TheSophomoreCritic

Thank you to several friends of the blog Part II

2012-01-29T10:10:00.000-08:00

I think it's weird when someone says "friend of the blog" until I realize that I used that term myself in a post about a year ago where I thanked several people who have been influences, inspirations, and help to me:

I'd like to update that list a little with a few more names:
I recently wrote about many twitter friends I've made including my favorite grammar nazi Christine Becker, eternal Community fanboy Noel Kirkpatrick, rapping bookworm Ellen Wernecke, and the AV Club's budding star Rowan Kaiser. All of these guys continue to provide support and ideas to bounce off.

I'd like to also give thanks to some other friends I've made through twitter that I missed last time:
Kenny Herzog is a guy who's given me advice and is kind enough to talk to me despite being wayyy more successful at what he does than I am. He said to me once, "Hey man, us freelance plebes all gotta stick together." Great words to live by.
Kenny Herzog is currently published nearly everywhere in the Western Hemisphere (he is currently looking to get in the door at the Trinidad Press for the trifecta). Rolling Stone, Spin, Time Out, MSN, New York Daily News all bear his name. Rumor has it that freelance wrote some chapters of the King James Bible as well.

Kenny Herzog's work can be found at www.KennyHerzog.com

Cory Barker is a guy who in my early days of twitter (remember kids, these were different times. Think back to November 2010) when no one was following me, I emailed this guy in a huffy-puffy snit over why he wasn't following me. Since then, he's been a guy who's done an admirable job of tolerating me in our storybook twitter friendship (Disney hasn't yet bought the rights to our story, but we're holding out). Cory's love of TV criticism borders on masochism. He insists on watching pretty much every show on TV and reviewing it all. Look at his end-of-the-year list and you'll see he's watched some 20 million shows in 2010 and apologized for the 4 he didn't have the time to watch. www.tvsurveillance.com

Les Chapell is a person I met when LA Times Critic and AV Club chief TV writer Todd van der Weff was compiling a crowd-sourced sitcom and Les and I agreed to share a $10 prize to type up a transcript.. Since then, Les and me have fed each other publishing tips and shared advice on how to improve each other's pieces. This is the perfect relationship a freelance writer needs and I highly recommend you all go out and find your own Les (not my Les, though, I've snatched him up). Les's work can be found at ahelplesscompiler.wordpress.com

Speaking of Todd van der Weff, who once deemed himself the 17th most prominent TV critic in the nation (how cool is it, mom, that I have the 17th most prominent TV critic in the country on my email queue?!) also played a major role at the beginning of my writing career: Namely, rejecting me as a writer for the AV Club when I was unemployed in directionless in the Fall of 2010. More specifically, Todd's biggest contribution to my writing career was taking two weeks to reject me after looking at my work, rather than just flat-out looking at my work and rejecting me outright. .

The mere mention that I applied to the AV Club and was under consideration had a few facebook friends to get real excited for me. In an effort to keep my doors open and clean up my work for when Todd would eventually take a look at it, I applied to more things in that two-week period that either accepted me or, at the very least, gave me hope to keep writing.

More than that, Todd's contributions to my career haven't been accidental. In addition, to hopefully paying the $5 he owes me (and $5 to Les if he wants it), he was encouraging and kind upon rejecting me, and he regularly is kind enough to respond to me on twitter. I know that's not much, but Todd is patient enough to respond to some of the dumbest things I say on twitter (I'm not sure why he doesn't respond to smarter tweets), such as getting the number of seasons of a particular TV show wrong or assuming Davy Jones of the Monkees was dead when Todd, in fact, was standing in a room with him. Todd's writing (or the writing of the writers he hires) can be found at avclub.com/tvclub

I also have to thank Eddie Rodriguez for assisting me in being published on cracked and offering to include me on other pitches. Neither me nor Eddie had been published on cracked before when Eddie volunteered to jump on board the idea of an unpublished writer like me and bring it to fruition. Since then, Eddie's had phenomenal success on cracked with 6 or 7 pieces to his name last I checked. Thanks also E. Reid Ross over at cracked for helping to work with me on pitches as well and volunteering to troop on through my examiner recommendation..

In the world of print, I have been lucky enough to be published in 4 different print publications over the last 12 months*-Sun Gazzette, Connection Newspapers, Falls Church News Press, and Washington City Paper, in addition to toptenz.com, gunaxin, patch.com, and Arlingtoncounty.com and thanks to all the editors at those places and anyone on staff who helped me. I wouldn't want to mention any of them by name because that would make it look like I'm sucking up to them for more articles but I would like to thank one of them, Philip van der Vossen, for his transparency and his interest in hearing writers' opinions and suggest to freelance writers that Gunaxin.com, while not necessarily the most profitable place on the web, is not a bad place to consider because its editor-in-chief is a trustworthy and fair guy.

At Connection, I had the opportunity to work in an office setting with a number of interns and other freelancers who were great company and inspiration. Maya Horowitz, an intern-turned-freelancer, worked side by side with me for quite a while and has been a source of support even after my leaving the Connection. To see Maya's exploits at the Connection and to learn what it's like chasing local leads for a community newspaper, she can be found at mayahorowitz.wordpress.com.

A special thanks also to aspiring editor and Connection intern Edison Russ for helping me tremendously in terms of teaching me how to write better and self-editor (this blog entry was live for half a day before I recognized that mistake. That's how badly I need Edison) . He stayed behind on the last day of his internship just to help me with my grammar. He also looked at my blog recently and tried to compliment me on my ironic misspellings of certain words, unaware that I didn't misspell those words on purpose. I would highly recommend Edison to anyone interested in hiring him as a rearranger of words in (that mistake took an extra two run throughs for me to spot. Read every other entry of this blog to see how much I suck at grammar and self-editing) and inserter of punctuation marks (I guess that's what they call a copy editor?). I almost had an opening for Edison at Arlingtoncounty.com and he was a good sport when it fell through.
Edison's collegiate portfolio can be found at edisonruss.webly.com.

Thanks to all the interns I worked with at the Connection who made last summer more exciting for me and for making me feel important because I wasn't the lowest person in the office. Thanks to Isabelle for keeping me in the loop about the high school running scene, Adam for being the rounder-up of lunch-going and thanks to budding journalist Abigail for completing her fine article for me at ArlingtonCounty.com which allowed me the opportunity to say I successfully hired and supervised another journalist.

Oscar nominations just announced

2012-01-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

Oscar nominations were just announced and unlike last year, I'm ashamed to say I followed the race and lead-up this year. Like anyone else interested in films, I went into hyperdrive on Tuesday writing for Gunaxin and Examiner.

My Eaminer Piece on Things I liked and disliked about the Nominations is here:

What I saw as the highlights:

Max von Sydow nominated in the actor category

Terrence Malick nominated in the director category

Nine Pictures makes the big cut

Michelle Williams getting a 3^rd nom

Margin Call getting a screenplay prize

Moneyball’s still hot

Kristen Wiig and Jim Rash are now Oscar-nominated

Viola Davisbecomes 2^nd African-American actress to get a repeat nomination

What I saw as the lowlights:

Albert Brooks doesn’t make the cut

Ides of March getting a screenplay nomination

No acting noms for the Tree of Life

Ben Kingsley and Vanessa Redgrave getting snubbed

Real-life portrayals of Marilyn and Laurence gettingautomatic ins

Super 8 being snubbed in the technical categories

My Gunaxin Piece 8 Questions Now that the Oscar Nominations are Out is something I'm quite proud of and can be found here

1. When will the George Clooney extravaganza stop?

2. Will the Kristen Wiig haters back off?

3. What is War Horse about anyways?

4. Does it matter if Incredibly Loud is hated?

5. Speaking of which, what does Stephen Daldry have on theacademy anyways?

6. Has Melissa McCarthy craze gone too far?

7. Will there be backlash if Octavia Spencer and Viola Davisboth lose?

8. Why are Hugo and Descendants nominated for editing?

Predicting the Oscars 26 minutes before they're announced

2012-01-24T05:25:00.000-08:00

While waiting for the Oscars to be announced in 25 minutes (and counting), I'm going to post my predictions as I did at goldderby.com via invitation of the LAMB. This is solely so in the case that I'm correct, there's some evidence out there that I was either very right or very wrong.
Eight Questions to Ask Before the Oscar Nominations Are Announced

Picture: War Horse, Moneyball, Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Artist, Descendants, Help

Director: Bennett Miller, the director of The Artist, Terrence Malick, Marty Scorsese, Alexander Payne

Notes: Can't spell the director of The Artist, and won't even try. Wasn't a big fan of Bennett Miller's work in Capote but Moneyball is all about the director. If Malick doesn't get nominated, that would be tragic.

Actor: DiCaprio, J Edgar, Michael Fassbender, Shame, George Clooney, The Descendants, Brad Pitt, Moneyball, Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Notes: Ewan MaGregor of Beginners is also highly deserving

Actress: Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn, Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, The Help, Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Note: I would be thrilled if Charlize Theron for Young Adult or Rooney Mara for Girl with Dragon Tattoo got nominated. In the case of the latter, I have no rooting interest for the film, but I'd want to see Mara because heroes and heroines from big blockbuster tent pole films rarely get mentioned

Supporting Actor: Max von Sydow, Extremely Personal and Up Close, Brad Pitt, Tree of Life, Jonah Hill, Moneyball, Albert Brooks, Drive, Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Notes: I'm really holding out hope for Ben Kingsley, but I thought I'd mix it up anyways.

Supporting Actress: Shalene Woodley, Descendants, Carey Mulligan, Shame, Octavia Spencer, Help, Jessica Chastian, Help, Vanessa Redgrave, Corlianis

Notes: Vanessa Redgrave is the actress I have rooting interest for. She's a living legend and it's a field almost entirely composed of newbies

Adapted Screenplay: Moneyball, Help, Descendants, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Notes: Best pictures shouldn't automatically be placed in the screenplay categories (Goodbye Hugo and War Horse). Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had as much pressure as The Da Vinci Code to not disappoint fans of the book. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was also adapted from a well-known source and succeeded despite comparisons to recent movies. A film like Hugo doesn't really stand out for stylized dialogue.

Original Screenplay: Young Adult, Artist, Margin Call, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris

Notes: Artist is a silent film, but that can be just as hard to write. Margin Call is wishful thinking, but it's that good. Beginners and Win Win would also be wishful thinking. Bridesmaids would definitely be a unique contender and, what's more, it's pretty probably it will make the cut. I have my personal qualms with Midnight in Paris

Score: Super 8, Artist, Hugo, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Harry Potter VIII

Notes: I listened to about twenty different scores thanks to youtube so I had a lot of samples to draw from. Artist and Hugo both sound very much alike. Plagarism?

Editing: Girl with Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball, War Horse, Tree of Life, Hugo

Notes: Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy or Drive could easily also fit into here. Moneyball should win this. Tree of Life is an interesting conundrum: It's way too long but you have the feeling that without the editor reigning in Malick's vision, it would have been a much longer film

Cinematography: Super 8, War Horse, Artist, Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy, Tree of Life

Notes: Super 8 has amazing cinematography even if it's not a good film.. I'm not sure why it would be ignored in that category.

Art Direction: Anonymous, J. Edgar, Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy, Hugo, Harry Potter VIII

Note: Anonymous was shot using Roland "I like to blow up the world" Emmerich using mostly green screens. A very interesting and novel way to do a period piece. Harry Potter VIII, I'd put in art direction, because Lord of the Rings won in that category, and the two seem very similar in production values.

Reviews of Moneyball, The Help, and Margin Call

2012-01-20T14:06:00.001-08:00

Just went on a back-to-back-to-back DVD watching binge over the last three nights as I figured out how to reopen my redbox account. All three films were excellent but clearly I had the foresight of all those year-end reviews to steer me in the right direction.

Moneyball:

Moneyball is all about Brad Pitt. Because the film ties BillyBeane’s journey of self-discovery to that of his sport, and because there’s asurprising amount of psychological depth to Beane himself, this film transcendsthe typical sports film. At the same time, it’s a very exciting sports film inand of itself.

The sad thing about professional sports today is that tospectators and players alike are excited by the whole phenomenon up until thepoint where they lose. This is a film that deals almost exclusively with how todeal with defeat and how victory itself is tenable. That says more about lifethan much of sports does today.

This is Aaron Sorkin’s third movie (Charlie Wilson’s War andThe Social Network) since making the abysmal television show “Studio 60” andcommitted every sin imaginable in the TV writer’s bible (don’t have all thecharacters sound alike, don’t use the show to air out your dirty laundry, tryto at least pretend to care about where your story is set, etc.) and he’s beenusing more and more restraint on those Sorkinisms. Occasionally, Sorkin stillgets cringe-worthy as in the conversation between scouts about how theyshouldn’t put in a pitcher with an ugly girlfriend.

Another weakness of Aaron Sorkin seems pretty subverted in Jonah Hill’s shy and introverted character of Peter Brand. Unfortunately he drifts a little towards Sorkinish territory towards the end.

On my top ten list (which I’m working to rapidly construct acouple weeks later than everyone else), this lands at #2. Not as profound asambitious as “The Tree of Life” but it’s more intense and kinetic than anythingelse I’ve seen this year and it marries that intensity to a stronger story thana typical action or sports film

Margin Call:

The film takes place over a condensed 28-hour period as abright employee (Zach Quinto) a couple levels below management at a multi-billiondollar investment company discovers some kink in the system. It’s 10 pm on thenight when the staff is out celebrating because they’ve survived the night ofrecent layoffs, but gradually everyone up the chain of commands right up to theCEO, stops everything their doing and shows up back to the office, because theycome to the realization that they’re company is going to be screwed very soon.

For me, it’s an especially interesting experience to watch because I’ve long relegated economics and finance to the grey areas of myknowledge that I’m too far behind on to have a chance of understanding. I could embarrass myself very quickly with a list of current news events from recent times (Fanny and Freddy, the subprime mortgage crisis) that I didn't understand whatsoever.

So as someone who had no understand of this world these characters inhabited, I can truly say the film did a very good job of not making it exclusively about numbers andgraphs. Rather, it was the emotions and consequences behind those numbers It also helped that (whether it was makingsome thematic point), some of the higher ups in the company had no idea whatthose numbers meant either.

The film’s biggest strength is how the ensemble is all onthe same page. Zach Quinto, Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey (hamming it up as themost conflicted character), Simon Baker, Demi Moore, and Jeremy Irons all seemto bring a surprising intensity to a movie that’s basically set in the same twoor three rooms and features a fair amount of quasi-technobabble.

This film is definitely a keeper for my top ten as well, somewherein the middle. It’s certainly about more than a film like “Bridesmaids” and I’mnot sure where I compare it to “Win Win” which has a little more heart but hasa little less solid of a cast.

The Help:

It’s probably safe to assume that the genteel life of bridgegames and debutante balls in 1960’s Mississippiwith those colored women lurking the background of family photos was probably amorally grayer zone than depicted in “The Help.” In this film, you have heroesand villains with Bryce Dallas Howard playing Cruella de Vil donned in themakings of a society gal. Words that I would associate with Bryce Dallas Howard(someone who I’ve been eagerly following since my older sister randomly becamefriends with her at summer camp 15 years ago) are enigmatic, quiet, andreserved. This is a major change of pace for her.

The hero is independent gal Eugena “Skeeter” (what a name!) Phalem,who bucks the trend by going to University of Mississippi andmajoring in something other than husband-hunting. For a film that wouldeventually make the short-list for Oscar if all goes according to plan thisTuesday, Emma Stone was a risky choice for the lead. She looks like LindsayLohan and her career trajectory up to this point (minus the drugs) has mirroredhers. Stone pulls the leading role off admirably.

Aside from Stone and Bryce Dallas Howard, this film boasts avery strong cast and one of the few films that’s loaded with great femaletalent without looking like it’s simply an excuse to win someone an Oscar inthe ordinarily thin “Best Actress” category. Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek,Allison Janey, and Jessica Chastain (who holds the distinction of being inliterally half the films to come out in 2011) have great parts while OctaviaSpencer and Viola Davis provide the heart of the film as the twoAfrican-American maids who Emma Stone is interviewing to get the maids’ side ofthe story.

The film still does an excellent job at capturing a placeand time, although I do wonder if it’s the most interesting place and time

This is definitelynot a film that reaches for the tragic depths of The Color Purple or MississippiBurning. The abuse that the maids suffer is relatively mild that maids sufferin comparison to other points or subsets of in the Civil Rights era. Withouthaving a firm working knowledge on 1960’s Mississippi, it’s a little hard for theviewer to decide how badly to feel for the protagonists. They are, after all,getting paid to do a job, and on occasion, they seem to have friendlyemployers.

It’s through the framing device of Emma’s story and a New York publisher’s (MarySteenburgen’s) reaction that we learn that race divisions were tense enoughthat no one would willingly trash their employer. Of course, no one looks goodtrashing their employer today, but you get the sense that the repercussionsmight be more dangerous.

If there’s one other slight weakness, I’m not sure if I’mconditioned to expect dramatic films to be devoid of comedy, but some momentsin the second half of the film felt more screwball comedy than cathartic. The major plot point revolving around a (without spoiling too much) rather unique slice of pie, seems a little more like a scene from some zany children's flick than a film with the kind of aim this film goes for.

The Help is still a film that swings for the fences.

Oscar buzz: Is the tail wagging the dog at this point?

2012-01-15T13:44:00.000-08:00

I just bought an issue of Entertainment Weekly when I was was on a trip and stressed out and needed to get my mind off things, and it was comfort food to read it.

When I skipped straight to the prediction section, I started to realize a problem.
What I was reading was information I already knew with just minor alterations (i.e. now Steven Spielberg is in the best director category instead of Terrence Malick and Money isn't one of the BP frontrunners).

And then it struck me as ridiculous. I was eagerly wanting to consume information telling me most of what I already know. Then I'll eagerly watch the Oscar ceremony where 70% of the content is what I've already seen before.

The Oscar speeches will be mostly identical to the Golden Globe and SAG speeches and the results will almost be pre-ordained.

I think Oscar buzz started out as a few people wanting to be the guy in their office who says "I know who will win the Oscars," but 80% of the time, we all know who will win the Oscars and 80% of the time, the participants know who will win. How awful is it to invite Jacki Weaver (nominated last year for "Animal Kingdom") or Mark Ruffalo (nominated for "The Kids Are All Right) to the Oscars when they both know it's a practical certainty that they're going to lose. For all, we know the precursor gluttony decides the voting. Someone might have asked themselves in the 2010/2011 race: "Why should I vote for Jacki Weaver when all of the precursor awards show that it's either gonna be Hailee, Amy Adams or Melissa Leo?"

More disturbing is that when we discuss Oscar buzz, we're not actually talking about movies anymore for the most part. We're simply trying to use statistics and such to predict human behavior. Some of the most prominent people in the film criticism community are nothing more than glorified statisticians. Go to Awards Daily and you'll see that most of their articles consist of announcing press releases by various groups giving their awards of the films of the year. Commentary by the webmasters of the commenters will use this information to slightly recalibrate their attitudes about who will be selected as Oscar winners.

Just the other day, we had the Central Ohio Film Critics Awards announcing their picks. Are we now dividing states into latitudinal thirds for the sole purpose of disseminating a list of best films of the year that closely mirrors 200 other such lists?

I've previously written that the winners of the Oscars were originally publicized before the big night. Now, the stated goal of the Academy is to keep the results sealed. Technically, those awards are still sealed but when we have 8 million awards precursors; when they allow directors, actors, writers and producers of the academy to vote in other awards ceremonies; when sites on the internet are dedicated to using every algorithm they have to predict the results, what's the difference?

FAQs about blogging

2012-01-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

How do I know whether I should start a blog?
I would recommend a blog if you have things to say and you take pride in expressing it.

