season seems to be like a strange series reboot. More often than not, the high drama of the cliffhanger never gets a payoff and remains secondary or sometimes practically forgotten; the everyday pedantics of the show require more action than story (at least how they've played it off as of late), and that's too bad. I just hope that the writers and producers of "24" know that they would have a really incredible show if they just sat down and made a plan for it instead of writing by the seat of their pants (like they have mentioned they do in past interviews). This season finale promises big questions about Jack's fate with the Chinese, but I wouldn't be surprised if we start up Season 6 with all that explained away off-camera.

"Alias"'s series finale was a nice swan song, bringing back characters of old and doing a nice bow-tying intercutting flashback wrap-up from before the action of Season 1 ever began. This show was so good in its first two seasons, but then completely lost control in Season 3 and never could get the reins back. It fell prey to sloppy writing and confusion of its own storyline, and bungled it even more come Season 4 in a strange evolutionary retreat. All that flip-flopping concerning Sloane (he's a bad guy, no, wait, he's a good guy, but wait, is he good? No, he's bad), the gaping missed opportunity with Vaughn's wife Lauren, and the contrived inclusion of Syndey's long-lost sister.... all too much. So, by the time we reach the great answers of Rambaldi in this series finale at the end of Season 5, I'm not so sure I care anymore. That said: Jennifer Garner is still on fire, and has quite a career in front of her. Lena Olin is perhaps the hottest woman in film or TV over 50. I'm glad that they remembered that Sydney's mom is bad to the bone.... it would have been a bit unsatisfying to see the Mom become some kind of good guy. Besides, the show has always been at its best when Lena Olin was there to play the Mom (and I think the writers know that), so it's only fitting that she and Sydney get to duke it out before series' end.

So, after "Lost" is over tomorrow night, the television-free summer awaits me. We'll just see how long I manage that.

Cody's Books on Telegraph shuts their doors

2006-05-19T13:43:00.000-04:00

I'm not of the reporting type, so this isn't a news flash or anything. That said, it's a sad day for lovers of independent bookstores in the Bay Area.... Cody's Books announced last week that they were closing down their store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.

This isn't the demise of Cody's as an institution though.... apparently they're prospering just fine with their stores down on the posh Fourth Street strip and at a scrubby new locale in downtown San Francisco. The sad part is that Cody's is a Berkeley institution, an massive oasis of books and magazines amidst the grungy one-of-a-kind fervor of Telegraph Avenue. I was never down by Fourth Street for any reason (the bus took too damn long to get there, and that location always feels strangely deserted), so the Telegraph store was the place to go. This is certainly one of my favorite places to peruse books of all kinds (not only do they have an impressive collection of fiction and short story anthologies and lit mags, but also a film theory section that's yet to be matched by my eyes); the selection that they have just can't be found at Barnes & Noble or Borders. That, and it's one of the only places I know that still carries new issues of Wrapped in Plastic magazine.

What exactly has become of Telegraph Avenue as Berkeley's main drag? Business have started to jump ship over the last three years, and no matter how many American Apparels you open up, it feels like something's gone missing. If anything, Cody's is one of the last bastiens of Berkeley's literary culture, and now that it's being plucked from the university's periphery the town is being depleted of a much-needed asset. Who wants to trudge down to Fourth Street to see quality readings? Even that nice flower stand, a fixture outside of Cody's, will likely crumble in its absence. It won't, however, affect the business of that guy who sells patches from those giant plastic bins in front of Amoeba Music. Without a strong bookseller near the university, the legacy of Cody's is left to the masses in downtown San Francisco (I'm not sure they can maintain the same charm when setting up shop next door to the Virgin Megastore) and the yuppie/hippies (or "yippies".... thanks Josh) of the bourgeois North Berkeley Chez Panisse Sunday brunch crowd.

I'm sad to see it go.

star perks at starbucks

2006-05-13T23:46:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I was at the Starbucks on Chambers Street and West Broadway when this guy rolled on up on his bicycle, caught eye contact with me through the window and then looked away awkwardly, waltzed into the Starbucks to grab his venti frappuccino of some kind, and then waltzed back out and zoomed away up the street from whence he came on his bicycle.

Did I miss something? He was literally indoors for thirty seconds, tops. Did he call ahead and place an order or something? Can you even do that at Starbucks? Clearly he has an in with the barista staff. Maybe one day I can avert public attention by making advance pick-ups at Starbucks via bicycle.

the best of contemporary american literature

2006-05-12T13:52:00.000-04:00

What would you say is the best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years?