Do you find yourself occasionally having thoughts about stuff and wanting to express them in a fuller extent? Do you take pride in what you write on message boards or even your facebook notes, facebook status messages, tweets, or correspondence to other people in e-mails? That’s material you can put on a blog.

Do I have to like writing?
You might or might not like the process of writing. Sometimes, I might not like the actual writing, but I do like the feeling I get of looking at something I’ve written and knowing that it was written by me. In other words, I write for love of the finished product.

In another scenario, writing might also be cathartic or therapeutic for you. It might not be the thing you enjoy most in the world, but like eating vegetables, it could be a healthy component of your daily activity.

Lastly, you might see it as an ideal vehicle for advancing your point of view or opinion.

What are the benefits of blogging as opposed to just writing on a blank word document?
Blogging is partially about creating a body of work. You can use it as a reference for yourself for things you’ve written. I’ve had two occasions where someone wanted me to write about the film “From Here to Eternity” and fortunately, I’ve already written about it multiple times on my blog. That’s fairly easy material to rework for someone else’s needs without having to rewrite the piece. More importantly, it’s a way to display to someone else what you can do which is what you often need to get ahead as a writer.

Blogging will also keep you productive. If you see that the current month has only one blog post, you think it looks kind of lonely sitting by itself and are tempted to add another one to it. It’s a fairly easy way to ensure that you’re consistently writing each month.

Does blogging make you money?

Blogging on wordpress or blogspot will likely not make you much money at all. Even if I do have ad sense, people have to click on those ads and google ad sense doesn’t yield much profit as opposed to other sites. It depends on growing your readership to 5 or 6 figures which is easier said than done.

That’s not to say that blogging shouldn’t make me money. I do firmly believe that the world is a better place if people pay for art they consume in the appropriate amount. If you enjoyed reading my piece on Capitol Critters, for example, you should pay whatever you think that experience was worth (donation jar on the top right, tis the season for generosity folks), even if it was worth 19 cents. That said, believing that people SHOULD pay and convincing people to ACTUALLY PAY are two entirely different things.

So you don’t care about the money? Why are you doing this?
For the money, of course. I originally graduated college as a naïve idealist who didn’t think money was important, but I've come to understand that everything I do is underlined by capitalistic motives. My goals are to grow readership and to direct you (through links) to sites where I do get paid based on traffic. That's not to say that that strategy is working particularly well.

So everything on this blog is your third-rate throwaway work?
Exactly! So if you like these measly article scraps, you should check out my better stuff. In all seriousness, though, I do strive to maintain a minimum level of quality for this blog. Putting my best efforts on this blog while trying to maintain a presence on my new home at Gunaxin and Examiner (my home of two and a half years) and give both of those outlets my best stuff can be somewhat of a challenge.

The consequences of trying to maintain a minimum standard in quality. so that anyone seeing this blog would be impressed translates to a loss in quantity. I have a lot of things I could write easily, but to write them and not have them come off as sloppy, takes twice as long.

But you’re writing is still sloppy

I’m not writing the most perfect piece with a blog entry. I’m writing the best I can in the time I’ve allotted myself to write that entry. Every fact check and spell check I do is time and it adds up. There are bloggers who argue to the contrary: Poor spelling and grammar is unacceptable. I’m not ideologically opposed to those people and would get everything right if I could. It’s just a matter of time constraints.

What are the benefits of blogging as opposed to writing for a site that pays you money?
Three main reasons:
1. Sometimes, blogging fires up your creative juices or gets the wheels turning in your brain en route to producing that thing you would get paid to write.
2. I have free reign to write whatever I like with my blog. In order to write for examiner.com, I have to go through the trouble of using their more complex interface system and I have to stick to the topic on the film industry in Washington D.C. In order to write for Gunaxin, I have to make something that’s conducive to heavy visuals. In order to write for toptenz.com, it needs to be a list. In order to write for cracked, it has to be meticulously researched and pass through an editorial team
3. Sometimes a blog entry is a first draft of a better piece and it’s good to get that first draft out.

PART II:
WHAT ABOUT ME, What should I write about?
It generally helps to write about one thing, but you don’t have to stick to any rules. If you look at my early posts, I was pretty free-flowing. In order to develop a readership (i.e. one of your main goals), you should try to stick to the same general area of interest, the same style, and/or consistent features. That’s what they call branding.

If a reader stumbles upon your blog because of one good post you wrote, they’ll appreciate that, but they might not stick around. If, on the other hand, they come across more of what bought them there in the first place, they might have cause to stick around.

What if I can’t contain myself to just one interest?
If you have multiple interests and don’t want to constrain yourself to one topic, I recommend that you rely on an efficient tagging system. For instance, if you’re equally passionate about insects, skiing, and Cambodian politics, I would just tag all three posts and clearly divide it on your blog. That way if a reader stumbles upon an excellent article on the Cambodian elections, he can easily sort his way through other articles on Cambodia.

You should also diversify how you write on a topic. I do standard film reviews, but I also have a feature on guest star rosters, a directorial list progress report, and an ongoing list of songs that I like based on lyrics, for example.

But that’s not branding!
Yes, it is. I’m actually building a new brand with each new feature I do. You might stumble upon a guest star list and want to see more of them. I know this because this happens a lot to me as a reader.

I’ll give an example: A blog I have on my google reader is Zulkey.com. The reason I follow this blog is because Claire Zulkey (a published author) interviews writers (who otherwise don’t get press coverage) and I find it interesting and informative for someone in that field.

Looking at her feed, she has two interviews from her last 12 posts. In between, she has a variety of other stuff. She has a wide variety of topics, mostly resembling the kind of oddball humor bits you’d find at McSweeney’s. She writes about boring presidential scandals. If I stumbled upon her blog article about boring presidential scandals, I might enjoy it, but I also might be more inclined next time to go to a site like snopes.com (dealing in urban legends) or oddee.com (dealing in oddball munitiae of that sort). However, because I already was at her blog (because I like her interview pieces) to check out her latest interview, I was able to jump to that piece fairly easily and enjoy it too.

Also of note, Zulkey uses the blog to promote larger projects of hers. In this case, it is an event she's speaking at.

So that's how web traffic works?
No, that's how I work. Most people are worrisomely overreliant on web searches for everything, so in response, a lot of bloggers try to make their writing match google searches by using a technique called Search Engine Optimization. People still remember branding and blog names, however.

Is that how people find their way to my blog?
Yes and no. People find their way to your material through a variety of ways, but not as many ways as you think. If you do absolutely nothing to promote your blog and if you write on a standard wordpress or blogspot account, then people will find you through searching. You can, however, network and ask to be listed or linked to by other blogs. You can also keep a twitter account and mention your blog on facebook. I personally find message boards to be an effective place.

What if no one reads my blog?
First of all, join the club. If no one is reading your blog, go get some more readers.

OK, what if I do that and fail?

That’s part of what blogging is about. Whether you succeed or not, going through the struggle of getting more readers and trying different methods to accomplish that goal will likely have taught you a lot about how networking, promotion and media work. There are people who have been interested in hiring me in the field of PR because I've been through the trenches in trying to promote a blog that no one reads

Any other questions? Post in the comment section or email me at mrpelican56@yahoo.com

Some Capsule Reviews of 2011

2011-12-28T07:08:00.001-08:00

This holiday season, consider making a $1 donation to this blog.

Some links: What if the SAG Awards Didn't Exist?
An Open Letter to Dwight Howard and Chris Paul on Gunaxin

Some movie reviews of 2011 Films (rapid fire edition)
Cedar Rapids-Ed Helms plays a small town insurance salesman who goes on his first plane trip to the big city to attend a convention. This movie is an excellent example of "Funny cause it's true" comedy. Trade and professional conventions are treated by the people who put them on and many of the attendees as highly exciting. From an outsider's perspective, it's a bunch of people overly excited to be spending a weekend at a hotel listening to lectures. Thus, you have a perfect premise for a movie and with the point of view being told from the perspective of the greenest convention goer ever to exist, there's not a mean bone in the film's body. John C. Reilly does his best to channel Jack Black. If I have one complaint about the film, is it ends on too much of a high. Even the best convention experiences aren't THAT life-changing.

We Built a Zoo-Covered here in my retrospective of Cameron Crowe. A must read if there ever was one.

Horrible Bosses-That was one enticing trailer that "Horrible Bosses" offered. Unfortunately, many of the best jokes were in the trailer. Oh yeah, and the trailer was misleading. It's not a film about three people trying to murder their bosses. That's really just the first act of the story. Maybe it's because the film switches directions in so many spots, that the film feels kind of rushed.

Overall, the film is still pretty decent. Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, and Jason Bateman have some pretty good chemistry and Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell have a lot of fun hamming it up as villains. Also, Julie Bowen of "Modern Family" pops up into the mix and gets kind of naughty.

Hangover II-Probably THE most shameless sequel to come along as of lately. It was enjoyable only on account of the fact that I was already in the theater (on account of other people) and did my darndest to forget I ever saw the first film. So if you try really hard, you can enjoy this film, but I do strongly believe that if a film has nothing original to say, then there's no reason for it to be made.

Cowboys and Aliens-This wasn't meant to have a shelf life beyond the two hours you spent watching it last summer, but this movie has proven surprisingly memorable for me. Several elements in the plot (i.e. why aliens would want gold, why Olivia Wilde's character wouldn't reveal her form, etc.) didn't make too much sense but it wasn't a movie that took itself seriously and I really appreciated it on the level of genre filmmaking (or more specifically, double genre filmmaking). The visuals, special effects and certain members of the cast (Adam Beach and Sam Rockwell made great supporting players) worked well. There was a sort of clash between Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford (One reviewer called the pairing a "peanut butter and peanut butter sandwich" and I ) both being the grumpiest guys you've ever seen, but I was won over by both of them even if I felt like it was a little too much friction.

Hugo-The main negative is that pretty much everyone says the movie starts off pretty slowly. It's over two hours and you could easily come in 45 minutes in and not miss much. This is somewhat of a problem because it's a mystery and the film works best on first viewing as the clues come together.

Other than that, it's an excellent film. The colorful cast of characters and excellent actors behind them are the film's biggest strength.

Descendants-This film is really two stories that don't connect as well as they should. It's not really a negative, though, because both stories work very well. One story is about a man coping with his wife's death and the other is about the responsibilities of the descendants of a land-owning clan to preserve the land. It's material that falls really well in Alexander Payne's ball park (co-written by Dean Pelton on Community of all people).

Both of the two central performances are overrated in terms of the Oscar buzz they're receiving. As I've written extensively, I'm finding the hoopla surrounding George Clooney to be overpowering of him whenever he is on screen. His performance is good but doesn't show many new notes in comparison to Up in the Air or Michael Clayton. Shalene Woodley is good but not great.

Directorial Progress Report

2011-12-25T09:30:00.002-08:00

My annual progress report for 2011. New additions over the last two years added at end:

18 Alfred Hitchkock-Family Plot, Torn Curtain, Rebecca, 39 Steps, North by Northwest, Sabetour, The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, Topaz, The Birds, Psycho, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions), Rear Window

14 Stephen Spielberg-Color Purple, Raiders of the Last Ark, Jurassic Park, Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, Schindler's List, Hook, ET, Jaws, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
PLUS: Saving Private Ryan
14 Woody Allen-Hollywood Ending, Curse of the Jaded Scorpion, Manhattan, Annie Hall, Small Time Crooks, Sweet and Lowdown, Mighty Aphrodite, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Melinda and Melinda, Ants, Sleeper, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Bullets Over Broadway

10 Billy Wilder-Spirit of St. Louis, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Double Indemnity, Sabrina, Ace in the Hole, Major and the Minor
PLUS: 1,2,3; The Front Page

9 Joel and Ethan Coen-Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Ladykillers, Man Who Knew Too Much, Intolerable Cruelty, Big Lebowski, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading
PLUS: True Grit

8 Martin Scorsesee-Color of Money, Age of Innocence, Goodfellas, Aviator, The Departed, Gangs of New York
PLUS: Hugo
8 Mike Nicholls-Primary Colors, The Birdcage, The Graduate, Working Girl, Charlie Wilson’s War, What Planet Are You From?, Postcards from the Edge, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff

7 Ivan Reitman- Ghostbusters, 6 Days 7 Days, Old School, Space Jam, Fathers Day, Beethoven, Beethoven’s 2nd
7 Rob Altman-Mash, McCabe & Mrs Miller, California Split, Buffalo Bill and the Indian, The Player, Dr. T and the Women, Prairie Home Companion
7 Rob Zemeckis-Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future I-III, Contact, Romancing the Stone
7 Steve Sodebergh-Erin Brockovitch, Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12, Full Frontal, Good German, Ocean’s 13, Informant
7 Clint Eastwood-Mystic River, Unforgiven, Bronco Billy, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Invictus, Gran Torino
PLUS: White Heart, Lonely Hunter
7 Howard Hawks-Sgt. York, Bringing Up Baby, Big Sleep, Ball of Fire, Rio Bravo, His Girl Friday
PLUS: Gentlemen Perfer Blondes

6 Mel Brooks-Spaceballs, High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part I
6 Vincente Minelli-Meet me in St Louis, American in Paris, The Pirate, Brigadoon, The Band Wagon, Kismet
6 Frank Oz-Bowfinger, In and Out, Stepford Wives, The Score, What About Bob, Housesitter
5 Terry Gilliam-Time Bandits, Brazil, Fisher King, Monty Python, Brothers Grimm, Baron Muchenhausen
6 Barry Levinson-Tin Men, Rain Man, Sleepers, Good Morning Vietnam, Man of the Year, Wag the Dog
6 Peter Segal-Naked Gun 33 1/3, Tommy Boy, My Fellow Americans, 50 First Dates, Get Smart
6 Jay Roach-Austin Powers I-III, Meet the Parents, Mystery Alaska, Dinner for Schmucks

5 George Lucas-Star Wars I-IV, American Graffiti
5 Gore Verbinski-Pirates of the Carribean 1, 2, & 3, Weatherman, The Mexican
5 Stanley Donen-Take Me Out to the Ballgame (most sources insist that he really was the director, not Bugsy Berkley), On the Town, Singing in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Charade
5 John Huston-Treasure of Sierra Madre, Beat the Devil, African Queen, Man Who Would be King, Key Largo
5 Tom Shadyac-Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty, Patch Adams, Evan Allmighty, Ace Ventura
5 Sydney Pollack-Sabrina, Out of Africa, Tootsie, The Interpreter, Slender Thread
5 Joel Schumaker-Time to Kill, 8 MM, Batman and Robin, Batman Forever, The Client
5 Orson Welles-Citizen Kane, Lady of Shanghai, Othello, Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil
5 Ron Howard-Apollo 13, Beautiful Mind, Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon, Angels and Demons
5 Bryan Singer-Usual Suspects, X-Men, X2, Superman Returns, Valkyrie
5 Terrence Young-Wait Until Dark, 4 Bonds
5 John Glenn-5 Bonds
5 Brett Ratner-After the Sunset, Rush Hour 2, Family Man, X-Men 3, Red Dragon
5 Johnothan Demme-Silence of the Lambs, Melvin and Howard, Manchurian Candidate, Married to the Mob, Rachel Getting Married
5 Tim Burton-Batman, Batman Returns, Ed Wood, Charlie and the Chocolate Factor, Alice in Wonderland
5 Roland Emmerich-ID4, Stargate, Patriot, Day After Tomorrow, 2012
5 Robert Rodriguez-El Mariachi Trilogy, Spy Kids and Lava Girl, Sin City
5 Peter Weir-Witness, Dead Poet’s Society, The Truman Show, Master and Commander
PLUS: Year of Living Dangerously
5 Rob Reiner-Stand and Deliver, Princess Bride, Rumor Has It, American President
PLUS: Ghosts of Mississippi
5 Tony Scott- Enemy of the State, Déjà Vu, Crimson Tide, Top Gun
PLUS: Taking of Pelham 1,2,3
5 Curtis Hanson- LA Confidential, Wonderboys, In Her Shoes, Lucky You
PLUS: 8 Mile
5 Cameron Crowe-Almost Famous, Jerry MaGuire, Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown,
PLUS: We Built a Zoo
5 Chris Columbis-Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Stepmom
PLUS: I Love You Beth Cooper
5 Sidney Lumet: Network, 12 Angry Men, Murder on the Orient Express, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
PLUS: Fail Safe

4 Harold Lloyd-Safety Last, Feet First, The Freshman, Kid Brother
4 Guy Hamilton-4 Bond movies
4 Peter and Bobby Farrelly
4 Kevin Smith-Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Dogma
4 D. Herek-Mr. Holland’s Opus, Three Musketeers, Mighty Ducks, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures
4 John Lynn-Whole Nine Yards, Trial and Error, Sgt Bilko, Trial and Error
4 Barry Sonnenfeld-Men in Black I, II, Wild Wild West, Big Trouble
4 Wes Anderson-Rushmore, Royal Tannenbaums, The Life Aquatic, Darjeerling Limited
4 Penny Marshall-Awakenings, Rennisance Man, Big, League of their Own
4 Ernst Lubitsch-Shop Around the Corner, Ninotchka, Merry Widow, Trouble in Paradise
4 Lasse Holstrom-What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Hoax, Cider House rules, Shipping News
4 James Mangold-3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line, Kate and Leopold, Night and Day
4 Dennis Dungan
4 Sam Weisman
4 Christopher Guest-For Your Consideration, Mighty Wind, Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman
4 John Lasseter-Lady and the Tramp, Toy Story 1, Cars, Toy Story 2,
4 Jon Favreau-Elf, Iron Man
PLUS: Iron Man 2, Cowboys and Aliens
4 Adam McKay: Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers
PLUS: The Other Guys
4 David Lean-Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Passage to India
PLUS A Passage to India
4 John Ford-How Green was my Valley, Stagecoach, The Searchers
PLUS The Hurricane
4 Michael Moore-Roger and Me, F 411, Sicko
PLUS Capitalism: A Love Story

Once Upon a Time....

2011-12-25T09:30:00.001-08:00

“Once Upon a Time” is an interesting show to watch in a vacuum (what I call watching a TV show or a movie without having read any reviews, reading commentary, or internet message boards). So many questions are popping up that I can’t turn to the convenience of the internet for: Does Regina know that she’s an evil queen? So the bail bondswoman’s stated reason for being in town is to stalk the kid she gave up for adoption ten years ago against her mother’s wishes? Is that the crazy guy from Prison Break as the town sheriff?

ON TO THE REVIEW:

Once Upon a Time is a show about the residents of modern-day Storybrooke, Maine, who previously inhabited the world of familiar fairy tales before being banished by the evil queen from the Snow White story.

In the modern-day world, that evil queen goes by the name of Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla) and she is the town's mayor. The narrative is complex and highly confusing which is due to the fact that the plot is dictated almost entirely by Regina's 10-year old adopted son, Henry. The other characters all have amnesia and somehow he is the only one to have figured this all out.

Thus, the story is told from two conflicting perspectives and that's a very interesting scenario that the show delivers on. From the point of view of everyone else, Henry is a troubled child with a big imagination and from the POV of Henry, these are lost fairy tale characters who haven't figured out their true identity.

Because Once Upon a Time jumps back and forth between Storybrooke and the actual fairy tale world (I'd estimate the screentime is split 70-30 between the two universes with Maine getting the 70%), the show is on the side of Henry and we know it's only a matter of time before the rest of the town starts seeing things from his point of view. This is the central conflict and that's reinforced by Henry's belief that the characters will all be happy when they discover their true nature. Thus, it's a show of characters awakening to their true nature and works on that level.

This also makes Henry the guy who's always right. He's also a giant exposition machine. The person who he's doing most of his expositioning to is Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison). Swan is a cynical 30-something bounty hunter who discovers in the pilot episode that she is Henry's birth mother.

Emma's a key figure in the story, but the reasons that she impulsively uproots from Boston to Storybrooke after the pilot episode aren't particularly well hashed out. There's not really a strong case for why she's there. Emma's concerned that Regina doesn't have her son's best interests at heart but, then again Regina doesn't want her to take an active role in the kid's life ten years later and Emma has no rights to do otherwise. It's a good thing the show's fantasy, because if we looked at Emma's rationale from a realistic ethical or legal standpoint, we might not really be on her side at all.

Regina is eventually revealed to be somewhat malignant, but the show starts off with some genuine thematic confusion as we're left wondering why we should be behind a woman who voluntarily gave up her kid in a closed adoption process, and is now upending everyone's life on a hunch that the boy's adopted mother isn't all she seems. This is made iffier by the fact that Emma reconnecting with her son is one of the key conflicts in the story. If you can discount the clunky set-up (the key to enjoying much of this show), it's not such a bad story either).

Besides, the pilot at least establishes Emma's motivation, although somewhat weakly. The "why" of what Emma's doing in Storybrooke, is more of a "Why not?". One of Emma's key characters traits is that she's being rootless and having close to no support system (she's adopted herself).

The show's biggest strength is that it works both as an overarcing storyline, and as a series of entertaining one-off episodes. The fairytale land sequences are having diminishing returns with me for each episode, but it frames the story well.

Chris Farley hosts Saturday Night Live: Season 23 Episode 4

2011-12-07T10:48:00.001-08:00

I recently watched the episode of Saturday Night Live that Chris Farley hosted in October 1997. Inviting Farley to host at the time was a somewhat controversial decision because Farley was on a downward spiral at this point that would eventually lead to his untimely death.

As for my experiences with Chris Farley, I originally never had a special attraction to him when I used to watch old episodes. Perhaps, I was just used to thinking of the heavy-set guy as a stock character and not the main star. My fascination grew, however, as I began reading about how amazing of a performer he was from other sources.

In Jay Mohr's book "Gasping for Airtime", the former SNL recurring player of two years clearly thought he was the most talented member of the cast. He devotes a whole chapter to Chris Farley. The introduction:
"Chris Farley was the most beautiful person I have ever met. You wanted him around all the time. You craved his presence...."

More here:

Coupled with other pieces of high praise I heard about the late comic star, I gradually began to shift my focus on Farley whenever I saw an old SNL rerun.

The most obvious thing one can say about Chris Farley is that he followed in the transition of fat comedians who were unaware of their girth. The Chippendales sketch is an example of Farley acting so gleefully free in spite of his girth. In the book co-written by his brother Tom, Chris Rock says that the Chippendale's Sketch might have been pigeonholed Farley too much in the "fat guy falls down" type of sketch.

The way I see it, there were two basic components that defined Farely's comedic skill set and he simultaneously played both masterfully. He had a consistent intensity. In whatever sketch he was in, he went full-force with the character. On the flip side of that coin, he had a charming Midwestern affability buried underneath. He was essentially a sweet and naive kid and that would come across even as he would erupt into a hysterical fit.

I think one of the reasons Farley drew so much curiosity and the book written about him was such a fascinating read, was that he was an elusive figure. Chris Farley might have had a consistent screen persona but you never felt like you really knew him. He would not be a likely candidate for the Weekend Update chair. In fact, it dawned on me as the opening credits were rolling that Chris's monologue would be the first time I've ever seen him addressing the camera and the audience as himself.

In a highly anticlimactic turn of events, Chris's monologue was averted in place of a sketch where he (as a character, not himself) gets distracted by Ana Gasteyer (whom he seduces), Tim Meadows attempts to take over hosting duties, and Lorne Michaels decides to get Chris Rock to come in last minute. At the end of the sketch, Chris Farley shows up and goofily does the requisite "We've get a great show/ ____ is here/Stick around" lines. It was pretty much the least amount of involvement a host could have for his own monologue.

For a show that's supposed to center around him, Farley hides himself pretty well too. The second sketch of the night is a parody of a morning talk show where Farley plays Gellman to Will Ferrell's Regis equivalent and Cheri Oteri's Kathy Lee equivalent.

He's inserted into a Mary Katherine Gallagher (Molly Shannon) sketch and doesn't appear at all in a Martha Stewart sketch.

Because popular demand wouldn't have had it any other way at the time, Farley got to do the motivational speaker sketch and the premise was ramped up to new heights with the sight of Matt Foley on a stationary bicycle in the gym. In the same vein, the Bears superfan character is given an update wherein Coach Mike Ditka has relocated to New Orleans and Chris' character refuses to accept it.

All in all, some interesting stuff.

Sing-Off wrap up: Fixing the season length

2011-12-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

As we hit the Christmas special tonight of the Sing-Off and look back on it once more, I'd have to say that the season for me with its 16-group format didn't work as well as I might have expected.

I obviously love watching the show and I can't conclusively say that more of a good thing is bad, but there were drastically diminished returns in the last three or four weeks.

For one, we basically knew what the groups could do after a certain point so there was little element of surprise in the last few episodes. Most of the breakthroughs and surprises (the big dramatic moments which non-scripted and scripted shows alike rely on) came in the first few weeks. It seemed to me like most of the groups came together and had their best performances at the guilty pleasure show. The judges tried to frame Urban Method, Delilah, and Afro-Blue as having narrative arcs of falling and coming back, but I felt like those were exxagerated. I thought Katey Turley of Urban Method sounded just fine in Love the Way You Lie and the Rhianna medley. Was it that humongous of a difference?

To me, it wasn't so much groups were having big comebacks and finally figuring it out. It was more of a matter of the groups being out of their element in certain genres or just rubbing the judges the wrong way.

With the more articulate Sara Bareilles filling in for Nicole Scherzinger, the judges had more credibility on the whole and when they're saying all those intelligent-sounding words, you are really sold on that. Ironically, this is all flying in the face of what look like baffling decisions.

I think the general consensus on the blogosphere is that Afro-Blue's dismissal was a big goof on the part of the judges. I'd even go so far as to say it hurt the credibility of the show. Those conspiracy theories I've heard that the judges being influenced by the producers seem possible with Afro-Blue.

More than that, I think it's more of a matter of the fact that if you have 5 or 6 groups who all have what it takes and it's apples and oranges and the judges are trying to make convincing cases for Afro-Blue or BYU or Delilah being sent home when they all sound great, the judges are not gonna look good no matter what.

My suggestion: Expand the final round to five groups. Keep it as one episode with viewers voting. The dangers of America getting it wrong might be a problem if there were more than one week of audience voting because they might believe they're favorite group is safe. In this case, they're still voting for a winner.

This will cut the season by a couple weeks and eliminate viewer fatigue. It will also allow groups that are capable of delivering by the judges' standards to have an equal chance to compete for America's vote. Most importantly, it will give those poor performers a break. They looked thoroughly exhausted.

Capitol Critters

2011-12-01T07:28:00.001-08:00

Anthony Scibelli on Splitsider.com had a particularly inspired article about the early stages of prime time cartoons. Apparently, the success of the Simpsons sent networks in a rush to develop cartoons for the prime-time landscape in the early 1990's but it took break away tonally from children's shows. As a result, the first batch of prime time children's shows occupied an awkward middle ground between preachy Disneyesqe and the animated shows of today which are indistinguishable from live action TV shows in quality and maturity.

I just watched several episodes of Capitol Critters which first aired in 1992. Five minutes into the show, the protagonist's family is brutally murdered by fumigators which is very jarring. In his article, Scibelli seems equally jarred by this:

"It opens with what may be the most horrific scene I've ever witnessed in a cartoon. The series stars a young mouse named Max, voiced by a young Neil Patrick Harris, who lives on a Nebraska farm with his parents, grandfather and what appears to be about four or five brothers and sisters. After spending a day gathering corn, Max returns home to find an exterminator truck parked out front."

To be fair, Finding Nemo opens with one such tragedy and Bambi has a more tear-jerking scene. Unlike those two films, "Capitol Critters" makes the mistake of treating this opening passage relatively casually. The little guy lost his entire
family yesterday and it's treated as just a typical first act designed to move the plot along and explain Max's move to D.C. For comparison's sake, imagine how jarring it would be if a show with a similar premise, "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", described Will's mom being killed and raped.

One of the show's strengths, to me, was the ensemble. None of the characters (with the partial exception of Jammet) were overly bland.

1. Max's cousin, Berkley, is a hippie mouse who calls everyone fascist. She has the least screen time of the five main characters on the show, yet the writers impressively mold her into a fully formed satire of the kinds of socially-conscious people I see in D.C. all the time (I live less then a third of a mile from the nation's capitol, I should know).
2. Trixie is a landlord and maternal figure of sorts with a Jersey-accent who gets some choice lines. Her vague resemblance to some regional New York/New Jersey/Boston stereotype (she'd fit in with the ladies from the SNL sketch "Good Morning Bronx")that somehow worked for me.
3. Trixie's son, Jammet, is the most broadly drawn character. Scibelli describes him as "streetwise" (because of his idiosyncratic speech patterns? he doesn't exactly sound like he's from the hood). Mostly, he's the bad influence on innocent Max. The group troublemaker, who inexplicably remains friends with the people who's plots he foils (think Shake in "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" or Dr. Smith in "Lost in Space"), is a long-standing sitcom staple that I'm a sucker for.
4. Lastly, there's the particularly inspired invention of Muggles. Voiced by Bobcat Goldwaith (who has a voice suited for comedy like no one else), Muggles is a former lab rat (or is he a mouse? he doesn't look like Jammet and Trixie) who still has the after effects of countless experiments. He goes on an LSD trip in one episode and in another he turns into the Manchurian Candidate. He also possesses an inordinate amount of knowledge like Chuck (from "Chuck") and regularly explodes like a popcorn kernel.

Like a kid's show, the episodes have moral themes and teach a lesson. One episode is about the danger of drugs while another is about cultural acceptance and so on and so forth. This didn't strike me as cleverly conceived satire so much as the remnants of a children's show which the art form hadn't yet transitioned out of.

To make a show about mice and rats in the White House be an effective satire about politics presented a lot of challenges anyway. The mice are primarily interacting with each other and have little to do with the lawmakers. If you wanted to overthink the premise, you might ask why Berkley is invested in the happenings in the White House when the legislators make laws that probably don't affect the lives of mice and if so, only inadvertantly. The show might have been better if there was something along the lines of a separate mouse congress.

When they get the mice interacting with the human world, it creates a few moments of effective satire. In one episode, Max gets stuck in the briefcase of a congressman, and he learns the truth about bribery in Washington. The show can also be kind of cute when it asks us to look at things from a mouse's perspective, although that's
what most Disney cartoons of that genre do.

Check out my examiner page!

And we have a winner (and a foul!) on the sing-off

2011-11-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

The Sing-Off season 3 left me with a feeling of disappointment.

As I previously stated, the advancement of the Dartmouth Aires over other groups never sat well with me. As far as I was concerned, the Dartmouth Aires were the weak link of a very strong final eight. It wasn't a matter of one bad decision along with seven very good decisions. It was a matter of the judges making the wrong choice in virtually every episode (Delilah did fall on their own sword, so I'll give the judges a pass that week) by simply not eliminating the Aires. I am aware that it's just my personal opinion that the Aires weren't that good and it's not some objective truth.

The elimination of Afro-Blue, however, went from my disagreeing with the judges over the quality of the groups, to just feeling cheated. For one, Ben admitted that Afro-Blue was his favorite group. Additionally, Sara Bareilles said she decided to vote with the group that she had a great emotional connection and ignored that the Afro-Blues moved her to tears twice. Lastly, Afro-Blue never sounded bad or technically defficient (and Dartmouth Aires continually got comments toward that effect). Their instructions from the judges to dumb down their sound and simultaneously still keep delivering their signature sound put the group in a hole they couldn't climb out of.

Ben Folds addressed the twitter haters about Afro-Blue's dismissal on his blog here:
http://www.nbc.com/sing-off/on-key-with-ben-folds/

It's with some shame that I admit that I was one of those haters. I tried to articulate this with some self-awareness that I was clearly getting too invested in a TV program, but at the same time I now realize that I was adding a lot of negativity to the blogosphere and twittersphere.

The Dartmouth Aires didn't end up derailing the season for me, because at the end of the day, the best group won. The Pentatonix were a cut above the other groups, but this season was sufficiently more dramatic in that they didn't emerge as a clear winner until a few weeks in.

Congrats to the Pentatonix, as well as the other groups with strong finishes. I even tip my hat to the Aires for persevering and improving

The failure of Community

2011-11-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

College is generally portrayed in popular culture as an experimental period following high school that serve as the best four years of your life. Portrayals of the college experience on TV tend to marginalize all the outliers to that experience such as:
-The commuters who simultaneously have a foot in the working world
-The people already in the working world who begrudgingly return to school because they have no other option
-Older students who don't get into the social aspects of college because they have little in common with the primary age bracket that comprises most of the campus
-The people who who view their current college as their safety school rather than shangri-la and subsequently view it as either a temporary stop or a necessary evil

"Community" is about marginalized types deciding to make the best of their second-rate lot by banding together to enjoy their college experience the way that they're entitled to enjoy it. It's an underdog story and the triumphant moments at the end of each episode revolve around the group uniting together. When Troy comes to Britta's rescue when she gets paralyzed up on stage at the dancing competition, or Britta and Jeff team up together to fend off some bullies, the group succeeds at being "the cool kids" on campus (or whatever it is their goal is in that episode) because their bonds to each other have been tested and strengthened.

From that point of view, the show initially had a good concept and framework that intrigued me and kept me going through the first season. While the show wasn't particularly funny and had some awkward kinks, it did have some genuinely gooey moments in the last couple minutes of the episode that would redeem the half-hour experience for me. At least that was the case in the first season.

Most of the people I know who love discussing TV, blog about TV, or write about it professionally, they have praised the show as one of the smartest and most enjoyable programs on television and that praise seems to have increased as the show goes on.

For me, it's been the opposite experience.

To me, the show's main crime is that it is so caught up at making the academic community salivate with its deft handling of filmic conventions that it forgets to be entertaining. In terms of the amount of conflict going on, the plots can be incredibly insubstantial. To their credit, Community is experimental so they take risks and sometimes miss. That's something I admire over a show like "Modern Family" (a best-case scenario) or "Two and a Half Men" but I think the show rarely ever has baseline episodes which follow the more familiar beats of a sitcom.

I also think for a comedy, the show's humor factor is very low. It's not a show that goes for one-liners often and relies more on character-based humor and I think your mileage may vary depending on how you find the characters, which to me is kind of a weak point.

For one, the characters on the show don't really get along as well as advertised. It seems everyone hates Pierce and the group routinely gets mad at Jeff. The show devotes much of its screentime to having characters arguing with each other, as if the writing room can't think of any way to build up to climaxes. I will concede that the show's magic is often how it comes to the other side on the denouement.

The ensemble as a whole feels vastly overrated to me. Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) seems rather stereotypical and Annie (Allison Brie) can feel increasingly like a caricature. To her credit, Allison Brie infuses Annie with comic characteristics and even has a penchant for physical comedy but her heightened reactions don't really match the tone of the show. Joel McHale comes off somewhat awkwardly as the rebellious cool kid on campus, but I think that's the writing which asks us to believe that someone in his 30's could ever be the coolest kid on campus. Pierce suffers a little bit from being whatever the show needs him to be week-to-week. His varying levels of kindness are inconsistent.

How I've come to hate the Dartmouth Aires and other Sing-Off Thoughts

2011-11-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

My apologies for not writing about the Sing-Off as I did last year in such winning fashion (also here: http://bit.ly/if3nxR. This season, I've been finding myself experiencing a feeling I normally don't have towards TV characters and that is borderline hatred.

Normally, I don't hate a TV character because it's pointless to hate a fictional character. In this case, my anger is directed towards real life people and that's also ironic, because they're a group of 16 guys who I've never met and I probably wouldn't mind so much if I did ever meet them.

When I initially saw this group of people on TV, I didn't have a problem with them at all. I didn't particularly like their song choice, but I didn't think they deserved to be axed. In the first week, they were in the same bracket as a group of Liberian refugees who were there for the sob story factor and sounded like the choir in the opening few measures of the Lion King's Circle of Life (I don't mean that as a compliment).

But the thing is that the caliber of talent on the show this season is amazing. If need be, I could make a good case for about seven of these groups to win the entire show because they are legitimately the best at what they do without those cases being mutually exclusive. In no particular order:
1. BYU Vocal Point (finished 5th)-Vocal Point deserves to win because they were arguably the best group at clearing the hurdles created by the wide range of genres. They also have the sharpest, most finely tuned arrangements out of any group and no one can touch them in terms of choreography. The reasoning from Shaun Stockman for their dismissal this past week was that they didn't have a star personality. I call BS on that. Aside from the edgy rock-tailored voices of McKay Crockett and Ross Welch, I thought Jake Hunsaker had the best voice on the show.

And keep in mind, I'm defending them to the death without being sure if I even like them as people**. It's not the Mormon thing, but they seem either whipped by their girlfriends and wives or strangely overeager to ensure us of their heterosexuality. In the worst incident of this, their introductory video* has one guy stating out of nowhere (I am not making this up) "Yeah, we really like girls, kissing girls also." Then he demonstrates his girl-kissing prowess by leaning down to a girl on the quad and kissing her (I hope that was his girlfriend and it's not a standing mandate at BYU that all girls must be on the ready in case Ben wants to kiss them).

2. North Shore (finished tied for 9th): Aside from being true masters at what they do from the standpoint of time spent on their craft, they are vitally important because they represent what is a lost art and despite the opinion of the judges who felt they looked dated on the "Power of Love," they succesfully take their old-school sensibility on pop songs. Not to mention, "Talk of the Town" coasted to the finals last year without putting an ounce of effort into modifying their style to accommodate different genres. "North Shore" was full of personality, humility, and appeared to be much more hard-working.

3. Delilah (finished 6th): A case can be made that Delilah is the best all-female a capella group ever assembled. Aside from the fact that this legitimate blogger thinks so, it makes sense considering you had judges scour the country for the best a capella groups in the country and this all-star super group is comprised of the best females from those groups. So if that's not good enough, than the judges might as well ban women from singing together and institute Sharia law. I mean, honestly, what more did these girls have to do? Yes, a couple of their performances had some problems, but if I'm arguing whether they had the potential to win the entire show and not shame the Sing-Off brand, then yes. You can also make a case for them to win based on the sheer number of home-run tear-inducing performances.

4. Afro-Blue (still in the final 4): In terms of musicianship, they are a step above the rest. Their music is indisputably solid, enjoyable and produced those "musical orgasms" (Nicole's term not mine) that Committed evoked out of Shawn last year. They have a deep bench, amazing vocalists (Christine Dashielle and Danielle Withers), and a priceless sound.

5. Urban Method (still in the final 4): Despite being pigeonholed as "the group with the rapper," Urban Method is strong enough as a group, that the judges deservedly have been hailing them all competition. They have a deep bench of great soloists, an excellent amount of cohesiveness for a group that just got together, and a very well-produced sound. They also are edgy and might be able to sell more records among non-a-capella fans better than anyone else.

6. Pentatonix (still in the final 4): They will likely win it all, so I shouldn't need too big of an argument here. They are highly innovative, fresh, and they produce an incredible amount of sound for just five people.