This is a question the New York Times thought they'd try to answer, and with a list of 125 writers and essayists and critics, they posed the question: what is the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years? Accompanied with a very readable essay about the survey and its results, they listed the twenty-or-so novels that came back with the most hits. But the top five collected more votes than all the rest:

Beloved, Toni Morrison
Underworld, Don DeLillo
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, John Updike
American Pastoral, Philip Roth

I would consider anything in the last twenty-five years to be "contemporary" literature, but I'm no literary scholar or critic. So, are these novels (and, by association those that qualify for the best American fiction of the last twenty-five years) contemporary literature? By "contemporary" I'm not referring to a style or mode of writing (although it can be argued that there is one to describe this tag), but rather a temporal association. I guess my definition of "contemporary" is fluid, changing as time changes, leaving behind what once was contemporary to bring new members to the team. Maybe my perspective on this will change one day.

It's probably no surprise that Beloved is coronated with the title as the best work of American fiction from the last quarter century. It seems already so quintessential to American literature as a whole; it is thoroughly engrained in our minds as lit canon. As it should be.... it's a virtuoso whirlwind of weirdness and beauty and love and fear and all that other crap that I can't explain without reducing it to something that it's really not. That, and I think it's an important novel to read (something I can't say of the Updike/Roth group.... but more on that in a bit). I must admit that I find her writing sometimes to be super-dense, and I get thrown off the wagon too easily when she goes off on some tangent that I wasn't able to pick-axe into.... but I don't wane in my confidence of her writing. I remember once I was in a group of people talking about books (probably all with wine or Brooklyn beer in our hands), and everyone was talking about which author does this and which author does that, all of us dropping lit names here and there. I made some comment about how Morrison manages to do some strange ethereal stuff in her fiction that's so hard to do, and one of the people in the group looked at me blankly: "Morrison who?" they asked. Morrison who?! Has Toni Morrison not earned the right to be referred to by last name only, like we do all the greats like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Steinbeck, etc etc etc? Maybe it's because she's still living (but, we refer to Marquez as Marquez....), maybe it's because her work is still too fresh in our minds.... but if you don't know who Toni Morrison is, you've got some reading to do.

I've always wanted to read Underworld, but have been scared off too easily because it's so damn massive. Let's keep in mind that I'm in no way a fast reader; Underworld will literally take me a month or two (conservatively) to read. White Noise is perhaps my favorite novel (and probably would be my pick for the best-in-the-last-25-years list), so I know DeLillo's got the chops.... but a 900 page book is quite a commitment. I thought once that I'd try to tackle David Foster Wallace's much-beloved (no pun intended) Infinite Jest, clocking in at well above 1200 pages or so (right?), but couldn't manage to crack the first fifty.... I think that book might be a casualty betraying the maxim "less is more". I've heard that Underworld is fantastic novel, but it's the kind of book you need to duct tape to your hand in order to really get into it. Somehow that reminds me of the mythic "Edward 40-Hands" college parties, were people duct tape 40s of beer to their hands and can't do anything until they're finished. Ah, college parties. Chances are they'd be less wild if people were duct taping books to their hands instead.

Blood Meridian is near the top of my little summer reading list, and I've always had strong interest in reading it but haven't gotten around to it yet. I must admit that I want to get to the gruesome parts (as mentioned by most people if the topic ventures to Blood Meridian), but because I've heard nothing but praise for it, it's next on my list. I first learned about Cormac McCarthy's work in a writing workshop I took a few years ago; during a class discussion, the woman sitting next to me spat acid on the work of Charles Frazier (author of Cold Mountain, a book I have not read, although the movie that is based from was not as good as I wanted it to be).... she said that Frazier blatantly ripped off McCarthy's work, and that McCarthy is not as well-praised as he should be. But.... look who's work has stood the test of time the best. Frazier's just gonna have to be happy with that National Book Award of his.

So, am I the only one who is not so in love with John Updike or Philip Roth? I find their works to be bloated and sometimes dripping with self-importance, as if they knew while they were writing that their works would be held as top achievements and would grace lists like this one. I think that's the largest strike against them in my opinion.... the stories that they tell are just fine and worth telling, so these guys are not being heralded for no good reason. That said, I don't like reading works where the author holds himself at a higher standard than his reader (sorry Nabokov and Pynchon, I think you guys are in this category too); it seems like they're trying to one-up the reader or establish a barrier of knowledge and worthiness, setting themselves at a higher standard than the audience that they're trying to attract.

The list has quite a few excellent selections (namely short story collections like Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien), and a strange affinity for all things Philip Roth. It seems where Roth's never-ending stream of navel-gazing novels ring a bell with the group of 125, Joyce Carol Oates' poisonous proliferation has shot herself in the foot. I'm not going to make any statements about "how dare they leave off this!" or "how can they trust that!" because this list is in no way trying to pretend that it's not subjective. It just seems to be an interesting cross section of American literary minds and what they deem as important literature today. Chances are the list would look quite different if asked five years from now, or even five years past. Read the essay.... see what you think.

prison broke

2006-05-08T22:04:00.000-04:00

Tonight on "Prison Break", the show followed through with what the title has been promising all season long. This episode happened to be the second I have ever seen after last week's, so I'm new to the show.... What can I say? It comes on right before "24".