7. Sonos (finished tied for 11th with Kinfolk 9): Urban Method blogged that they listen to their record all the time and Scott Hoying of front-runner Pentatonix says "they're who we want to be." So if the point of this competition is making a record and building a following, what does it say about your group that one of the groups is already buying your CD and the winning group wants to emulate you? Hell, I even bought music from the Sonos on itunes*** and those are among my most played songs. The Sonos are otherworldly and are right up there with Pentatonix and Afro-Blue in terms of creativity when it comes to approaching songs. They only had five people but so do the Pentatonix and I'm sure they're talented enough to have worked out those harmony quirks if given the chance. The judges acted as if succeeding as a five-person a capella group was impossible.

The Dartmouth Aires, on the other hand, are entirely unremarkable to me (although I will concede their Queen performance was phenomenal). I've come to accept, however, that I'm in a small minority. My experience scouring the blogosphere and conversing with others on message boards indicates that people seem to very much like this group for legitimate reasons.

Now, I acknowledge that I have a more limited ability to analyze choral music and express that analysis than 90% of the people I discuss the show with, I could still argue that the Dartmouth Aires don't have what it takes to win it. To me, they're indistinguishable from the hundreds of 15-memberish all-male collegiate a capella groups from the country that rarely have any geographical reach beyond their campus and the schools where they tour. If I went to Boston University or Harvard or Brown, why would I consider buying a Dartmouth CD when I could get a similar sounding a capella CD from a group on my campus?

In order to make the case that they're champions, you'd have to make a convincing case that they're so much better than that humongous mass of a capella groups, that they could significantly sell records. Anyone have any idea how much Aires sell right now?

In the meantime, the Dartmouth Aires are eliminating groups who legitimately could win the competition. On top of that, the Dartmouth Aires are also eliminating groups who I happen to like better.

So while I didn't originally have anything personal against the Aires, it's gotten to become so. Case in point: One of the Aires has a very interesting wavy hair style (I believe his name is Clark). I used to think "hmmm, that's an interesting hair style." Now whenever I see Clark's hair, I think "that's a very stupid hairstyle." His hair style hasn't changed at all, but that's the inexplicable effect the Aires are having on me.

It's partially because I watch the show week after week and seeing this injustice committed over and over builds up that resentment. It's also partially because I feel like everyone I talk to about the show is ignoring the mediocrity of the Aires when they have debates over whether Delilah or Afro-Blue or Urban Method should have been eliminated in a certain week****. For me, everyone else in the top 7 or 8 are so amazing that if the Aires were out of the competition, it would be nothing but a win-win-win-win-win-win situation.

More importantly, it's because the show is doing a good job of building emotional attachment between me and the different groups. For example, the similarly-structured Yellow Jackets of the University of Rochester might also have some of the same weaknesses as the Aires*****. However, they had an eagerness and likability that won me over. So it would only be natural that if every group had an emotional connection to me that grew week after week, then eventually I'd feel strongly in the opposite direction towards the one group that I originally was apathetic to.

So, my apologies to the Dartmouth Aires and Clark's wavy haircut (which I still want to believe is a good haircut) for the inexplicable hatred I've come to feel. I'm not a hater of any of you and think you're perfectly pleasant people. It's just that reality TV has made me that way.

*As I wrote about the Whiffenpoofs a year ago, sometimes those intro videos can rub me the wrong way. I had a similar problem with the Del Tones of the University of Delaware. They were self-admittedly the fourth best a capella group at the University of Delaware and felt that they should be among the top 16 groups in the nation? Also, members suffering from home sickness when they first get to college and being concerned about making friends (yeah, that's pretty much everybody in the first two weeks of college) is really not much of an emotional hook

If you enjoyed this write-up, check out my internet column.

**But in all seriousness, I've grown to like BYU vocal point over the weeks. Too bad, you had to go

***Want to enable me to buy more itunes music or itunes epsiodes so I can continue to blog about the groups of the Sing-Off so entertainingly? Be sure to donate on the top right of the page. If you are a member of a group on the Sing-Off and write your name in the column, I will immediately start blogging about your group in a very positive fashion

****Note to judges and Sing-Off producers: Other than going back in time and eliminating the Aires during the top40/1960's week, you could improve the Sing-Off substantially by cutting the series short a couple weeks and having the audience vote on a final five.

*****Although unlike Ben, I could close my eyes and tell Aaron Sperber, Jamal Moore, and Danny Rubenstein apart. One of their strengths is having diverse and unique soloists

South Park's Butter episodes

2011-11-09T10:13:00.001-08:00

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It wasn't until several years after the show had become a cult hit and I heard my fair share of my teenage peers doing Cartman imitations that I first watched an episode of "South Park."

As for whether I am a fan, sort of. Sometimes the show's gross-out humor and juvenille tendencies can be a little too high for my tolerance, but their current events parodies can sometimes be impressively sharp.

I did recently started to notice that every single episode starring Butters is a home run to me. I have no idea what the general consensus is over which episodes are great and which aren't great, but to me Butters episodes seem to be drawn from an almost entirely different and better show. Butters episodes are great comedies of errors. The kid is too sweet and innocent to understand the world around him and his parents look absolutely awful in retrospect. I even think it's a good satire on alpha-level parents in general and it fits into the whole theme of the show really well. That theme is that fourth graders are the sanest people in society and as you grow into adulthood, you don't get smarter but rather just screw everything up through overcomplication.

A show that was centered around Butters would wear thin pretty quickly, but as it is, South Park knows how to use the character to good effect.

Allen Gregory and dislikable characters

2011-11-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

Allen Gregory-I tend to give a fairly generous bye to anything appearing on TV that either looks remotely entertaining even if it might have some rough spots. Life is too short not to enjoy a good TV show if you see one. In some cases, even if a show isn't entertaining me in the moment, I might be intrigued because it has a solid enough framework. In this case, you can envision a network of characters or scenarios so that if the writing got sharper it wouldn't be very hard for the show to hit its stride. Off the top of my head, "Parks and Recreation" or "American Dad" are great examples of this.

"Allen Gregory" is a very rare case of the opposite. I was looking forward to this show after seeing a 3-minute clip of a 7-year old boy genius who despite having lobbied for fuel cell technology on Capitol Hill, and having a circle of friends that includes Sandy Bullock, he quickly becomes an ordinary outcast when he transfers to a new school. At this point, the show has completely fallen apart and it's shown that despite occasional moments of funniness, we are ultimately left with unlikable characters that we don't want to spend time with.

Someone asked an intriguing question on a message board about why Allen Gregory being a dislikable character detracts from the show if that's not the case with many characters in movies and tv shows who are enjoyable to watch even if they're not likable people.

For one, I personally prefer likable characters and can even find redeeming qualities in traditionally dislikable characters (which suddenly strikes me as good fodder for a seperate post). More importantly, however, likable characters have to be interesting in some way or another.

Allen Gregory had promise to be interesting because of its tension. It would be like if Stewie on "Family Guy" were ever confronted with the reality that maybe he wasn't one of the world's smartest and most charismatic people and forced to deal with that reality alongside other kids who could see right through him everyday. "Gregory" doesn't capitalize on that because the main character rarely acknowledges reality. His teacher, Gina (Leslie Mann, a faaaar more ideal love interest than the 60-year old Principal Gottlieb who induces more of a gross-out effect than anything else), doesn't seem to be enabling his delusions but the interaction between the two has been very limited.

Instead, what we have is Allen being given a swirlie, passing it off as something that he voluntarily chose to do and being enabled in his behavior by his dad and a school director who appreciates the money from the Gregory-DeLongpree name too much. Conflicts aren't dealt with in any interesting or meaty way.

Which brings us to another major problem: Not only is Allen Gregory delusional and emotionally abusive to those around him, but so is his biological dad (voiced by French Stuart). The father character is so discaple that, as his backstory (yet to be fully explained) he coerced a straight man with a wife and kids to be his husband (sex included).

The end result of this is that the scenes with the family of four have a sort of wierd dynamic where two people are the family scapegoat and the dialogue just doesn't flow as well. It's not convincing that two people would be able to have so much power that they can intimidate the other two into into just being quiet scapegoats.

It works much better if you have three or more people and one guy who's the punching back. This is what most shows do: see Meg on "Family Guy", Jerry on "Parks and Recreation", Kimmy Gibbler on "Full House", Roy Biggins on "Wings", etc.

So essentially, what we have is a few good jokes in the middle of a train wreck.

Fall Preview III: Up All Night, Prime Suspect, Terranova and the topic of originality

2011-10-21T11:39:00.001-07:00

Up All Night-I am about as interested in this TV show as I am listening to some couple at a family reunion showing me baby photos and talking all about the cute little boy. Yes, I understand this show inverts that notion and explores how parenthood can be surprisingly difficult but that's not exactly news either.

Personally, I would much rather see Will Arnett taking creative risks with Mitch Hurwitz ("Running Wilde" is just on hiatus #Holdingout), even if the results aren't entirely satisfying. Arnett just feels creatively neutered here in generic sitcomland.

If the show is going to be this generic, my sensibilities might be less offended if a laugh track were put in. As it stands, the single camera format communicates to me that the show's creators think that what they're doing is edgy.

The show breaks from the A-premise occasionally with a B-premise that centers around new mom Christina Applegate as a production assistant at an Oprahesque talk show. Oprah is predictably played by Maya Rudolph (although it's nice to see her on TV again). The show would be better served by devoting more time to this world, except for the fact that you could then criticize "Up All Night" for being a lesser clone of "30 Rock" or the film "Knocked Up."

I hear other critics being quick to praise this, but the show doesn't show much promise to me.

Prime Suspect-Just like comedy, TV dramas like to play it safe. They stick to the same kind of professions for their characters (doctors, lawyers, and cops, oh my!) and emulate the style of other successful shows in that format. These shows are commonly referred to as "procedurals."

Procedurals create a marketing paradox of sorts: You don't want to advertise yourself as being entirely different from the other cop/lawyer/doctor shows but you don't want to make it look like the writer simply cut and pasted a script of Grey's Anatomy and just changed the names around.

What they usually do to navigate that different/same dichotomy is to present themselves as the same concept with edgier characters. The start of this trend might have been "The Closer" which presented itself as (imagine Don LaFontaine saying it) "A cop show..featuring a detective who's pretty, female, and tough and if that weren't enough, she has a southern accent."

Look at Prime Suspect's promotional materials on the NBC website:
"The series stars Maria Bello ("A History of Violence") as tough-as-nails NYPD homicide Detective Jane Timoney, an outsider who has just transferred to a new squad where her new colleagues already dislike her. Jane is confident and focused - and also rude, abrupt and occasionally reckless. She has her vices, and rumors of a questionable past follow her everywhere - but at the end of the day, she's an instinctively brilliant cop who can't be distracted from the only important thing: the prime suspect."

Mario Bello's Jane Timoney is far from the first or last character to copy the same sets of attributes of another successful character. USA Network has built a factory of shows modeled on Monk: Exiled [Profession: spy, doctor, cop, lawyer, investigator, white collar worker] who has [obsessive compulsive disorder/too much of a conscience/a crazy dad who scarred him/an unknown enemy in the CIA who burned him] which prevents him from entering his profession in the mainstream, so he must resort to doing his job on a freelance basis outside of the establishment while discovering [the identity of his wife's killer/how to build a better relationship with his dad/how to connect to his brother and find love again/the identity of the man who burnt him] so he can be complete again.

Ultimately, "Prime Suspect" exists so that you can pass an hour in front of the TV without expending too much brain power. It's like eating a protein bar in lieu of a homecooked meal (for this analogy to work, I'm suggesting the goal here is eating a hearty and tasty meal and not a nutritional goal. The protein bar could very well be more healthy for you than the meal).

Terra Nova, on the other hand, has an ambitious concept. That's already a step up from a procedural. The show initially takes place in the year 2149 where the planet has been sufficiently ravaged by environmental destruction due to the pressures of overpopulation. The frontier in this show isn't space but time. A portal is discovered in space-time that allows people to travel back several million years to the Mesozoic Era where our protagonist family goes to begin a new life. The theme of redemption is especially fitting for the father, a former cop who went to prison for overpopulating the planet (A wonder Lionel Richie hasn't already been arrested for this *rimshot*) (the max in this universe is two kids, he had three. Why the mother didn't also go to prison, I'm not sure).

With this blog post centering around the discussion of procedurals and originality, I find two things ironic about the dad figure. First, he's a former cop and in one of the three episodes I've seen him in, he's solving a murder. Second, the character is played by Jason O'Mara who's credits have consisted largely of procedural shows: "Life on Mars" (although that show did have a time-travelling twist), "In Justice," and "The Agency." If my thesis is that procedurals are bad for TV, I'd have to add a corollary that while it's bad for TV viewers, it's financially the opposite for the networks so it is touch to avoid getting a high-concept sci-fi show like this on the air without working in elements of a procedural.

Somewhat. It's family-centered but doesn't have a very strong family. Of the three children, middle child Maddy (Naomi Scott) seems the strongest so far. She's charming on screen and in terms of plot dynamics, she's believably inquisitive which can add tension in plots. In one episode in particular, Maddy was an effective Nancy Drew character. Other than her, the younger child doesn't have much to do except be cute and precious and the older child (Landon Liboiron) is the typical rebellious son who exposes his father's weaknesses.

What is intriguing is the concept, but I hope the show picks up the pace in terms of captivating plots and makes the family element more exciting.

Fall Preview II: Pan Am and Playboy Club

2011-10-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

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Two Shows which Often Get Reviewed Together:

Playboy Club:A lot of the special interest groups you might expect protested this ill-fated show and as strange as it may sound, I put myself in that category to an extent. I find any celebration of Hugh Heffner as a creative genius to be misplaced and tasteless. Heffner was a guy (even though he's not yet dead, I feel he's best discussed in the past tense) who lived out his sexual fetishes because he's rich and because (for a variety of reasons unknown to me because I'm not inclined to research it) he was able to get away with it. I don't think there is anything notable in that. There are a lot of guys who'd live Hugh's decadent lifestyle if they had the money and could get away with it too.

In short, it's hard to be invested in a series based on the debate over whether the Playboy Club was good or bad for society, when you just don't care either way.

So if you strip all that way, this is essentially a workplace drama (albeit a very odd workplace) and a period piece set in the '60s and not too bad of one at that.

With the exception of the male lead, who is so obviously trying to emulate Jon Hamm's stoic blankness, the characters were fairly interesting. Amber Head as the novice bunny Maureen is pretty decent casting and through her, one can see this show as a fairly gripping girl-trying-to-make-it on her own story. Laura Benanti, the playboy bunny with the most seniority, is a formidable foil to Maureen, but she's a little broadly drawn. Why does she care if the playboy bunnies hook up with her clients? If she has such an accute business sense, why does she want to be head bunny and sing up on stage, rather than remain behind the scenes or just start her own nightclub?

The sexual tension and relationship dynamics between the characters are surpriginsly interesting to me, since sex is present everywhere and in everything and I assume the guys have such easy access to it here. How do you define a menaingful sexual interaction or even a meaningful flirtation when it's already a paid commodity and accessible?

The pilot and the next couple episodes wisely focused on something that had nothing to do with the Playboy Club (since that doesn't interest me): Maureen accidentally murdered a mob boss and she has to cover it up.

Pan Am:
No matter how many times I've been on a plane, the experience of flying still remains glamorous for me and that even includes waiting in the terminal and going through security.

With that in mind, it's hard to dislike this show and I suspect a lot of people will latch on to that sense of glamour. Despite using an actual plane, the production values don't strike me as particularly amazing. It might be just me but the score seems too Hallmarkish, the plane's a little too well-lit, Berlin looked like it was shot in Toronto.

If the show is anything like the first and third episode I saw, then the show's format is as follows: The first act is the flight's outbound flight from JFK, the second act is the flight back to JFK, the third through fifth acts (the meat of the plot) consist of flashbacks to what the girls were up to on their layover, and the finale is the plot resolving back on the plane as they're landing at JFK.

Christina Ricci, the biggest name in the ensemble, plays an attractive character in Maggie. She seems to be into the countercultural movement and a sort of emblem of the free-spirited decade. It's because of her spunky and unpredictable nature that I enjoyed the subplot of her trying to meet Kennedy. I think we can all relate with similar experiences trying to meet famous people.

As much as stewardesses (particularly of old) were associated with sex symbols, the Berlin episode wisely makes a couple moves to show these woman as empowered but not dislikable. Maggie flirts and befriends a journalist in order to get into a press conference but makes it clear she won't trade sex for a front row seat. Also, newbie Laura (Margot Robbie) rejects the advances of one of the co-pilots.

The episodes provide an excuse for a hodgepodge of stories about these characters in a time and place which hasn't been particularly disappointing so far. More than a number of other shows, I do question how many plots they can derive out of this show, but if shows like "Chuck" or "Gilligan's Island" can stretch a thin premise, I'll wait and see.

One slightly awkward part of the third episode was how lightly it treated the plot wherin French stewardess Colette (Karine Vanasse) comes to terms with her childhood in World War II. This should have been "Sophie's Choice"-level drama and didn't fall short by a lot, but still. Likewise, when Kate (Kelli Garner) makes a life-threatening mistake in her espionage activities, I can't imagine the show will all of a sudden turn into 24.

All in all, a pretty decent show worth checking out.

Coming Up: Up All Night, New Girl, H8ters, 2 1/2 Men and possibly Murhy's Law

Ricci as Maggie is already a fairly well-developed character

Fall TV Preview Pt. I: Last Man Standing, 2 Broke Girls, Free Agents

2011-10-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Last Man Standing
My main preconception for this show was that its reason for existence was that TV executives feel the universe is severely misaligned if anyone who has ever helmed a successful TV show ever isn't currently on network television (see Bill Cosby, Jeff Tambour, Bob Newhart, Lucille Ball, etc.) in some form or another.

I also felt that while Home Improvement entertained me as a 10-year old, it probably would not hold up to a grown-up audience which I now count myself in.

However, ten minutes of this show changed my opinion pretty quickly. I now think that there's always room for a by-the-numbers family comedy in the prime time schedule (Modern Family is too clever and therefore disqualified form this category) and even if he's not treading in vastly dangerous waters with this familiar role, Tim Allen is giving me what I need.

It's odd that both this show and "Home Improvement" have Tim Allen playing roles of highly empowered middle men. On "Home Improvement", Allen was the host of his own TV show but it was made clear that his boss was the head of the Binford Tool Company. Why a TV show would be owned by a single sponsor is beyond me. That would mean that every Tool Time commercial ad would be for Binford tools like the "George Burns and Grace Allen Show" had commercials and in-show promotions consist entirely of carnation milk. Again, Allen's character appears to be a boss in the sense that he has hiring and firing authority but he answers to the company owner.

The show is an interesting twist on "Home Improvement" in that Allen has three girls instead of boys. The dynamics are a little better this way with less of Allen's character revolving around his infections manliness and also has the benefit of positioning the mom (Nancy Travis) as less of a foil to be subverted (poor Patricia Richardson). The show has an even more interesting twist in that the oldest kid is a single mom. The show earns big points for downplaying this facet to her character rather than branding her as a Hester Prynne incarnate (Ellen Wernecke will be so proud of me for throwing in a literary reference!).

Lastly, the pilot episode seemed relevant to the economic climate of today with Tim Allen's job in danger. Here's hoping the show maintains that sense of instability. That would be an interesting ride.

Two Broke Girls:
My review for this show will be short and simple, because there's not much to the show. It really hearkens back to old-timey sitcoms which I would loosely translate as a TV show with little complexity in its humor.

Most good sitcoms today are loaded with multi-layered complexity with their jokes. Brick jokes, call backs, and running gags lead to punchlines that can take an entire episode to set up. In contrast, every laugh in a sitcom like "Two Broke Girls" never requires more than two lines of set up at the most (I didn't scientifically measure this, feel free to point out any
counterexamples in the comments).