Judging from two late season episodes, the show has many diverging serial plots (brownie points) and definite forward momentum. I'm not sure of the background and setup really, but the main character (played by Wentworth Miller, last seen as a younger Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain (2003), and who looks like he's twelve years old) wants badly to get his brother out of jail, to the point where he got into the jail in order to get the brother out. I'm guessing somewhere earlier in the season the lawyer subplot spun into something that now seems mob-related (with the lawyer played by Robin Tunney.... hey, she was in The Craft!). There's some political intrigue too that appears not to have any correlation to the prison story; the vice president (Patricia Wettig.... hey, she was in "thirtysomething"!) is apparently being forced out of office, and some inside operative (Michelle Forbes.... hey, she was Ensign Ro!) is trying to make sure she does so without causing a fuss. Not sure where they're going with that story.... it's interesting, but gets maybe four or five minutes of total screentime.

Of course the story is action-packed; at least now it is, because they're actually breaking out of prison. I'm not so sure how my attention would have been kept earlier on.... the acting is particularly wooden and unconvincing from some of the principal characters, which makes the show more laughable than provoking. Certain storytelling techniques also seem to creak and sag with contrivance, for instance the unfortunate trashy multiple flashback sequence at the end of last week's episode, and the even trashier zoom smash cuts when going to commerical. The inevitable nail in the coffin: apparently Brett Ratner, self-annointed auteur, is a producer.

Television shows (mostly serial, but not limited to) are resolutely designed around a single event; the story develops from this event, the characters change and evolve based on this event, and the show is allowed to take off in different tangents and become something else entirely as it moves forward. A show like "Prison Break", though, works in the opposite direction.... the event this show is planned around is to come in the future, not an inciting incident from the past. The point of the show is to break out of the prison, so what happens once that mission is accomplished? Can a show still continue forward when the original conceit (and the title, after all) no longer applies?

Now the gripe: Isn't there something inherently wrong about planning an entire series around one future event? The idea being, once that event happens, the show is finished.... ah, but we know this is usually never the case, as networks sometimes continue shows past their expiration date ("NYPD Blue", anyone?). If a show like "Prison Break" is a wild success, then what to make of it once they actually break out of prison? This is a question the writers and producers are trying to answer for themselves right now, as the second season dawns in the visible distance.

Now the question: Why are networks greenlighting shows like this in the first place? Also this TV season came "Reunion", which I have not seen, which had a similar one-season-only conceit but got unmercifully axed before it could tie up its loose threads. Isn't it reckless to go ahead with a show that can't be seen as carrying forward a couple seasons down the road? Don't networks want to invest in their programming? Imagine the handful of other really good serial shows that were turned down for one-season experiments like this. People could make an argument that "24" follows in this pattern, although I disagree. I do admit that "24" has branched into a strange and somewhat disappointing form of season-long episodic-ness, but it doesn't promise to end it's conceit just because twenty-four hours have run out.... there are always twenty-four hours in future days, but not unlimited prison breaks.

One more episode of "Prison Break" left, and then next season...?

Lost: television bloodbath 2006

2006-05-03T23:45:00.000-04:00

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. I don’t watch as much television as it seems I may, but the TV I do watch seems to get a rise out of me.... as all great storytelling should, right?

So, if I don’t gripe enough about “24” blowing away their entire cast one-by-one, tonight’s “Lost” decided to go two at a time. This is another visible example of how
trigger-happy television shows have been this season, a weird trend if you ask me. Because all five of you that read this are likely not dedicated to “Lost”, I’ll put a humble SPOILER WARNING here, with the caveat that reading on will reveal why I must gripe about the unfortunate circumstances around the two characters that happened to bite the dust. Oh, and I’ll complain about how this flirts with sloppy writing and evidences further that the writers of “Lost” just might be flying by the seat of their pants.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all for the death of a main character in a serial television show as long as it is 1) surprising, and 2) challenging to the story. I’ve already vented steam about how “24” religiously does not do this as of late, and thereby is not as well-written as it could be. “Lost” is a different beast though, and the finale of tonight’s episode was gutsy and disturbing. Usually the more random and unsettling deaths of main characters hit home the hardest (everyone, look to the paragon of television serial drama that is “Twin Peaks” to back this up).... Tonight, Ana-Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) and Libby (Cynthia Watros, who is still on my dream TV cast list) both got shot in the gut, and yup, we watched their last breaths (which was terrifying, I’ll admit) and watched them die before our eyes. Always important to have the pan-shot over the dead body for the viewer to be assured that the character is dead (Ana-Lucia, check; Libby, check)*.

Okay, so why kill these two characters? We were just starting to get to know them. Looks like real life might have played a role in this one: Both Rodriguez and Watros were arrested last December for drunk driving, and this snafu probably spelled u-n-p-r-o-f-e-s-s-i-o-n-a-l to the producers, and they set their crosshairs on the characters. Fans were already turned against Ana-Lucia when she shot and killed Shannon (an underused and thereby useless character, à la Edgar in “24”), so her departure is probably a godsend to many fans. But Libby? Oh writer/producers, what have you done?

Well, about a month ago (only two episodes ago) they decided to pull a wicked reveal that connected Libby in flashback to other characters in a challenging and satisfying way. We know little of her except she’s a clinical psychologist.... and the reveal showed us (from an omniscient POV, rare for “Lost”’s flashback-heavy character-centric episodes) that she spent some time in the loony bin too. But now Libby, who was just getting interesting, is dead.... meaning that loony bin reveal has been wasted! Bad writers, bad! You completely tarnished that plot twist, the most satisfying this season until.... well, tonight’s. But, my point being: perhaps the writers had this cool Libby-backstory idea before they decided to kill her off, thus wasting an opportunity to complicate the story through her character. With her dead, how will that awesome reveal from two episodes ago ever pay off? It won’t. The same can be said of interconnections set up in the backstories of other axed characters (Shannon, for instance), which all lead to nowhere when we don’t have the character there to make the connection for us. Dear Writers of Lost: do you have an exit strategy planned for this show? Because at times it seems like the emperor doesn’t have any clothes.

Okay, about Ana-Lucia. Was I the only one who actually liked her? They gave us an unlikable character who had a mountain to cross with the other characters, and they seemed to be doing a good job of integrating her tough-girl exterior into the fold. But, instead of taking the challenging route with her character and exploring further tensions with her, she gets popped. This was an out for the writers, an easy way to dispense with a character that the fans apparently didn’t like and an actress who was rumored to be causing problems on-set. Regardless of whatever on-set chemistry was going on, her character had more depth than quite a few of the gaggle of other whiny characters who are still sticking around. Now she’s done with, and the viewer gets no more.

I’m not so sure my mind can be changed regarding killing off Libby, but the writers did ultimately succeed in fulfilling the two requirements above about killing main characters. I was absolutely floored, so the surprise was there. How does this challenge the story? Michael, fresh from a many-episode hiatus at the Others’ Club Med off-screen somewhere on the island, takes a sinister turn as our bad guy murderer. He betrays Ana-Lucia outright, and finishes Libby off because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. By framing the captured Other the good guys have for these murders, it seems like Michael’s turned to be a bad guy now. Of course, this now limits his tenure on the island. BUT: This is a great reveal and justifies at least one of the deaths (sorry, Libby's death is a waste and thereby not justifiable.... so, why not take out that whiny hobbit Charlie?). The viewer knows Michael’s turned, but none of the characters do.... and thus the story is forced to change and evolve based on this reveal. This is challenging writing and presents a new course of obstacles for the characters ahead, and raises the bar for the writers. Let's hope they can make the grade.

But, why kill off two characters played by actresses that were just hired at the beginning of the year? Obviously some kind of shake-up was in order. Unfortunately, it kind of cheapens the whole tail-section-meets-the-rest-of-the-survivors arc. I was hoping that those rumors that Cynthia Watros has landed a role in a pilot picked up for this fall were just bunk. Apparently not. And what will become of Michelle Rodriguez? At least her character got to have some steamy sex on the island before her time was up. I for one will miss her. In the end though, this episode packed a powerhouse wallop that completely blindsided me, and made for some great television. I’m just not sure how I feel about the results quite yet.

*yes, a footnote: when “24” decided in their third season to kill off the two greatest villains they’ve ever had and probably ever will have, they didn’t abide by the pan-over-the-dead-body shot when Sherry Palmer got two bullets in the gut (interesting parallel to the recent “Lost” axe-ings here). It doesn’t matter if she wouldn’t be able to survive the shooting in real life, but by television rules the viewer has to have visual evidence that the character is dead, and all we got with Sherry was to watch her get blown backward onto the floor. The camera conspicuously panned away quickly, and that was it. So, writers of “24”, do yourself a big favor and bring back Sherry to knock our socks off. You left that window open….

more reasons for a Healthy Appetite

2006-04-29T14:10:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought the Food Network had sold its soul to the reality television devil (I'm talking to you, "The Next Food Network Star"), along comes the first bit of watchable original programming in quite awhile: "Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger".