Still, while the jokes might not require me to focus on all 22 minutes but the story in the two episodes I watched were good enough to keep me glued.

I have to confess that because I didn't see the pilot, I'm not entirely sure why the rich heiress roommate is suddenly poor. No matter, the odd couple chemistry is sparking and the premise is a unique enough angle to induce my curiosity.

Besides anything with the wonderful Kat Dennings (from "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist") is worth a glance. The ensemble is pretty strong except for restaurant employee Oleg who's an all-purpose source of ethnic humor.

Free Agents
I'm not familiar with what direction this show took after the pilot (yes, I know it was cancelled), but the first episode had a sort of artificial slickness to it that came off as schwarmy (fair warning: that might not be a real word. Perhaps, it could be?).

I can't think of a plausible reason why characters in Hank Azaria's office are talking about sex so much (including the board meeting) except that the company is a manufacturer of sexual innuendo. To the show's credit, a later scene in which a board meeting is called just to discuss Alex's (Azaria's) date is so ridiculous, you have to think that they're in on the joke (my third lampshading reference in a row!).

The show is also a little guilty of overly stylized dialogue reminiscent of "Studio 60." While the characters aren't nearly as homogeneous as that disaster of a TV show, they're all on the same page in trying to be as uber-hip as they can at all times of the day. Alex's secretary (Natasha Leggero) is too hip to actually act in any helpful capacity to him as it interferes with her lifestyle of being rude and snarky.

Hank Azaria is about as good of a choice for this role as you can get. His age and level of attractiveness are about right for the degree of self-doubt that the character is written with.

It was somewhat jarring that he'd elicit such curiosity about his sex life. As a character actor, Azaria is the definition of someone who's sex life you're supposed to be apathetic to because he's sharing screen time with a handsome leading man like Brad Pitt or Orlando Bloom whom you're supposed to be thinking more of as a sexual being.

To further illustrate this point, let's try this hypothetical: Do you think when Paul Giamatti goes to a cocktail party, people want to hear all about his sexual escapades? Whether he's having sex or not, it's certainly not something that anyone would be interested in knowing, which is exactly why he gets cast in awkward dramedies or John Adams and other meaty character roles.

Kathryn Hahn (not really a well-known actress and liable to be confused with Catherine O'Hara) is just a tinge too witty (not as bad as the supporting players) as Helen, but she's not far from being a great lead. She pulls off some very honest and relatable moments and brings about the pilot's funniest moment when she vents out her frustration at a seemingly judgemental grocery.

Most importantly, the romance here makes sense for the characters. It was also a nice touch that the romance onlt started to feel genuine when Helen's independent woman persona crumbles in the third act.

Family Guy Review: Meg Griffin Fights Back

2011-10-16T18:51:00.001-07:00

I've often heard complaints about the character of Meg Griffin on "Family Guy" and I wanted to touch on how the use of Meg is an example of Family Guy's strength.

For those that don't know (READ: Skip this paragraph if you're already familiar) , Meg is the middle child on the animated family sitcom and she's inexplicably the butt of her otherwise decent family's jokes. Her dad won't openly admit that he even likes his daughter. Aside from being not as attractive as her mother, no reason for this is ever given, and that incongruity is the source of humor.

Speaking of incongruity, isn't it ironic that the girl playing Meg is played in real life by an actress beautiful enough to convince movie going audiences that heart throb Justin Timberlake would be swooning all over her? In fact, considering Hollywood's obsession with the question "Is a beautiful actress capable of truly embodying the soul of a not-so-beautiful woman?", then either a) Mila Kunis is more worthy of an Oscar than Charlize Theron or Nicole Kidman because she's really nailing the whole ugly thing better than "Monster" and "The Hours" or b) perhaps, it's not that hard to play ugly and it says more about our male perception of outward beauty that it's such an issue.

OK, enough philosophizing* and let us get back to my theory on why Meg is written the way she's written:

*Yes, I enjoyed spelling that word wrong for stylistic purposes

Look at the E! Hollywood True Story of any family sitcom and you'll see that behind the scenes, the Seaver kids on Growing Pains or the Winslow kids on Family Matters (two of whom got written out of the show entirely) or the Taylor kids on Home Improvement were all battling for equal story lines (or rather their agents and parents).

When a sitcom is in development and the cast is getting hired, it's really difficult to tell which characters will be breakout stars and catch on with the audience. The writers will probably focus on the parents and service the kids by devoting an episode to each of them with care. For whatever reason, audiences will inevitably respond to different characters differently, and this could become especially jarring for the actors playing the kids. They are far less able to professionally or personally recover from failure than the actors playing their parents (usually established stars like Bill Cosby or Tim Allen). Already secondary characters, the kids could get written out of the show or usually significantly marginalized.

Meg was written poorly in the first couple seasons (to be fair, Chris hasn't really grown as a character past the obligatory Chris episode) and rather than try harder to develop her, the writers went the opposite way and decided to use her as a stand-in for every underwritten child character ever. It's what we in the TV blogging business call lampshading.

For reasons I don't entirely understand, "Family Guy" is a pretty big target of criticism when compared to the works of Matt Groening or the South Park boys. Comparisons aside, I always find McFarlane to be not just genre-savvy but consistently able to utilize it for laughs.

As for the last week's episode, "Seashell Seashore Party," it was highly uneven. Beyond a curiosity to see how well Family Guy's animation team could go all-out Tim Burton, the plot didn't start kicking in until the 3rd act. How weird was that?

Retroactively Looking at Parks & Rec: Five Episodes Rereviewed

2011-10-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Pawnee Zoo:
I can’t think of any show that had characters intersect with each other so awkwardly in the first season and turned those awkward interactions around into such strong dynamics.

In particular, Leslie Knope is so annoyingly enthusiastic and wears her heart on her sleeve so much, that it’s hard to imagine her as anything more than mildly tolerable among the other department members. The show even got criticized for her being too much like Michael Scott in that both Scott and Knope are aloof enough not to get that they are an object of ridicule.

While Season 2 deserves a lot of praise for gradually making Knope a more likeable person and charismatic leader without a complete retcon, the season premiere shows that the transition isn’t complete yet. In particular, Knope’s tirade on the local TV station stretched credibility a little too much for me. Her other awkward moment, performing Will Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” is the most cringe-inducing thing I’ve ever seen Leslie do, but it was played with enough distancing irony that it came off a little better.

The episode also featured the introduction of April’s two boyfriends and reminds me just how ironically hip of a character she used to be. It’s amazing that even as she’s grown, those traits are still present in her character.

Andy’s relationship with Anne was originally a plot device to get April more involved in the pit. Now that we know more about Andy and Anne, it certainly raises the question of how Andy ever convinced Anne to go out with her in the first place.

Summer Catalog:
This episode was interesting to look at from the point of the series’ mythology and how much it expects us to realistically identify with it. In the episode, Leslie gets really excited because the four living Parks and Recreation directors are all going to meet at one place and time. Although Leslie treats these people as indistinguishable from US Seceretaries of State, it’s fairly apparent that at some point, the reality will sink in (at least for us, if not for Leslie) that these men are just ordinary guys without any pretensions of greatness.

This highlights a balancing act that “Parks and Recreation” has to achieve. The show is an exploration of the trials and tribulations of government. To be effective towards that end, the happenings in Pawnee can work as a parallel for the happenings in Washington that we read about in the news. But this only works to an extent. The people in the national news are public figures and using Leslie’s inflated opinion of her department to justify the heightened scandal-like drama in certain episodes only goes so far before it strains the show's credibility.

In this case, the fact that it hit Leslie rather early on that these guys were big jerks helped restore that balance fairly quickly.

The best two things about this episode is how quickly they established the three other parks directors as comic characters and how they didn’t overdo it. Only one of the three Parks directors (the misogynistic one) could be classified as a bona fide wacko. The apathetic director was close to normal while the pot head that pushed his philosophies a little too forcefully into conversations fell somewhere in the middle. I get the general feeling that they didn’t just treat these guest stars as a game of Party Quirks on “Who’s Line is it Anyway.”

94 Meetings:
It’s tough to say which episodes of a series are standout and I can’t imagine there’s ever much consensus in the same vein that great movies or TV series are more agreed upon. I suspect different plots will hit people different ways.

Personally, I thought this episode was fantastic because it was a clever plot that leant itself to a lot of great situations. At various points, the show pushes storylines beyond the realm of believability. April actually fooling a complaintant with the line "Come back at 2:65"? Or worse, angry citizens being content to meet with a nurse not affiliated with the department or the shoeshine boy.

The way that Anne is worked into plots so often is something that I think the show deals with through lampshading (defined as drawing attention a plot hole so you let the audience you know you’re in on the joke).

Both the A-plot and the B-plot is strong here. Leslie’s fight for historic preservationism is right up her alley, and I preferred the confrontation with Leslie and the former Ms. Pawnee to cold tension. Her final scene of crashing the party once more was a step backwards in her evolution. Leslie’s chaining herself to the fence would have also been a little extreme except for the fact that it had no consequences in terms of future hostility between her and the citizens of Pawnee: Her friends (combined with the nature of the fence) saved her from making too much of a fool of herself.

Just like April, I’m reminded of how little Tom Haverford has changed. Even if he’s married or has a girlfriend, he still embodies that same persona of the guy who wants to be the club VIP. He’s redeemed from being a sad character through the fact that it’s obvious he has strong friendships.

Viewing this episode, I’m also reminded of executive producer how Mike Schur's sediment that he loves romances and feels a show has to have them. Parks and Recreation has dealt with romance incredibly well. The Ben-Leslie relationship was thankfully dissolved before it started. I don’t know if I can forgive the show for allowing it to be given so much focus in the first place, but it also made sense retroactively since we discover that Ben is really a shy dork which makes him perfect for Lselie. I also love how quickly the relationship dissolved.
Another good example: Marrying off Andy and April. Typical boyfriend/girlfriend relationships are a dime a dozen but not-ready-for-primetime newlyweds, that’s another story.

Anne’s three boyfriends, on the other hand, seem to have occurred solely because the producers wanted romance for her. She had little to no organic connection between Andy, Mark, and Chris and it didn’t further the plot along at all. One possible excuse for these relationships, however, is it allowed her to be involved in office affairs more. I’m hoping that in this coming season, she might just be allowed in Office affairs on the basis of her best friend working there. Reportedly, Rashida Jones was attracted to the show for the strong female friendship between Anne and Leslie.

Season 3Camping:
Watching some of these episodes over again reminds me just how much Ben is a fish out of the water. There are a number of subtle signs to this effect that I gleamed on second viewing. He’s not sure about the culture of the department and whether he should take Leslie’s request seriously that they all brainstorm ideas. He doesn’t really know what to do with downtime on the camping trip as opposed to Tom who’s off making fondue and watching TV or Jerry and Ron who fish. He definitely was a strong character.

The dynamic between Ben and Tom works really well and the sparks of it are sort of laid around this time. Ben’s just a passive grounded guy who observant of what’s around him (he’s somewhat of an audience surrogate) and Tom’s the most ridiculous character he sees.

Chris is a little cartoonish but he worked in terms of providing comic relief and mixing things up. I wouldn’t classify him as a character to be taken with the same level of realism as the core group in the Parks and Recreation Department.

Again, the “What’s Ann doing here?” problem is apparent here.

This episode also had some really funny moments. Ron and Jerry’s conversation definitely was out there. The humor also picked up nicely in the third act (as it’s traditionally supposed to) with the Bed and Breakfast with the old lady, her extremely early breakfast time (which April wouldn’t have any of), the cats and the entry in journal that united Tom and Ben in a nice little moment of shared horror.

Fancy Party:
For my money, this is the high-water mark of the series. Typically wedding episodes are big and all the emotional grandeur of the wedding episode is here. When April sheds tears at her sister's speech (if I ever get a chance in hell to interview Aubrey Plaza, I'd have to ask her how she summoned those tears), it was a moment we (or at least I) felt. At the same time, the tone was small and casual, even a little claustrophobic.

Andy was such a sweet guy and if he hasn't won you over, how about his cute grandmother?

Even though the episode functioned primarily dramatically in the sense that it was all about the emotional uplift, it never ceased to be funny. Tom and Jean Ralphio attempting to make the perfect toast was a high point in that department.

Also, it was Ben's finest moment to date. In Season 4, he's become the socially stunted dork. In season 3, he was the only sane man in the room and consummate outsider. A guy asks him if April is available and his reaction along with the line "Her? She just got married twenty minutes ago. You were right here", is priceless.

Four-time Oscar nominees Most Likely to be Five Timers

2011-09-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

Here's my list and rankings in order from most likely to least likely
The Actors:
1. Ed Harris (nominated: Apollo 13, Truman Show, Pollock, Hours) He does so many character parts and still is prolific and is gaining a great reputation in Hollywood after having directed more of his own stuff. He still hasn't won and he's historically been able to score noms for very small and minor stuff. He also chooses roles wisely.

2. Ben Kingsley (nominated Gandhi, Bugsy, Sexy Beast, House of Sand and Fog) He's too brilliant, too prolific, and is getting too many juicy parts not to have something happen soon. He doesn't overdo it but he's had a leading rule in at least one film a year.

3. Geoffrey Rush (Shine, Shakespeare in Love, Quills, King's Speech)-There's a big danger of him being overshadowed by other Brits like Collin Firth, Clive Owen, Jude Law or whoever the next big one is but I think he's fairly hot again after being in the King's Speech so in the next year or two he might get #5 (and I say that with no clue what he's doing next)

4. Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, Gangs of New York, There Will be Blood)-He's clearly capable of brilliance that makes everyone's jaw drop. The argument against is he's so sporadic and he can turn in a brilliant performance and just have it be in a highly competitive year or whatever. He's not making as many proverbial plate appearances

5. Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, Runaway Train, Ali)-He is a little bit over the hill, but I'd say he's one of the 2 or 3 most capable actors over the last decade for someone of his age range. He's in a lot of films and while a lot of them are Blockbusters (i.e. Transformers, National Treasure) I don't see him selling out to the levels of Robert De Niro (unless you consider his comedic acting a virtue). Also, unlike De Niro or Pacino, he doesn't have to fight a former image of himself and run into the wrap that he's doing a caricature of his former self. As a character actor, he gets better as he's less tethered than those two, and on top of that he acts pretty regularly and even in mediocre movies (Enemy of the State, Transformers) he steals scenes.

6. Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs, Remains of the Day, Nixon, Amistad)-I see it as unlikely. Even though he's been prolific and chooses varied roles, he hasn't got any buzz for anything he's done since nomination 4. I suppose it's not his fault that Bobby, Hearts in Atlantis, Proof, or All the King's Men didn't pan out well.

7. Robin Williams-I think he's already done dark performances and comic performances and inspirationally uplifting performances and there's not a whole lot he can do. There's not the same novelty to Robin Williams bringing out his (still incredible by any standard) rapid-fire multiple-voice comic persona that got him his first nod for Good Morning Vietnam.

8. Warren Beatty (Bonnie and Clyde, Heaven can Wait, Reds, Bugsy)-Already had his Oscar and lifetime achievement award and as Bullworth showed, he's more likely to get it in the directing or writing category these days.

Of the Actresses:
1. Julianne Moore (Boogie Nights, End of the Affair, Hours, Far From Heaven)-Way overdue for a nom on top of being overdue for an Oscar. Great actress who is regularly doing quality work and usually one of the 3 or 4 people anyone producing a film with potential Oscar buzz will go to first.

2. Helen Mirren (Madness of King George, Gosford Park, The Queen, The Last Station)-She's highly popular and is still getting prime roles and she's not as old as people think she is (she's just 66). Her being positioned up this high on my list, however, signifies my lack of confidence for anyone on this list other than Moore.

3. Annette Bening (Bugsy, American Beauty, Being Julia, The Kids Are All Right)-She's still due for an Oscar but I don't they'll nominate her unless there's a good chance she'll win. I also don't think it's likely that her next project will get her a nomination. It might might be a couple years before she's on the radar again.

4. Frances McDormand (Mississippi Burning, Fargo, Almost Famous, North Country)-She's still doing really good work and working with lots of inventive directors. She's older but hasn't been held back in any way by aging as some actresses are (i.e. Michelle Pfieffer, Meg Ryan).

5. Emma Thompson (Howard's End, Shadowlands, Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility)-Thompson was much bigger in the 90's than she is now but she still does quality level work, although it is now in films that are less visible (see "Brideshead Revisited). If the Academy is all of a sudden willing to go back to women like Redgrave and Close who haven't been considered for an Oscar in years, then there's no reason that if Thompson does something really impressive, it will go unnoticed

6. Holly Hunter (Broadcast News, Piano, The Firm, Thirteen)-She's been nominated far more recently than Thompson and is a favorite of the Coen brothers (who have lately been producing more Oscar nominees) but she works pretty infrequntly and is drawn to indepedent below-the-radar films. It was a wonder many people caught on to her fourth nomination in "Thirteen" at all.

7. Dianne Keaton (Marvin's Room, Annie Hall, Reds, Something's Gotta Give)-She already got her nod for showing that old people can be attractive, sexy, and appealling in movies. She can't play that card again.

Season Premiere Catch-Up: Random Thoughts on Glee's "Purple Piano Project"

2011-09-26T19:47:00.001-07:00

Some random thoughts on Glee after waching the season opener:
-I did not expect Schuster or anyone in the New Directions to confront Santana's dual alleigance because it's already the white elephant in the room. In other words, it was already implausible that Santana would still be in the Glee club after sabatoging them at regionals the first season. Sue's 3-year long vendetta against the Glee club isn't really plausible either, so at this point, it probably would have been better to run with it rather than call attention to it.

-I thought the only real good part of the episode was the change to Quinn. Very interesting and intriguing things going on with her, although who knew such wierdos existed at that school. Weren't Tina and Mercedes the absolute biggest outliars in the school season 1? And if the "skanks" existed in the Glee Universe that early, they were the same kinds of people Tina and Mercedes (and Zicsees) would have befriended. Plus they looked like Zizes and Mercedes.

-Sam (Chord Overstreet) really balanced out the cast as the most normal kid. I hope that's not the last we see of him.

-I think the main problem is the reset button is going on too much, which is somewhat similar to complaints I've heard before. There's only so many times the resolve of the Glee club and Will's patience against Sue can be put to the test and have the drama hold up.

-Blaine transferring is really troubling to me. Does he even have parents? No person, gay or straight, would or should ever succeed in convincing their parents to let them go through the trouble of transferring schools just so they could be wth their significant other, given how volatile high school romances are. Or ESPECIALLY NOT to be in a different glee club, there are 7 periods a day of actual school, that parents would also base that decision on.

-As for the girl who wasn't good enough to sing, isn't there an entire music department with a choir class at the school to accomodate her? Just like any other school? I also don't think it's as morally interesting of a case as Mr. Schuster makes it out to be: If you have auditions and you're not cutting people, than what's the point of the auditions? That's what they call sign-ups and that means anyone can join. To have a program where anyone who meets a certain bar is admitted is already a pretty generous policy, anyways.

Premiere Week: Sunny's first two episodes

2011-09-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's opening two episodes both highlighted different ways the show can succeed.

The opening episode took a familiar plot (the "Pretty Woman" prototype) and gave it the Sunny treatment.
In the Sunny version, Frank wants to propose to his whore and the guys think she'd bring down the standards of the gang (not particularly easy to do, mind you). In classic Sunny style, there's no real charitable purpose other than the image problem.

Rather than try to make the whore into a lady, Dennis gets distracted by Mac's weight and Dee decides midway through that perhaps the life of a whore has its upsides.