Ellie who? Well, the Food Network has certainly saturated their commerical air time with her.... she's young, she's sexy (threatening to perhaps dethrone Giada "Food Babe" DeLaurentiis?), and she loves chocolate.... and entreats you to call the food police as she unwraps the foil of her chocolate bar.

The pitch? Looks like she's found the holy grail of cooking healthy.... yeah, yeah, she's a nutritionist, but she knows how to cook things that are good for you without removing the tasty stuff that is usually not so good for you. She's not cutting corners, and she tells us so: Hence, we have episodes where she's making triple chocolate cookies (without the usually nasty "good for you" fillers in chocolate baked goods like bananas) and scrambled eggs with avocado and buffalo chicken fingers with blue cheese dressing. She uses butter and mayonnaise. Bottom line: I salivate.

She's got a sexy coolness that is a refreshing reprieve from the high-on-diet-pills energy of Rachael Ray or the hedonistic butter psychosis of Paula Deen. She talks lovingly about her husband and daughter, sometimes parading the husband onscreen as she fills him with tasty meals. Her show is easy-going, thanks in part to her calm-yet-bubbly voice, and is instructional, thanks to the little tidbits we learn about correct portion sizes and the composition of vitamins in the food we eat. Bookending commerical breaks are atmospheric shots of her walking around New York City, for instance the Starbucks right at the gateway of St. Marks in the East Village, and I imagine myself running into her and following her home where she will make me delicious food. Maybe I'd just say hi instead. Or take covert pictures with my cell phone camera.

imagining what I would say if I didn't get the job I wanted

2006-04-25T18:00:00.000-04:00

Well, if there were ever an example of what blogs are made for.... it would be in response to something like this:

I just found out who Mark Slouka was yesterday, when I read a little article of his that tries to open a new asshole on the Columbia University writing MFA program. Talk about biting the hand that fed you.

Now, whatever points he brings up that do have merit are lessened dramatically by the fact that he didn't get appointed for tenure at Columbia.... and then decided to sling this kind shit at them. By publishing in the Columbia campus newspaper, no less? Maybe more reputable and high-profile outlets (Harper's, New Yorker, the Atlantic) rejected his catharsis, or maybe he found just the right niche audience to witness his wrath. Who reads the Columbia Spectator than just Columbia students, anyway? He all but spells out the names of the faculty and administration he targets, and he published his angry diary scribblings in a place that these targets all have easy access to.

I'm not so sure that this was perhaps the most professional way to go about expressing his dislike of not getting the job he wanted. He does pinpoint some issues that I think are worth really taking a look at (in part because it seems that maybe no one is talking about them?), but he immediately paper-shreds his integrity by the fact Columbia didn't give him the job. He goes on then to attack former colleagues he believes are not as well-qualified as he is. Is that such a good idea? He's sitting pretty with a tenure-track position elsewhere now, so the comfort of giving the finger to Columbia doesn't come with potential-job backfire. Or does it? How would his current university-of-hire feel if he turned his vitriol on them? Who's gonna pick up this guy's book and be so happy to read him? Probably nobody who graduates(ed) from Columbia. If situations were reversed and Columbia hadn't have burned him, his article would have had more of a lasting impact and probably wouldn't be dismissed as angry rantings. After all, why apply for tenure at a university MFA program where you feel the quality is so crappy? This lessens that impact all the more.

Rick Moody wrote a similar article in Harper's last summer that momentarily set its crosshairs on Columbia's writing MFA program.... but he was referring to the Columbia of the 1980s. I don't have a good idea on how it has changed for the better or worse, but the fact that he threw a hammer at Columbia doesn't look good for it no matter what decade you're writing about. Ultimately, Rick Moody didn't pick up any screaming fans from Columbia after his article, which in my opinion whined a bit too much about how nobody seemed to like him. Harper's ain't a counselors couch, buddy.

But, maybe Slouka's tirade won't be dismissed so soon? Two nails in Columbia's writing MFA coffin so far, and that can't be ignored. Scary to see what happens next....

A friend of mine told me about an essay/interview of Flannery O'Connor's and her response to the burgeoning popularity of writing MFA programs. When prompted about whether or not MFA programs stifle writers, O'Connor responds that she thinks that they don't stifle writers enough, and that thanks to the MFA there's been a nasty showerdrain-clog of bad writing and bad writers out there. Couldn't Slouka have said something like this instead? Flannery O'Connor wasn't pissed that she didn't get a job, though.

the great quake of 1906

2006-04-18T12:20:00.000-04:00

On this day one hundred years ago, San Francisco was almost completely destroyed by a massive earthquake. This earthquake was no little shaker; at a magnitude 7.9 (the most recent estimate.... I'm not even sure if they use the Richter scale anymore), the epicenter sat two miles into the ocean off Ocean Beach near Lake Merced. Brick buildings crumbled everywhere (and hence we learned our mistake: not so many brick buildings in California anymore), and landfill-covered chunks of land that used to be part of the bay upchucked and swallowed foundations whole. It wasn't just the earthquake, though: a massive fire came through and destroyed everything that we think of as downtown.... the entire northeastern quadrant of the city burned to the ground.

Having experienced a 6.9 earthquake ten miles from its epicenter in 1989 (which, no matter how much they downplay it lately, was a huge m-f-ing earthquake, in its path wiping out all of downtown Santa Cruz for instance), I can tell you that a 7.9 back when buildings were unstable was probably quite an event.... unlike anything seen since then (unless you were in Anchorage in March of 1964; their 9.2 earthquake is the second largest recorded in modern history). In 1989, my house lost a chimney, a big brick hearth, and a window or two. The land splits apart (in some places) and wobbles, and you can hear the corners of the building you're in crack and whine. Aftershocks are pretty intense too. Pretty trippy. I'm in the camp that finds earthquakes more exhilerating than terrifying, but I don't wish any of the destruction or death that comes with them.

The 1906 Earthquake is quite a big deal to San Franciscans, because it still weighs heavily on their minds. It's interesting: in New York City, older buildings are heralded as being "pre-war"; in San Francisco, the older buildings (and usually the most beautiful) are "pre-earthquake". Of course in New York, the buildings weren't destroyed by a war.

I always assumed that I'd be in San Francisco for the centennial celebration of the 1906 quake. For past years they haul out the few really old grannies who were one or two years old during the quake, and have them ring a bell or something at 5:12 am to commemorate the event. Apparently there's a big party in the city today to celebrate the centennial, and it's a bummer that I'm not there to join in, being such a lover of all things San Francisco.... now, having taken a 90° turn, I've ended up on the other side of the country where earhthquakes sound scarier to people than hurricanes or tornadoes.

On a related note, I've been meaning to read 1906 since it came out two years ago, just for the hell of it. It has the potential to be trashy, but it's nice to see San Francisco treated right in the realm of fictional storytelling, other than in some crappy tv shows that shall remain unnamed. They have yet to make a stand-out movie about the 1906 earthquake (correct me if I'm wrong).... it could make an awesome Titanic-style epic...! Are you listening, producers? I'll write it for you.

The view down Sacramento Street (again: my old neighborhood!) toward what is Chinatown today.

People stand next to eviscerated buildings and causally watch as the fire races up Nob Hill.

Needless to say, none of these buildings are standing anymore.

workshop burnout

2006-04-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

I've been taking writing workshops now for almost five years. I'm thinking there's definitely a saturation point where the random feedback coming in starts to tarnish the intentions of the work of writing going out. It doesn't help any that my current workshop tends to be debilitatingly negative (thanks in part to the workshop leader, who manages to turn compliments into negative comments). When I write, I have always imagined the voices of my potential readers giving me feedback.... usually it keeps me in check, but lately it seems to be stopping production. When you have a workshop that's so difficult to please, how can you turn out anything worthwhile to read? It's come to the point where nothing can please them, no matter how hard you try.

All this said, I'm not stupid enough to go into a workshop with the intention of pleasing their interests. I don't write for my workshop, I write for myself in hopes that the workshop can give me beneficial and constructive feedback to improve. This current workshop is just a bad apple.... but in the end, they're not all that bad. I like the people just fine, but somehow the energy was set at the wrong level early on and I don't think we make for the best class. Every workshop is different, and chemistry between the members matters a lot. My attitude about it all now comes from a combination of resoundedly negative feedback (on everybody's work, not just mine) and the fact that I've just been in workshops for too long.

I can get past the workshop-feedback-editor-in-my-mind for my own writing.... but somehow, those editors are arguing with themselves when I'm reading published fiction.... and good published fiction at that. Case in point: I recently picked up a collection of Donald Barthelme's short stories (Sixty Stories, after which I look forward to reading Forty Stories). They're weird and strange and intricate and experimental and beautiful. An example of some of his stories (and some of my favorites): "The Zombies" about the community of good zombies and bad zombies; "I Bought a Little City" about buying the city of Galveston, TX and shaping it into the shape of the Mona Lisa visible from the air; "The Great Hug" about a man with symbolic balloons and the one woman who can pop them. I'm not a fan of all of the stories, though.... some seem needlessly experimental and too despondent for my liking.... but there are a handful that are masterworks of fiction, and perfect examples that prove to me that one can never run out of things to do with fiction, even when sometimes it seems like it's all been done before. My favorite so far: "The Balloon", haunting and gorgeous; a story about a guy that inflates a giant balloon over New York City, covering some eighty square blocks. The narrator talks about how people in the city take day trips walking over the balloon, or meet on the street at certain places where it dips to the ground or touches against the buildings. People attach paper lanterns on the underside and have block parties. The end is a revelation, so bittersweet and touching.... why did the guy inflate the balloon? Because his lover left him, and it was nothing more than a symbol.