I've praised the show in the past for being written so well that each scene could stand alone as a textbook great scene. One of the B-plots, involving Charlie trying an elaborate scheme to get Frank a better woman, didn't get enough time to get off the ground, but we got one knockout scene out of it that made my whole night. Similarly, the other B-plot (or maybe we'll call it a C-plot) had little to offer other than that one hysterical scene at the doctor's office. While the show does great comedy set pieces, the fact that both B-plots were essentially excuses to lead into one awesome scene shortcutted any sense of narrative.

As for the second episode, the Jersey Shore narrative had all the makings of a winner. Unlike the first episode, this one had a sense of hope to it. The first episode was about depraved characters seeking to bring someone into their depraved world (under the pretense of improving her) while this episode began with two characters attempting to recapture their childhood nostalgia. In both real life and on TV, attempting to go back to some earlier time in your life is usually a bittersweet experience that hits some somber tones when it's more bitter than sweet.

The twist here is that while some characters do indeed have a magical time in Jersey Shore, it turns out to be the other three guys. Charlie bumps into the waitress and she's actually nice to him for once. He has the night of his life with her. Wery wisely, the reset button is pressed on that subplot. Sunny's strength is that the characters are too far entrenched into their own purgatory for happy endings to occur. Mac and Frank have a great time with a rum ham and a ship of guidos. I can't imagine any other series on TV being able to work a rum ham so well into an episode: the ram ham is the comedic version of a Hitchcockian McGuffin.

Dennis and Dee make some new friends only to find out that they're pretty decrepit and this evening soon morphs into what seems to be the most terrifying night of their lives. There's a slight problem here: Because Dennis and Dee usually associate with people at the bottom of the barrel, this experience doesn't seem too atypical. Fortunately, the night of terror is glossed over in montage and intercut with the great night the other
guys are having.

For such an optimistic outing (consider this the Sunny equivalent of the "Disneyworld" or "Hawaii" episode on most family sitcoms), I was pleased to see it wasn't an episode that ended with a crowning moment of misery for all characters involved. Three of the five characters had the time of their lives, the twist being that it wasn't the characters who you expected.

Catching up on premiere week: The boss situation on "The Office"

2011-09-24T18:59:00.000-07:00

Check out my latest article on Helen Hayes

The Office
My main problem with the new season (as gleamed from the first episode) is that James Spader's new boss isn't too different than D'Angelo Vickers or Michael Scott: Uniquely weird and unorthodox. In the first season and a half, Michael Scott being the boss of the branch was an "informed ability" (thanks TV tropes!): The viewer was told that he was worthy of being a boss but there was little evidence of him being a good leader. In fact, the story arcs of many episodes (Diversity Day or
The Fire) were reliant on a 3rd act that culminated in Michael Scott screwing everything else.

Spader's character, Robert California, is being played this way. His skills are being talked up heavily: He apparently talked the CEO of the company into an early retirement and he talked himself up in his own interview. At the same time, he only seems good in a so-offbeat-it-just-might-work kind of way. His idea of making a list of who's a winner or a loser is something that I would give 90/10 odds on failing horrifically if a boss tried it in the real world. I theorize it's that 10% room for doubt that has historically made the Michael Scott era work: The Office relies heavily on realism and while we thought the shenanigans of Michael Scott were most likely unrealistic, they were very plausible schemes that didn't require that much suspension of disbelief.

Getting back to the problem at hand, my beef with this season is that James Spader is seeming to play out the same way. Why remind the audience that Steve Carrell is gone by putting in someone even remotely comparable to him? Also, if the show's main asset is realism, I think it's kind of stretching it that the employees of Dunder-Mifflin-Sabre have suffered three of the weirdest bosses ever.

The Office had a great tonal change for the better when authority figures like Charles (Idis Ebra) and Jan (before she became a bit nutty in the 4th season) were there to contrast Michael Scott's antics. I understand that if you have a straight-laced boss and no crazy Michael-Scott-like element, you don't have anything remotely resembling what the show was in the first seven seasons.

However, I'd like to suggest that Michael Scott rubbed off on some of the characters: Oscar's a little less uptight, Pam's let loose a little more and has more confidence, Jim embraced wildness and fun (stemming from the "Murder" episode), and Ryan went from being a straight-laced business student to being supremely lazy and having an inflated ego. The new show could've work with a relatively straight-laced boss and the Dunder-Mifflin crew (in the form of Andy or Jim) wanting to preserve the don't-let-work-get-in-the-way-of-goofiness attitude that Michael Scott pioneered in the face of that nemesis.

Looking back on 2010-2011's TV failures and one success

2011-09-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

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Last Fall, I eagerly jumped into the new TV offerings and proudly backed a number of losers: No Ordinary Family, Running Wilde, (*# My Dad Says, and Outsourced. All four shows appeared problematic from the outset to most critics and I valiantly defended them based on either potential or the fact that they were already pretty good.

Some of these shows I slowly watched decline in quality and took too long to admit to myself that they were lost causes. No Ordinary Family initially had some flaws (TGIF-levels of family mushiness) and some strengths (great sidekicks, cool special effects) and strengths but the weaknesses got more annoying as it became more apparent that the writers were incapable of fixing it.

Outsourced faltered in the last couple of episodes but was a good run. I still think the critics, the audience, and other assorted pop culture pundits didn't give it a chance. #$)* My Dad Says never had a lot to offer and I never expected much from it beyond some pleasant one-liners, so I was never disappointed.

Running Wilde, on the other hand, was somewhere in the middle. I never found it unenjoyable to watch but if you put a gun to my head, I might be forced to admit against it's detractors that it ran into a bit of a holding pattern with its characters. Defending the show was made a harder task by the fact that even Mitch Hurwitz wasn't even on my side: He later admitted that the network stifled his vision.

I still never have found any middle ground, however, with the TV show "Mister Sunshine." This show has not generated an ounce of enthusiasm in pop culture from anyone: The critics and blogosphere basically shrugged it off as mediocre and, unlike some shows, no one has even suggested in response that it's worthy of some kind of "brilliant but cancelled" status.

The show stars Matthew Perry as a caustic GM of a sports arena in San Diego with Allison Janey as his zany boss (and she achieved a pretty unique tone of zaniness, I might add). Perry's mild brand of droll pessimism is countered by the annoyingly optimistic James Lesure. He also has a friend-with-benefit-turned-ex played by Andreas Anders, and another cloud cuckoo lander in the form of his boss' estranged son played by Nate Torrence.

Looking at potential reasons why this show didn't take off, one explanation might be that two other recent series-"Better off Ted" and "Archer"-took workplace craziness to further extremes and with more effectiveness.

I'd argue that while "Mr. Sunshine" isn't' the sharpest satire of the bunch, it has some very strong characters. A number of the side characters-the creepy yet sexy assistant played by Portia Doubleday, Torrence, Janey-were all big scene stealers and they were usually stealing scenes from someone you liked watching.

It's true that the characters all seem borrowed from other places:
Perry's character wasn't that far off from Studio 60, Janey's characters are usually nutty, and both Liesure and Andreas Anders were playing those same kinds of characters on other shows as well.

Still, this was a show that was one of the ones I most looked forward to watching week after week.

Belated Bridesmaids review

2011-09-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

Hey blog readers, I'll be recapping some of my favorite films I watched this summer in the next few days. Pick them up on DVD

Bridesmaids
Credits (w/the added convenience of omitting people who you've never heard of*):
Produced by Judd Apatow and a couple other people
Directed by someone who isn't Judd Apatow but probably was mentored by him (Paul something)
Written by Kristen Wiig and someone else
Starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Bryne, Ellie Kemper, some Irish dude, Jon Hamm, Jill Clayburgh

*Plus the added convenience for me of not having to open up a new window on IMDB

The age old question "Can women be as funny as men?" might have possibly been put to rest with Tina Fey conquering every dominion of mandom in recent years (Saturday Night Live, movies, TV, memoirs, etc.). Bridesmaid, however, takes the question to a new extreme: "Can women be funny when transplanted into the raunchy sex-obsessed stylings of a Judd Apatow movie?"

The curiosity of whether Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph could pull it off was what drove me to the film, but I was not expecting such a poignant and satisfying film.

Wiig, who overlapped with Fey for half a season on SNL, is the 2nd successor of Tina Fey (Amy Poehler being Fey 2.0) as the emerging funnywoman who we'll learn overtime is unstoppable. Just as Poehler showed that she can create a lasting comic character with pathos in Parks and Recreation, I think "Bridesmaids" was Wiig's moment of arrival on that echelon. If I may slip in the fanciest word I know here, Wiig brings pathos to the role: She draws you into an emotional investment.

The key thing is that she can get dirty and gritty. It's never believable that someone as chipper and cheery as Meg Ryan or Drew Barrymore would ever have lows en route to love that a romantic comedy requires. "Bridesmaids" is primarily a story about a woman hitting rock bottom and finding her way out of it making the personal stories that much richer.

People are quick to label Melissa McCarthy the break-out star but I actually thought Rose Bryne's prissy rich girl added the most to the plot. She's the perfectly sensible and nice girl who girls love to hate for no reason at all other than petty jealousy. I personally felt more of an emotional investment in Kristen Wiig and Rose Bryne working out their class differences than the buddy comedy or the romantic subplots.

The Palm Beach Story

2011-09-17T19:42:00.000-07:00

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The Palm Beach Story is one of the first classic films I saw that I wasn't so crazy about. I decided to give the film another chance today:

The gist of the film:

The film stars Claudette Colbert as Geraldine and Joel McCrea as husband Tom. Tom is struggling financially as an inventor. Thinking outside of the box, Geraldine decides that since she's a poor housewife anyways, the best way she can help her husband is to divorce him, date wealthy men, and get them to invest in his dream project. Like most of the audience, he thinks this is ridiculous, but she still runs away from him without any money. Being a good looking woman in despair, she seems to make her way. First, the members of the "ale and quail" club agree to sponsor her train ride out of a sense of camaraderie and charity.

"Ale and quail," as you can guess, means they're a group of guys who enjoy getting drunk and firing guns and aren't self-controlled enough to wait until they reach their destination. Segue to the funniest scene in the movie (although, it's somewhat of a weakness that it comes in the middle and has little to do with the actual plot).

Scared to death, Geraldine escapes to another part of the train where a man (Rudy Vallee) lets her sleep in the upper birth which sets up the second act. It turns out that he's super-wealthy, the perfect gentleman and highly single. In the meantime, the husband is given funding by a character known as the weenie king (he is one of the highlights of the movie) to track her down, and they all get embroiled in a love triangle further complicated by the arrival of the millionaire's aggressively single sister (Mary Astor).

Let's get the feminist commentary out of the way:
In any universe other than a screwball comedy from Hollywood's Golden Age, Geraldine would either be a dishonest whore who robs rich men of their money for her boyfriend, or simply a dissatisfied wife leaving her husband. Instead, the entire plot rests upon us accepting the premise that this woman is too naive to understand her plan fully. Nearly every advance Geraldine makes is through the efforts of some man who found her attractive.

While this all seems awful on paper, it's through Claudette Colbert's convincing portrayal of an independent and determined woman that this isn't as bad as it sounds.
She comes across as Mary Tyler Moore trapped in an era where woman had no rights. It certainly makes for intersting gender commentary.

Suffice it to say, there's a lot to discuss here. This film would give a women's studies major enough material for a semester's worth of term papers.

My take:
I still wouldn't consider this a great, classic film, although the whole look into gender politics was kind of interesting. The film is a bit short and some of the best scenes feel rushed or misplaced. It starts picking up as a great comedy of errors with misplaced identities in the third act but we don't see much of that at all. The moments where things are really firing on all cyllinders take up about 15 minutes of the film. Without saying how it ends, the ending is also kind of lazy and dissatisfying.

My ideal 3 Musketeers Cast

2011-09-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Hello blog readers. This is my first post in a while and if you're still reading, I'm glad you are back with me. I have to confess that I have been having a lot of financial problems lately and if there's any value that you get out of reading any articles, then I'd like to remind you that I do have a tip jar of sorts on the right column. Absolutely anything that you donate would be appreciated, be it 50 cents or $5.00. In this digital age, how we consume and pay for art (in the form of writing among other things), has changed and things like articles are given for free, but that doesn't mean art is free to produce. It costs time and energy. If you

Some belayed summer movie reviews will be coming up but in the meantime, I've also been doing some writing on the 3 Musketeers. I've just indulged myself in the book and have been watching several versions of the film as of recently. I'd like to start by discussing my ideal cast:

D'Artagnan: Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights, X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Reasoning: Don't want too big a name for the part. Chris O'Donnell kind of derailed the 1993 version by being too much the center of attention. He played Gambit who was Cajun and he showed off some action skills.

Athos: Benicio del Toro
Reasoning: I think Toro's Hispanic heritage is sort of close to French and he doesn't have too heavy of an accent. Del Toro has a chiseled scarred face and Athos is the oldest, most battle weary of the three Musketeers.

Porthos: Sacha Baron Cohen
Reasoning: I don't know if I'd call myself a huge Cohen fan, but I think he would definitely sell the movie pretty well by sheer "I wonder how he'd do the part" interest. Porthos is like the Zach Galifanakas of the group, but casting most comic actors would risk dumbing down the material too much and Cohen showed he could do a period piece in Sweeney Todd.

Aramis: Ewan MaGregor
Reasoning: Like most other adaptations of the 3 Musketeers getting a bankable All-French cast seems impossible, so there's always the awkwardness of having multi-ethnic casts with few of them being French. Ewan MaGregor's an actor I like a lot, he's bankable, and has done action before. He also seems to have good on-screen comedy with whoever he's with and that would be important for the Musketeers. He's contrast Del Toro and Cohen well. Lastly, he's a Brit who can actually do accents pretty well (see I Love You, Phillip Morris) which isn't the case with most Brits (see Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen)

Richelieu: Jesper Christensen
Reasoning: Waltz is a great choice except that he's played the baddie in 5 or 6 films in a row and audiences would read him as such a cliche choice. Plus, I'm trying to be realistic in terms of being aware that I couldn't probably afford big-name stars for everypart. Christensen was in the James Bond films and is believed to soon be playing a bigger role. He's also European

Rochefort: Gabriel Garcia Bernal
He might have a bigger part here. I like this actor a lot, and think he can be kinetic, dynamic, action-oriented and probably can deliver some cutting retorts with style.

Treville: Michael Gambon
Reasoning: I definitely want a Treville in my cast. Don't want too big of a name. Treville is a mentor figure and not a guy in the battlefield, so he should be kind of old

Duke of Buckingham: Timothy Spall (Harry Potter, Damned United, Sweeney Todd)
Reasoning: I'm basically picking a random British working actor here. Pretty much anyone would do. Just someone who sounds British, is moderately handome and who wouldn't cost a lot. Being in Harry Potter and Sweeney Todd also means he can do period pieces convincingly. Literally, you can pick anyone here. This film went the opposite way bny having the most reecognizable actor in the whole cast in this past.

King: Vincent Cassell (Black Swan, Ocean's 12)
I was juggling between having him as Rochefort or the King. I like Cassell here for a reason that's not entirely obvious: I don't think he looks particularly good-lucking in a matinee idol sort of way. He kind of has an oddly shaped head. The Kings were the result of in-breeding and suffered genetic deformities
so he shouldn't be the best looking guy in the cast.

Queen: Juliet Binoche
I wanted someone soft-spoken and elegant. She would probably be one of the more expensive parts but perhaps the queen should have presence. It might be best to have the 2 French members of the cast be king and queen.

De Winter: Scarlett Johannsen
She can be really wicked and dark, in my opinion. She's a great actress who's star has faded just a little bit in the past 3 years, in my opinion. The only drawback is like MaGregor she's a biy fair-skinned (but so was Dunaway) and she's also a little young. But she's 8 years older than when I first saw her on screen in Lost in Translation. She's also very sexy.

Constance: Abby Cornish
She definitely succeeded in playing a period character in Elizabeth and the Golden Age. In the film that I saw her in, she had a certain shyness to her and a subtlety. I envision Constance as being submissive like that.

X-Men First Class: Random Thoughts

2011-07-31T20:34:00.000-07:00

How an Oscar for Tom Cruise Could Have Changed it All

This post is going to be a very quick rundown of my delayed viewing. Spelling, syntax, and fully-formed paragraphs sentences will be thrown out the window today, folks.
-Kevin Bacon & Oliver Platt both had their first roles in a high-profile Oscar caliber movie in years with Frost/Nixon. Same casting director? Bacon as the main villain is just odd. Except for Sleepers, I’ve never seen him as super-villain material. Perhaps unknown actors work best in super villain parts. For example, most Bond films have this with the last four films-World is Not Enough (Referring to the guy who played Renard, not Marceaneau of course), Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace-going this route.

-I think this is the first time Magneto and Mystique were shown kissing and it was the only kiss in the movie (it’s possible that Xavier/McTaggert kiss was her imagination). Was it ever explicitly stated that Mystique and Magneto were lovers in the other trilogy? Magneto was played by the most openly gay actor in Hollywood (pretty much every interview with Ian McKellen 2000-2006 made reference to his being gay and an activist about it) which always made it a tough sell that McKellen's version of Magneto was heterosexual and equally as attracted to Mystique (that's a whole other tangent). The scene in X3 where Mystique morphs back into a human and Magneto leaves her seems to show that it was unrequieted love. It's consistent in both parts.

-Speaking of homoerotic, Erik and Charles were pretty close, weren't they? Especially when Mageneto held Xavier in his arms. Even so, I was never entirely sold on the strength of their friendship. We were told about it, sure, but not shown it as much.

-Why do James McAvoy's characters have such a high libido? It's hard to take him seriously as an innocent doctor in a bad situation in Last King of Scotland when he's shown seducing or trying to seduce every woman in sight (sorry for going off on a tangent again). Same here, did he have to try to hit on Moira. I can see him hitting on the first coed in the bar, but it just makes him look a little more like a free-spirited adolescent with ulterior motives with McTaggert than a very mature leader. It didn't sound right either time he said "Groovy" (although that's unrelated to his libido). It was a tough balance to strike, however and I think they did reasonably well

-Interlacing the X-Men with history was really a nice touch. I might have been a little more pleased with Casino Royale if it was grounded in a concrete point in history.

-There were some continuity problems like Magneto and Erik being shown to later be recruiting Jean and Erik could walk. Some people say that the film wasn't trying to be consistent with X3 but just X1 and X2. BS. X3 was signed off on by Singer and it has X-Men in the title. That's picking and choosing too much. However, it does strike me as pretty blaring that Cyclops, Jean and Storm being his first class of recruits is ignored here. Couldn't Cyclops have been used instead of Havlock?

-Biggest plot hole: Shaw was just foolish at the beginning. Why would he expect Erik to want to learn with him and have a lot of fun together with him when he shot his mother. Sure, it boosts his bad guy credentials to cold-bloodedly shoot his mother and a more maniacal villain might do just that, but surely an intelligent man such as Shaw could see he's creating his biggest enemy. I guess we later learn that Shaw is also a mutant and might not have feared Magneto's powers very much but I feel like they only made Shaw a mutant just to explain away plot holes.

-These scripts have gotta be pretty hard to write in a way that builds up action and tension when you have so many dues-ex-machinas at your hands. Xavier can freeze anyone's thoughts and make them do whatever he wants. Should it come with an Achilles Heel of some sort? Perhaps, if Xavier controls the minds of more than one person, for example, he gets drained? Even Havok could have taken out all the missles if he took off his suit and just fired in every direction. For this reason, it was entertaining to see the scene where Azazel just kills the entire staff at that CIA facility, because realistically it would be no contest.