So, the point I'm getting at: if Barthelme's stories were taken into a workshop, they'd be ripped into confetti. There's no way that stories like this wouldn't be eviscertaed on the spot in a snarling workshop. His style is sometimes slapdash and fragmented. His narrators wander and sometimes misdirect. Even I come across some things that I think could have been written more clearly or differently, but in the end his stories are viewed as successes and loved by many. So, if stories like his won't pass the muster of workshop, what makes good fiction then? Is that even the point of the workshop? The goal is not to be validated by your peers, but certainly that helps.... and I think sometimes the want to be recognized rather than assisted eclipses the whole purpose.

So, when I'm reading fiction, I no longer have a grasp on what's good or bad. Everybody has different taste.... so when in workshop they pontificate their tastes onto your work and therefore provide negative feedback....? What are you left with? Does your taste even matter? What about when someone turns something into workshop that (to me) is so clearly poorly written and scattered, yet they get a gentle read from the class? People gush and glow, and I'm left wondering "WTF?" Meanwhile the work that I find very strong gets ripped apart with jagged teeth. Maybe this should be of consolation for my own writing, but somehow it isn't.

So.... the story I'm writing next is weird. Inspired in part by Barthelme.... but I know it's going on the chopping block. For some reason I've been writing weirder stuff as of late, straying from the traditional realism I used to write in all the time. I'm looking forward, in a way, to the summer.... to clear my mind of workshop so that next year I can jump right back in with a refreshed attitude. Don't get me wrong: I like workshops and am looking forward to next year's, but I need the break. In the mean time, I'm gonna keep reading published fiction, and try to rid those workshop voices out of my head for that, too.

24: predictability will be the death (at least creative death) of you

2006-04-10T15:10:00.000-04:00

Further proof that the writers of "24" are suffering from delusions of grandeur:

But I think you could make the argument that the outcry over Tony's death, over Edgar's death, over Palmer's death, in a way, means we did the right thing. The purpose of the show is to appeal to and produce emotion in the audience, and clearly we have.

As far as their (i.e. executive producer Evan Katz's) treatment of the reliable bloodbath of established characters, he spits the same useless easy-way-out shit and calls it sugar:

....we really felt last year we had gone as far with David Palmer as the character could go.

and this, too:

In terms of Tony, we knew that was coming. That was a long time coming. We felt we had told the stories we could for his character.

Uh, guys.... let me say *again* that just because a character has "run its course" in your eyes does not mean that you should go and kill them off. Why not write them out in a unique and open-ended way and actually challenge yourselves to do something interesting with the character? Something that doesn't involve a bodybag for a change. I've said it before, but here you get it again: if a "24" movie is in the works, wouldn't it be nice for the characters we haven't seen in awhile turn up for a big hurrah? That would be certainly surprising and satisfying. Too bad they're all dead.

President Palmer's reaction is similar to mine. I'm glad I'm not the only one. However, his attitude might be tainted because he got a pink slip and I didn't.

That’s the result of destroying these relationships [between Jack and the other killed-off characters]. You have to constantly stunt to get people to watch, because every relationship that Jack has had, from Season 1, all those people are gone. It puts this man against the world thing in, and it becomes a bit cartoonish, not plausible.

All this said, I'm not so sure why there was such an outcry about Edgar's death to begin with. He was a missed opportunity last season (he should have gone bonkers), I think the writers realized that, and they didn't have anything interesting for him to do this season except die. More proof of what the writers like to do when they think the character has told all the stories they possibly can. Dear producers: you're getting predictable.

Yeah yeah yeah, I'll be tuning in tonight.

from dirty libby to delicious libby

2006-04-06T21:56:00.000-04:00

Cynthia Watros is screaming hot.

She's spent too much time in the background as second-season-addition Libby, the clincial psychologist (or is she?), on "Lost".... but on yesterday's episode, though, we finally got our treat. And, a pretty awesome reveal at the end (to your left) regarding her character.... turns out she happened to be in the loony bin with Hurley at the same time, but they don't seem to remember each other (....or at least Hurley doesn't). This is a step up from the usual pretending-to-be-tricky character connection crap the the writers have too much fun with. I have to admit, I'm afraid "Lost" might turn out to be a grand exercise where we find out at the end that the writers were flying by the seat of their pants the whole time. They've gone out of their way to seed so many little details (hardcore viewers are calling them the DVD-friendly term "Easter eggs") in their episodes, and I'm starting to worry if they're ever going to connect the dots. I'm actually interested to see how this one with Libby and Hurley plays out.... assuming it does. This twist was provoking and satisfying.... a trait as of late where narrative shock value in TV tends to miss the bar.

When I have my own TV show, I want her on it. Just added to the ever-growing dream cast list.

Is it bad to imagine the actors who you want to play the roles you write?

tread lightly, film industry, when bringing your junk to San Francisco

2006-03-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

"The Evidence" is a new television drama trying to be too many things at the same time. It has all the colors and poppy editing of "CSI", it has the gritty cop-and-partner edge of "Law & Order", and just about every other trope of your typical episodic criminal justice procedural you can find. Because all these things are so easily identifiable, and because of unchallenging writing, "The Evidence" is trying too hard, and at the end of the day it just isn't a good TV show. This is not it's highest crime, though. The show takes place and is shot (to some extent) in San Francisco. The only reason for this (evident after these first two episodes, after which I will not continue) is because of its scenery, its diversity, and all the other things that makes San Francisco seem like a good place for a show to take place in. It's all-too-clear that the city is being used and not utilized.

A show like "Grey's Anatomy" for instance, uses Seattle delicately; it acts as an interchangeable city. The show could take place anywhere else in the country, and the scripts respect this.... they're not going out on the streets or laboring past landmarks in every episode because it isn't necessary to do so. However, Seattle provides a comfortable backdrop, and in some respects pays respect to that city as a pleasant place for the story.... and that's where it ends. Another somewhat recent medical drama, "Presidio Med", albeit short-lived, treated San Francisco similarly as "Grey's Anatomy" treats Seattle; if they can't use the city as a focus, they use it only as establishing-shot setting.

I absolutely do not object to the film/television industry choosing to shoot in San Francisco, particularly because it brings revenue to the city and thereby helps the toruism industry. In fact, San Francisco has seen a decline recently in film industry interest.... I'm not so sure "Nash Bridges" counts. What I do object to is using the city (er, The City) as a dumping ground for a crappy unremarkable procedural show like "The Evidence" in the guise of paying respect to it. This show is trying so so hard to screech past every San Francisco landmark (including CGI-ing shots of the Bay Bridge flying over, in the wrong direction no less, supposed-waterfront locales that the Bay Bridge happens to be nowhere near), it cheapens the effect. Characters say useless throw-away lines such as "...from here to the Farallones" and mention the Glen Park precinct of SFPD.... they even created a ficitonal San Francisco Gazette for a crossword puzzle as evidence, feh. When we first meet the two leads in the pilot, they are playing golf on some fictional garbage scow/wharf with the Golden Gate Bridge sailing behind them, kicking smashed aluminum cans and walking past dirty chain link fences and panhandlers. In reality, where they chose to film (Crissy Field), garbage and metal fences are nowhere to be found.... instead there are beautiful sand dunes and grassy lawns, usually with joggers and stroller-pushing moms enjoying their afternoon by the bay. In their disgusting attempt to make San Francisco seem gritty while getting that landmark money shot in the background, they wanted to up the grunge factor. Why not shoot in Hunter's Point, then.... or the Tenderloin? I have a feeling that the producers are averse to having their actors witness homeless transsexuals peeing on street corners. Now that would be gritty television.

What's the point of the show? It's not about San Francisco, it's about "the evidence" of crimes in San Francisco that could just as easily be found anywhere else in the world.... why not set this show in Houston, St. Louis, Atlanta? The producers sat around some mahogany table and decided to choose somewhere sexy, and somewhere that stands out.... and because New York is overused, they threw the dart at San Francisco.

I'm no expert on the history of San Francisco in the movies and TV.... but others have come and succeeded, using San Francisco as the right kind of backdrop. Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), for instance, is almost a love letter to San Francisco, taking advantage of its ups and downs and letting the scenery shots come naturally and not be overused. This may be because both the director (Chris Columbus) and the star (Robin Williams.... why wasn't he Oscar nominated?) are San Franciscans. They filmed the movie with love for the city in mind, not as some any-city with sexy scenery.

Maybe I've contradicted myself above, or made the argument a little muddled. I have a high standard for San Francisco (could you tell?), and it's disappointing when Hollywood misses the bar. This is my own thing, though.... clearly I'm sensitive, but only because I love The City so much.

my old neighborhood.... *sigh*

say good-bye to these

2006-03-28T20:09:00.000-05:00

Today (yesterday?) was a a sad day for those who love quality television.

Rest in peace, "Arrested Development".... The three seasons we had were just not enough. There were so many more places to go. Here's to hoping that joke about making it a movie in the series finale was not actually a joke.

And now a question: If a show is so beloved by fans, why decide to end it when there are other options to keep it on the air (re: Showtime) on the table? Can't one argue that keeping a show on the air for the sake of the fans (and there are many of us indeed) is worth keeping it on the air?