-Why did Charles and Xavier have to become enemies so fast at the end? That felt like a false moment. It felt like the scriptwriters were just looking to check the last box on circumstances that needed to be in place for X-Men 1 to make sense. I would have much rather seen signs of tension than a formal split. Besides, Charles is sort of in a lot of pain as he's just been shot. Why didn't he focus

-Banshee, as I understand it, is Scottish. Definitely would have made his character far more interesting and would have been true to the comic books which had a worldly feel to it with so many foreign team members.

-There were a couple of PAINFUL exposition scenes in there. The six new recruits showing off their powers was not only a scene inserted solely for the purpose of efficiently introducing the characters to the audience (why not just have a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-style opening credits scene) but it was belabored and sophomoric. By showing off their powers and cheering, these guys felt more like middle schoolers at a slumber party than people hired by the CIA. The previous intros to Banshee and girl Angel were far more impactful and if they expanded Darwin's previous intro in the cab to show his powers (or better yet, had Magneto and Xavier meeting him in a swimming pool rather than a cab) and revealed Havok's powers later, you could have cut the whole scene out.

-This is especially disappointing because the X-Men film series has been highlighted by great character introductions: Seeing Sabretooth pop up on the side of the road, learning Wolverine's a mutant by seeing him draw out a blade when a guy wants to beat him up, Jean Grey casually picking up surgical tools with her mind when she's operating on Wolverine, etc.

Oscar win for Milk's Screenplay- Deserved?

2011-07-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

Good News: I've been published at TopTenz.net again.
Also check out this article on Movie Remakes

The Oscar for best original screenplay is a measure of pure creativity. Ideally, the director's vision, the special effects, or whether the actors can elevate the material has nothing to do with the award. Or, sometimes, politics.

This brings me to a particular Academy Award choice I feel like nitpicking on today.

Milk won an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2009. It was written by Dustin Lance Black. Black, a former Mormon, has become a well-respected artistic figure and activist in the gay and lesbian community since his win.

I wondered out loud the last time I saw Milk if there was anything particularly notable about Milk's screenplay that endeared it towards a best screenplay win. It seems equally as likely to me that the screenplay win for Milk was just a reaction to proposition 8 (controvoursey took place earlier that year) and a way for the Academy to voice their support of gay rights.

I like to think of the screenplay winners as something that film students would be assigned to read in class as examples of great running. I see that with most of the other recent winners. Almost Famous is a humorous story with such a strong personal touch that it doesn't feel like it could be written by anyone but its author (Cameron Crowe). Gosford Park demonstrates intricacy in tying together the arcs of various characters and veers away from cheap imitation. Lost in Translation has a very strong grasp of mundane human behavior. A meaningful relationship is weaved together from suddle moments and silences. Eternal Sunshine , like Kaufman's other films, navigates narrative in a new mobius loop of a story. Little Miss Sunshine creates a very quirky atmosphere for its main troupe of six characters while providing a contrast to a world that's unforgiving of tardiness or other forms of eccentricity.

I'm not sure where Milk falls into anything notable. It just seems like a run-of-the-mill biopic elevated by good performances. It also came along at the right place and time to be notable.

There's hardly anything in the story that isn't predictable. The fact that he fails in his personal relationships as he becomes famous is pretty much what you'd expect of nearly every movie character or famous person who simply has larger and larger chunks of his time being taken by the masses he serves.

Just ask yourself: If you could only get your hands on one original screenplay, would it be? I think there's little doubt in my mind that Wall-E
is the remarkable feat in creativity. To be able to convey romance in the bleeps and bloops of robots in a post-apocolyptic landscape and to write a first act almost entirely devoid of dialogue, that's something. The debate over the best Pixar film is usually a long one, but consider that Wall-E was the Pixar film that made fans call for an end to ghettoization of animated films at the Oscars. It is also the primary reason (along with Dark Knight) that we have 10 films for Best Picture (a number that has since been reduced).

I also think In Bruges had a stylized language and a strong sense of identity that would have also made it a worthy choice.

Related Article: My picks for best films of 2008

Guest Post - Ellen Wernecke - Book Adaptations from AFI's top 100

2011-07-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm pleased to welcome a guest post from pen pal and valuable member of my writing support circle Ellen Wernecke. Wernecke, a New York-based writer, is a book critic who writes for Soda Pop Journal, Publisher's Weekly and the AV Club. The AV Club is the Onion's sister publication which means she has the awesome perk of having her name appear in every single hard copy of the Onion (in fine print) in the credits. In fact, Ellen has been known to tear the newspapers out of New Yorkers hands when they're reading the Onion to show them that she's in the credits (oh wait, that would be me if I ever got into the Onion or AV Club)

In the interim, you should check out Ellen's blog next week where I will be writing a guest post later this week in which I will opine about film adaptations from the Modern Library list of the 100 greatest books ever written. You should also check out Ellen's blog if you are into books or if you were curious to know what would happen to a white girl from Wisconsin if she suddenly started thinking she was a rapper.

Ellen is going to opine on five films from AFI's list of top 100 films from which she already read the book:

"Criteria: Each movie had to be based on a book (eliminated: "Citizen Kane") which I had to have read (eliminated: "The Godfather," "The Grapes of Wrath," etc.) as well as seen the movie (eliminated: "Apocalypse Now") and are ranked in descending order of where they appear on the AFI List:

"Gone With The Wind" (1939) -- Margaret Mitchell's Depression-era bestseller, considered by some to be far too sympathetic to the antebellum South (and point taken), became a bloated, splashy old-Hollywood movie that is yet impossible to forget. Vivien Leigh's splashy outfits (the curtains!) and Clark Gable's parlor sneer bring to life the book that a 2008 poll found was America's second-favorite book, after the Bible. You might lose feeling in your extremities after its nearly four hours are up, but frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

"The Wizard Of Oz" (1939) -- Because even in this era of big-budget special effects, I bet you can all remember the first time you caught your first glimpse of Oz in Technicolor. One of the few books where it's okay for me that book and movie are inextricably linked and I can't imagine one without the other. Ebook supremacists be damned, I can still remember the gilt lines on my hardcover copy of THE WIZARD OF OZ, wide-eyed in wonder at this crazy world L. Frank Baum conjured up out of flat Kansas, and I felt the rush of early book lust upon learning about the many sequels he wrote to his most famous work.

Schindler's List" (1993) -- If "Gone With The Wind" represents old-Hollywood excess, "Schindler's List" represents its reincarnation as the late '80s/ early '90s Oscar prestige pic. While Keneally's novel-based-on-true-events is a clear and suspenseful narrative of Holocaust heroism, it feels impossibly dry and disconnected from real life compared to the movie Stephen Spielberg famously turned in to finish his film degree. And yet, I won't say it's too much. The mismatch of print and text reflect differing approaches to the material, neither of them wrong.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" (1962) -- I arrived late to this Gregory Peck-starring domestic and courtroom drama, but for all that what I like about the movie is the same as what I like about the book: Both capture the texture and the darkness created when things happen around children that they don't understand, but want to, and the struggle for adults near them between protecting and teaching them. The flight of Scout is so funny and terrifying at the same time. (Credit where credit's due, Mary Badham also gives one of the least muggy, most natural kid performances of that era.)

"All The President's Men" (1976) -- This is a complete nostalgia pick for me because of fond memories watching it with my dad when I was 10 or 11. No matter how many times I watch this movie my stomach knots up in tension during the second half, and I already know how it ends. I knew how it ended before we even sat down to watch! It gets me every time. This is probably the closest adaptation on this list because the journalists profiled more or less wrote themselves (and, hopefully, were thrilled to be played by the dream team of Hoffman and Redford)."

Another Old Film Review: Paper Chase (1973)

2011-07-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my fascination of Oscar-winning performances, I just finished watching a screening of The Paper Chase (1973) for which John Houseman (the guy on the left, more on him below)* won a Supporting Actor Oscar.

I also feel like I'm hitting a good niche with my film reviews by covering films from before the 1990's that aren't classics but aren't exactly forgotten either. After all, what use is reviewing the Godfather or Apocalypse Now as if that hasn't been seen or reviewed already?

On to the review:
"The Paper Chase" stars Timothy Bottoms** as a first-year student entering the demanding world of Harvard School of Law who develops two primary relationships: The first is an off-again on-again romance. The second is a relationship of fear and reverence for a stodgy law professor whose rigidity and toughness are the stuff of legend. The twist is supposedly that the girlfriend turns out to be the professor's daughter and I was wary of how the film might devolve into some kind of triangular comedy (or melodrama, take your pick) of errors a la "Three's Company", but the romantic plot (or at least the tension) quickly dissipates into the main plot which is essentially the life of a student in an intensely competitive environment as he prepares for the challenge of his life.

In a sense, the professor also becomes secondary to the main plot as the protagonist slowly backs away from seeing the no-nonsense professor as his enemy and realizes the only person standing between him and success is himself (in no way, is that presented in as cliche a manner as I'm describing it here). Within the professor-student relationship, the film reminds me of other anti-establishment films from around the period like "The Graduate" or "Shampoo" where the protagonist must resist the influence of some towering figure from the older generation and decide where his own morals lie.

One thing I can definitely say about this film is that I've never seen a film that infuses academics with such adrenaline. The desparation to make a good impression on the professor or to not be called on and have the wrong answer in class, for example.

Nearly a third of the scenes involve the students in their study group. The politics of study groups have never seemed so interesting (And no, "Community" does not come close) as the students start questioning whether the others are pulling their weight or mutually panicking in the face of some new obstacle. The film's emotional resonance also comes from the bonds formed within the study group as the characters go through battle together. There's the equivalent of the fallen comrade in the form of a married study group member whose life starts to degrade as the semester wears down on him. There's another friend of the protagonist who embarks with him to a hotel for a do-or-die cram session in which the two are so focused on their studying that they draw the ire of the hotel staff and practically go mad in response.

In short, it's a very satisfying film that moves at its own pace.

*John Houseman is a ridiculously fascinating guy. Born in 1902, his acting career can best be described as his third greatest contribution to the arts. His greatest career was producing stage plays on Broadway beginning in 1929 as as means of surviving the Stock Market Crash. It was in 1934 that he became "obsessed" (wikipedia's words, not mine) with the idea that a 20-year old actor from a play at Cornell University (I believe that's what's meant by a Cornell production) would be the only person qualified to play the lead of his latest play. That 20-year old was Orson Welles and the two became collaborators. Houseman also produced the radio play "War of the Worlds" that scared the shit out of New Jersey when people thought it was real.

Ironically, whereas Citizen Kane marked the birth of many careers (Rob Wise, director of West Side Story and Sound of Music, edited the film; Agnes Moorehead went on to play Samantha's mom on Bewitched and earn 4 Oscar nominations; Greg Toland was the preeminent cinematographer of his day, etc.), it ended the collaboration of Welles and Houseman. It was mostly the controversy over who wrote the play with Houseman taking the side of Herman Mankewicz. Judging by a quote in his memoir, it seems Houseman wrote more of the script than Welles.

As for his second greatest contribution to the arts, Houseman was a professor at Julliard for acting where he taught Kevin Kline, Christopher Reeves and Robin Williams. He even formed a theater troupe out of his first class of graduates because he didn't want to see them be disbanded. He also advised Robin to follow comedy.

He wasn't really serious about acting himself until he filled in the role of the professor in this film after James Mason backed out. After winning the Academy Award, he got roles in a lot of other films and found a third act to life by taking on a lot of other roles. His last was a comic role in Naked Gun before dying in 1988.

Want to learn more about interesting Oscar winners?
Check out this article of mine on interesting supporting actress winners

**Don't fear if that name sounds unfamiliar. I've never heard of him either, although apparently he's had a long acting career and doesn't look like a character from the "70's Show" anymore

Things I will do for you for money....

2011-07-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the craigslist guy who will do anything for a price as well as Cracked.com's Robert Brockway let me offer my services:

Price Negotiable: I will shill for anything you want as long as it isn't illegal, go against the general tenets of the US Consitution, and doesn't involve the cruel and unnecessary murdering of animals or Puerto Ricans. Anything else, I will do for a price but depending on how much I believe in that cause. However, keep in mind, I have some integrity. If you want me to advocate for bringing back Swastikas to school uniforms, for example, that might be a very high price since I don't think it's a good idea.

$0.53 I will tell you if anyone in the cast list of any film of your choice has ever been nominated for an academy award without looking it up and with one hand tied behind my back. (If I am wrong, I will pay you $1)
$0.72 I will channel the ghost of silent scren star Lillian Gish and answer any questions you might have about anything through her
$0.97 I will leave any inflammatory comment on any blog of your choice and take the heat for it
$1.19 I will learn the words to and sing any Oscar-winning song in the shower (this won't be tape recorded, but you are welcome to come to my bedroom next to the shower and listen, or ideally, just take my word for it)
$1.68 I will describe you in no more and no less than 12 adjectives. (11 cent surcharge if I have to pull out a thesaurus)
$1.75 I will friend your mom or dad on facebook. Conversely, I will also message your mom or dad on facebook and explain to them nicely why you have just defriended them
$2.00 I will vote for any political candidates you want in any mock elections on www.misterpoll.com
$2.05 I will dedicate no less than 3 facebook status messages proclaiming your awesomeness
$2.14 I will personally explain to you what the difference betwen a line producer, an executive producer, an associate producer, and any other type of producer are until you get it. (If this takes over an hour, there will be a 61 cent surcharge for every half hour we go over)
$2.21 First-hand research (of a very specific nature) I will tell you what it says under the census record of Kirk Douglas, Donna Reed, Dwight D Eisenhower or Tony Curtis for the 1920 Census. I once looked it up in the National Archives
$2.55 I will give you an imaginary census record for any famous person
$2.58 I will sell out my family. My second cousin once removed is Richard Dreyfuss. My dad once stayed at his parents' house in California and has met him 3 times. I have met him twice. I will give you any inside scoop I have
$3.18 I will tell you what came first: The chicken or the egg
$3.29 I will cast your life story into a movie (I might need access to photos/ facebook pictures for this task)
$4.00 I will write a review of any film you like using an exact number of words and I will include no less than 3 pairs of sentences that rhyme with each other. [Rental charges may apply]
$4.00 I will attempt to get the attention of any celebrity you want on twitter for you. (only requires pay if I succeed) ($1.10 surcharge if person has over 500,000 followers, $2.00 surcharge if the person has over 800,000 followers)
$4.15 I will ask 5 random people on my AIM chat list what they think of your latest blog entry.
$4.24 I will pretend that you have been cast in any film outside the American film Institute's top 100 films and write a review
$4.74 I will pretend that you have been cast in any film on American Film Institute's top 100 films instead of the actor who was cast and will write a review of your performance
$5.23 I will rewrite any blog entry of yours in Spanish
$5.30 I will explain to you why I don't want to translate your blog entry into Klingon and how that's a stupid thing to want to do with your time
$5.75 I will write any movie review you like and insert into it any five words of your choice into the review making them appear seemlessly into the review
$6.00 I will write the life story of any facebook friend of yours just by looking at their pictures
$6.21 I will write a review of your facebook photos as if it were an art show
$8.56 I will write a review of your life story as if it were a movie review
$10.49 I will send a query letter to Hollywood asking them to produce your life story
$21.03 I will sit through Ocean's 12 or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and take pictures of myself suffering throughout the whole ordeal

Please subscribe and follow blog for more updates of what craziness I might offer to do for money
Send all queries about service to mrpelican56@yahoo.com

I love you, Steve Spielberg, but how many times can you copy E.T.

2011-07-01T21:55:00.001-07:00

One of the primary purposes of this blog is to defend Steven Spielberg.

Let me clarify: I'm not necessarily his biggest fan and he's not my favorite director. It's just that my favorite director, Billy Wilder, doesn't really need defending because everyone thinks he's great and there's no significant opposition otherwise. Ditto for Orson Welles, Sidney Lumet or David Lean and all the rest of the classics. Likewise, I could use this blog to declare my love for someone like Wes Anderson or Ed Zwick but that's like preaching to the choir.

[Note to readers: That link above under "Sidney Lumet" is what I hope you'll click on and I'd be greatful if you do. I'm not even going to be subtle about it. From a commercial standpoint, the whole purpose of me writing the other 400 words is to get you to click on the Sidney Lumet link. Call it the necessary evil of advertising]

But back to my main point: Spielberg is the director that it all boils down to because he has just as many people who think he's had a negative effect on cinema as he has fans, and where you stand on Spielberg as a barometer of sorts on how much of a film snob you are and the non-film-snob side of the divide is the audience I consider myself geared toward.

If you don't like Spielberg, you can't appreciate the simple joy of a well-choreographed sword fight or the emotional connection between a child and the alien who pops up in his backyard (yes, he is putting quite a lot of aliens in his films, more on that later) because you're too busy analyzing the mise-en-scene and lamenting that Spielberg isn't as influenced by the French New Wave as his contemporaries.

So, that was part one of my post. Part II is where I blast Spielberg for the fact that in four of his last 5 films, he inserted a largely unnecessary alien subplot was inserted and relied way too much on old tricks. I'm counting Transformers and Super 8 here even though he produced and not directed those films.

In fact, the little research that I've done on "Super 8" (I want to react to the movie on the page before actually learning about it) tells me that JJ Abrams really did write it so perhaps it was Abrams inserting the ridiculously unnecessary subplot.

But honestly Steve, by recycling the plot of ET 4 times in a 5-movie span, you're making it hard to defend you.

So let's review:
E.T. is a film about a broken family and kids coping with a parent's divorce (or maybe it's just one kid or maybe it's just parents bickering and remaining married, I haven't watched this film in 20 years, I have no idea). An alien pops out of the sky. We're expected to think the alien is going to be a malicious threat to the kids, but the big twist is that the alien is very kind and indirectly fulfills the kids dream of being loved by his family.

War of the Worlds-Just like E.T, the alien(s) is/are largely irrelevant to the main dynamic. The film is really about the two kids reconnecting with their rought-around-the-edges father through this conflict of alien forces suddenly appearring on Earth.

Transformers-Transformers is about cars who turn into two warring factions of robots. In the movie version, an alien mythology is superimposed upon the original. Also, the main character is a disconnected loner who's problems are indirectly family-related (his family moves a lot, which puts him in an unenviable social position). It's through his special bond to an alien (a car alien, but still an alien) that he eventually connects to the girl of his dreams and everyone around him as well.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-The original trilogy centered around artifacts that were supernatural/religious: The middle installment dealt with stones that protected against the evil spirits of a monotheistic religion and the first and last installments, dealt with God and Jesus, respectively. This is a very, very far cry from aliens but despite that, they crossed over into alien territory and botched the ending.

Super 8-As we were getting closer to learning what the big secret was: I was thinking please don't let it be an alien, and I was disappointed.
I liked this film at first: I liked the idea of centering it around students shooting a movie, I thought it had a strong sense of place, and I thought there was some good chemistry among the kids.

On the downside, I felt absolutely smothered by the Spielberg touch yet again. Kids feeling disconnected from their parents. Parents grieving over the difficulty of being single dads. Oh yes, and aliens.

Looking at Curtis Hanson

2011-06-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

Last night at a function, I met three people doing our country proud by heroically pushing paper like there's no tomorrow at the Department of Energy. They took great interest in my blogging and my column (please, please click on that link I just put under column) writing despite how low on the totem pole I am of freelance writers and bloggers.

As I said a couple posts back, my success is the result of a lot of creative collaboration. When a new friend of mine, Kenny Herzog (you've probably never heard of him, but he's been published nearly everywhere in the Western hemisphere and is slowly carving out a niche for himself in Burma, I hear), promoted me once and I thanked him, he said "No problem, us freelance plebes are all in this together."

People who read this and subscribe and give me the rock star treatment because I once was in a shouting match with George Clooney's dad in a botched interview attempt are also nice to meet and I hope they drop me a line.

ONTO THE ARTICLE:

Just watched "8 Mile" (2002) which brings my films watched by Curtis Hanson total to a whopping five films. Hanson produced one of my favorite films in "Wonderboys" (2000) and made one of the moviegoing public's favorite films of the 1990's with "LA Confidential" (1997).

In addition, he also made one of the few chick flicks I would consider a great film with the 2005 "In Her Shoes" (starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MaClaine). Lastly, the only film of his I have seen that I consider kind of a drag is the gambling film "Lucky You" (2007) that starred Eric Bana, Robert Duvall, and Drew Barrymore.

Overall, he's a very strong filmmaker that has worked magic on genres that I would otherwise not be interested in. Even his noble failure, "Lucky You", shows the same traits as his other entries. Here's what I would consider to be Hanson's style: (note: I'm going to use abbreviations WB, IHS, LY, 8M, LAC)

1. Plots that move at their own pace-In WB,the protagonist english professor is about to lose his job for killing the president's dog and/or impregnating the dean's wife, he's just lost his manuscript, and he has until the end of the weekend to decide whether to abort his love child with his dean's wife and try to win her love. Yet despite this frantic crisis, most of the movie shows him in a melancholy state hanging around with his eccentric editor playing parlor games, getting high, and showing his even-more-eccentric student the time of his life. In LY, the protagonist risks his fortune and more with every bet he makes and even as he continually finds himself more and more in the red, an air of panic doesn't really set in there either. Similarly, IHS has one of the two protagonists, a lawyer, either quitting or losing her job and it seems insignificant.

2. Somber visual tones-8M plays into this because it's in the rust belt of Detroit and the harsh life of that town manifest themselves all around. LAC is a send-up to film noir so Hanson thrived on the dark interior spaces. The interior spaces (in Philadelphia and not Florida for the latter) in LY and IHS were pretty similarly shady and dark.

3. Strong Emphasis on Parent-Child Relationships-All five films have strong parent-child dynamics although I'm not entirely sure whether thematically they line up in any way. Let's see:
-A key plot point in LAC is that Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) has to decide whether to be like his father and be an honest cop. He ends up rejecting his father's methodology.
-Rabbit in 8M is trying to cope with a mother who hasn't gotten her life together. His poverty is a result of her but his emotional instability is also a result of her. As he succeeds in rapping, he is able to fix his mother and their relationship.
-In WB, Professor Grady Tripp is trying to decide whether he's a stable enough person to take on fatherhood and his salvation comes through that decision. He breaks into the home of his in-laws to save his hide, but the encounter with his father-in-law shows a paternal relationship there. He also takes on his most talented student as a surrogate son.
-The two sisters in IHS are damaged as adults because of the lack of a mother. They did grow up looking out for each other, however, but when that relationship is damaged, it takes a mother figure (they're grandmother) to repair them. Their salvation also comes through learning the truth about their mentally ill mother.
-The protagonist in Lucky You continues to make ill-advised risks because he's trying to live up to the card player and gambler that his father once. In the middle of the film, one of those ill-advised risks is playing his father directly and losing.

In all these films, people are defined by their parents or the lack thereof. The characters all deal with their parental relationships and in some cases take substitutes. The sisters in IHS use each other for support. Grady Tripp might be missing the guidance and separated from the father-in-law since he's divorced so he takes on a surrogate son, and when he's ready, he takes on an actual son.

4. Slow Secondary Courtships-In 8M, LY, IHS and LAC, there's a courtship that occurs during the movie. The characters meet during the movie so we see the relationship take place in its entirety. In the case of IHS and 8M, the characters also are leaving behind worse relationships that we don't see from the inside out so much. The relationships take place rather naturally and they're not the most important thing about the film but they do drive the film along.

5. Weary Characters alongside more excitable characters-Bud (Russell Crowe) from "LA Confidential" surely fits the bill. His colleague Jack (Kevin Spacey) is very much the opposite. Jack is eager to do his job and tackle a lead and is even eager to spread his legend, so to speak, by advising for a cop show. The bubbly Drew Barrymore is a counterpoint to Eric Bana in LY as is Horatio Sanz's character. WB has Tripp and his married lover as the weary ones. Tripp is balanced by his carefree editor.

"In Her Shoes" has the weary/excitable character dichotomy in three places: Between the two sisters (although the film's reveal is that younger sis is hurting underneath), between Toni Collette's choice of two lovers (one is unfaithful because he reveals a past where he was constantly rejected by girls whereas the other is optimistic, commanding and looking forward), and the grandmother and her circle of friends. The grandmother straddles the divide (although she hasn't necessarily dealt with her daughter's death and her alienation from her grandchildren) and is less eager to jump into love than her friends and suitor.

With the exception of LY, the carefree characters are all painted negatively: Jack is doomed by his eagerness and Bud's fate turns out better because he knows not to trust anyone. Grady's editor is seen as a nuisance and a bad influence on him. In IHS, the younger sis is the drag on her older sister.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

2011-06-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

Do please click on this link to this article about how movies seem to be culturally 25 years behind pop music. It's how I earn my revenue: https://bitly.com/jHuiX0

"Do the Right Thing" was a film that I was so interested in a couple years ago that I read about it in my textbooks and from Roger Ebert. When the film finally became available on netflix, the problem with watching it was that I already knew all the plot details.

For those of you lucky enough to not make that mistake: "Do the Right Thing" takes place over the course of a summer day on a primarily African-American occupied street in Brooklyn that's experiencing a heat wave. Spike Lee said that he researched that studies show there's a lot more crime during heat waves. So both metaphorically and literally, simmering tensions escalate over the course of the day. Much of the action happens in an Italian-owned pizzeria where Spike Lee's character Mookie tries to keep the peace and remain the voice of reason among conflicts that brew in the neighborhood and the owners' two sons. Mookie's role as peace maker is doubled by an older drunkard out in the street (Ossie Davis) known as Da Mayor.

Da Mayor gives advice when no one asks for it and fancies himself a wise sage although he isn't respected as such. He tells Mookie to always do the right thing, but Mookie's too pragmatic to bother with such advice. He has to safeguard his younger sister from wandering eyes, provide for his son, keep the mentally challenged guy in his apartment along with his trouble-making friend (Giancarlo Esposito) from getting themselves in trouble.

Later in the film's climactic riot, Da Mayor does the right thing by trying to break up the ensuing fight. He accomplishes nothing, so does it matter? Afterward, Mookie takes the situation into his own hands to do something. Is Mookie's action (won't spoil it) the right thing? The title seems to suggest as much by virtue of the fact that it's the pivotal action in a movie called "Do the Right Thing."

The movie is not only open-ended on whether Mookie did the right thing, it doesn't clue us in on whether Mookie was attempting to do the right thing. He could have just reacted irrationally in the moment.

Whatever the case, the film leaves a lot of questions which I believe is what Spike Lee was going for. Lee is a very intelligent and well-spoken man who has practically carried the weight of the black community on his back for twenty years. He also gets a lot of crap from everyone (recently Clint Eastwood).

When this premiered, Lee was thoroughly sliced and diced by the critics. One criticism that stuck out to me was that he didn't offer any answers to racism. I imagine that if Lee went any further and had been so arrogant as to even suggest a solution, then he would have suffered even worse backlash. He served the material best by creating a piece of work that throws out more questions than it answers.

It's a movie that's almost impossible to watch and not be drawn into asking questions and reconsidering your point of view. The fact that people were so enraged and continue to be enraged at Spike Lee, shows that in this film and his career, he's doing the job he set out to do by opening up dialogue. Although it's a shame people don't choose to engage in civil dialogue (i.e. Eastwood's "He can shit his face" comment).

For example, I entered into a message board discussion about Radio Raheem where a poster was virulent that Raheem was nothing more than a disrespectful bum who didn't deserve to be saved and that because Lee expected us to sympathize with him, he was promoting reverse racism and therefore an idiot. There's a lot I could say in response to that, but the point is that Lee's intelligence and technical mastery shouldn't be so quickly dismissed and that knowing Spike's attention to detail when it comes to stereotypical images, Raheem's on-screen image might be more than meets the eye.

It's simply unfortunate that people on the other end aren't always willin

Thank you to several friends of my blog....

2011-06-07T13:17:00.001-07:00

I think I now understand the urgent need of Oscar winners to thank as many people as they can when they're on that podium: Because creatively collaborating with people is a wonderful experience.

Part of what has kept me going with this blog is the wonderful collaborations I've had with people. When I haven't been making money off the blog (although the money helps, so click on this article about the childhood origins of Sandra Bullock who comes from my hometown) to give me much needed link revenue) the social element has kept me going:

Here's a list of people I'm proud to say I know who have helped me along the way:
First off is my one and only sister Yasmine who was one of my very early avid readers At least, she began that way. I'll invite my sister to correct me if I'm wrong in the comment section, but I think her official stance is that she likes that I'm successful at blogging, but she hates the actual blog itself and no longer wishes to read it. This has been a great opportunity for me, as it allowed me to freely admit without guilt that I also hate her blog (it's a blog detailing the trials and tribulations of being pregnant as if she's the first person ever to go through it) and have since been off the hook for reading it.

Brian Ehrlich has contributed a couple of blog entries. He's a film student from Minnesota that I met at my niece's christening. He's just now finishing the first of his two degrees en route to being a teacher. I imagine if I had the brain power of all the people in Brian's classes I could create a superblog. Brian's a wonderful person to bounce ideas off.

Chris Schrack is also such a person. An undying fan of Tim Burton and David Lynch, Schrack is a budding filmmaker who's working on his second independent film from his home base in Fairfax, Va. who took film classes with me and is the reason I inexplicably have a page on imdb. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3312762/

My friend Nicholas Lazo, who I also know from film classes in college, has been generous enough to also contribute guest columns and provide insight into films. He was a directorial assistant on the Djimon Hotsou film "Never Back Down" and is currently in film school at USC.

I had another good friend, John Kaden, with aspirations to go to Hollywood some day. He settled in Virginia Beach after graduating college with me and has been a great motivator and a person to form ideas with.

My friend Eric Feldman, is a lawyer who was doing humanitarian work in Sri Lanka when we both discussed a mutual interest in writing comedy. We teamed up to write a sketch that was viewed and given a thumbs-up by Jake Hurwitz of the Jake and Amir web series and have been working on collaboration with comedy writing. Eric took sketch writing classes in New York City and has recently begun to get things published on the internet. Here's his travel blog on life in Sri Lanka and Geneva. It's dearlonelyplanet.blogspot.com.

Anthony Gullino is a Pittsburgh-based film buff who wrote for his school newspaper reviewing films at Dusquene University. In addition, he has a work history with the Pittsburgh Film Office (not sure if he's still working there). He recently restarted his blog, although I don't know where it is. He has contributed articles here.

Kristi Harrison, a mom of three in Idaho, who writes comedy for cracked.com has been a great voice of encouragement in my efforts to get published by cracked. She basically told me to try and try again when you get rejected and if I don't have thick skin, I'll never get anywhere. She is actually a very funny woman and her website is www.here-in-idaho.com. I wouldn't have been published on cracked without her help and given the cracked community a second chance either.

In college, I was fortunate enough to be in the same dorm my junior year as two entrepernuers who I'll just label Shy and C.O. The latter has a clothing line called Clockwise Clothing (@clockwiseclothing). The two have been unbelievably great friends and supporters over the years.

I was able to use my writing skills to collaborate with the former on his business idea for uboast.com in 2008 and one of the writers I hired for that project was a freelance writer from the Carolinas named Logan Stewart who offered great tips on how to freelance write and such. I almost met with her when she came to D.C. but our schedules were too busy. Either way, it's been a thrill learning from her because she was far more experienced than me at the time.

Another writer who is far more prolific than I am and has a much greater following than me is Nathaniel Rogers. He's New York based and is the official blogger for the Tribecca Film Festival and blogs a lot but isn't making enough in ad revenue to support his operation and I admire the way that he's upfront about his need for donations as he tries to streamline his operation so that it can get more monetized. He can be found at thefilmexperience.net.

I first found him on the AIM about two months out of college and into my first newspaper job reviewing films. I asked him if I could get away with writing a review on "Flags of Our Fathers" without actually watching the films and he snarled in disgust. A couple years later, I caught him on the AIM again, and he probably forgot me the first time because he responded to me more favorably, haha, and featured a couple of my articles. He's doing a pretty awesome new series on his blog where he interviews his readers and I'm currently trying to get interviewed by him (for fun, not self-promotion).

Eddie Copeland is a classical film buff who runs the website Eddieonfilm.blogspot.com. He was one of the first people I got in touch with.

Noel Murray is a writer for the AV Club who has given me some good advice as I try to expand and has been generous with his time. I remembered his name from a podcast I downloaded and noticed he was friends with another facebook friend and contacted him on a whim to ask about writing for that publication. That led to my applying for the AV Club which didn't lead to anything directly but it set a couple more doors in motion. Since then, I have recently come into contact with another AV Club writer named Ellen Wernecke who publishes for the AV Club as well as keeps her own blog and has been generous with her advice. She appears to be in the trenches just as much as I am fighting for readers. If you're a book person, her blog is http://lnvsml.blogspot.com/.

A third AV Club writer, Rowan Kaiser, is an up-and-coming Oakland-based writer. He reviews TV for the AV Club although his real passion, for some reason, is games. For reasons unknown, Rowan is almost always online and always eager to talk. He's like a rock star who handles every piece of fan mail personally. Rowan hates it when characters on TV get together romantically, so take heed sitcom writers: every time you hook up your two main writers come sweeps, you're alienating the most powerful TV critic in Oakland.

I also have made a number of connections on twitter including notorious Community defender Noel Kirkpatrick and Georgia State graduate student in moving image studies, who recently started the blog http://www.monstersoftelevision.com/. Another twitter correspondent, Christine Becker is a professor of Television Studies at Notre Dame who's been generous with advice and bashes my grammar. She runs a reference site called News for TV Majors.

Speaking of people of people who blast my grammar, one of my very early supporters North Carolina-based journalist Daniel Johnson.. He worked at an art house type theater in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and was a major champion of old-timey restoration theaters. He hated my mistakes in grammar as well as my audicity to call myself a writer without having seen every film the Coen Brothers and Scorsese ever made along with my unwillingness to drop what I was doing right there on the spot to watch their entire catalog. Still, he was a big supporter for a while and he can be found at filmbabble.blogspot.com.

Lastly, thanks to anyone I missed along with all my subscribers and readers.

Saw the last of 2010's Oscar Haul....

2011-05-31T12:14:00.000-07:00

I recently saw "Black Swan"(about 3 weeks ago, but it took me this long to getting to write about it) which means I’ve seen what I believe are the top 5 of 2010 by Oscar’s standards. I wish I could say for certain that "Inception" and not "The Fighter" would have made the short-list under a five picture system, so I’ll do the next best thing: Continue to refuse to see "The Fighter" and just call it as 5 for 6.

Why aren’t I watching "The Fighter"? I am highly uninterested in boxing movies. There have been too many boxing movies over the years with little variation and I’m not convinced I’ll be seeing anything remotely original. Even Mark Wahlberg admitted as much. Boxing is also just way too easy a venue for metaphors about the human spirit. He gets knocked down in the rink, like he gets knocked down in life, oohhhh, I can relate to that. It’s symbolism for second graders.

Now that I’ve seen each of the best picture contenders (the ones worth seeing), I feel I can comment on this race.

A quick summary: “The King’s Speech” is a crusty British film about the shenanigans of the royal family, which let’s admit: The British royal family has never been interesting. Largely removed from actual power, they’re function is mainly to smile and attend important functions, meet with important people and mug for the camera. I can’t be the first cultural commentator to notice that they’re parallel over here in the states is becoming Paris Hilton, the Khardashians, Lauren Conrad, etc.

Still, the British royal family is important in the cultural context of having grown up British. To them, the royal family is understandably important, and the dramatic arts community here has had a strong affinity for all things British, which is why such duds as “Cavalcade” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” “Billy Elliott” “The Queen” (arguably not that much of a dud), “The Madness of King George” “Shakespeare in Love” “Mrs. Miniver” and many, many more films have succeeded at the Oscars just because they had to do with something British.

The “Social Network” came along and said: Don’t vote for another stuffy British film again. Vote for a film about something hip and current, like the story of Facebook. “The King’s Speech” had the defense: Just because we’re a film about something very British, doesn’t mean we’re a stuffy British film or a bad film. Voters should still give us a chance.”In my opinion, both of these films were what they said they’d be. “Social Network” made a movie about something current and hip and could also qualify as artfully made. I had the reaction of admiring many of its elements: The editing, the score, Aaron Sorkin’s more restrained script, and the performance by Jesse Eisenberg (neither of the other two leads impressed me much at all) were all impressive. “King’s Speech” was about something stuffy but was less stuffy than I expected. I suppose that’s the best I can say about it. I won’t say the film didn’t succeed, but I’ve also largely forgotten about it by now, except for the particularly innovative performances of Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bohman Carter.

My reaction to “True Grit” on the other hand wasn’t intellectual like it was to the Social Network. I didn’t say to myself, “I’m impressed.” I just felt a sense of “wow, that was something.” It was a movie that moved me emotionally. This is very ironic when you consider that while the Coen Brothers have been referred to as “film scholars” and they’ve shown a somewhat perverted interest in copying genres and stripping them of the elements that have given them emotional resonance . “True Grit” has a sense of quirkiness to it, but it really cares about telling it’s story.

As for the other two films:
"Black Swan" is a film that is without a doubt the boldest, most experimental of the films. Aranofsky is a filmmaker with a distinctive style that’s adding something new to the conversation and for that he deserves reward. Even though I haven’t seen Wrestler (I hate wrestling films in addition to boxing films), I imagine that it’s the perfect marriage of the Wrestler’s profile of an artist with self-esteem issues plot motif with Requiem for a Dream’s general reality-bending trippiness. In some ways, I very much didn’t enjoy Black Swan, but it’s a shame it didn’t enter the conversation for Best Picture or Best Director. It also was very deserving of technical awards like editing and cinametography.

"Inception" was the best film of the year I saw. Whether it had too much exposition or not, it was endlessly fascinating and a highly intelligent piece of work. Like Black Swan, it broke from the norm and took viewers outside of their comfort zone. The cast also delivered pretty heavily. Everyone from Cillian Murphy to Joseph Gordon-Leavitt to Tom Hardy were all on the same page. Again, it's too bad it didn't enter the conversation as the race wore on.

Bits of Movie Trivia-MASH, Almost Famous, Rio Bravo, etc.

2011-05-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

Dove just discovered that every time I submit a trivia update on IMDB.com, it's recorded into an itemized history. This makes for a pretty easy blog entry. Here are some bits of trivia I've learned somewhere or other and contributed to the IMDB.com over the years.

Check out my 10-year retrospective on 2001 in film

Front Page (1974)- Billy Wilder felt that Chicago was the most exciting newspaper town in the country and as a result, this incarnation of The Front Page was the first to mention the city of Chicago by name and use actual Chicago newspapers.

X-Men (TV show)-Fox initially had a lot of resistance to the cartoon series before it became a success. They felt that the target audiences, kids under 10, wouldn't be interested in a romantic love triangle between Cyclops, Jean, and Wolverine. They also thought kids wouldn't keep up with a show that was serialized

Futurama (TV)-Billy West was inspired by Lou Jacobi's performance in the Diary of Anne Frank when he was creating the character of Zoidberg. He imagined Zoidberg to have Yiddish mannerisms because of the last name. He also said he was attracted to the idea of a doctor that was poor

Bullworth (1998)-1) Beatty was described by writing partner Jeremy Pikser and biographer Peter Biskind as so insecure about his script that he went to former collaborator Elaine May with the script. She told him it wasn't any good but Beatty suspected that because May was writing the script to a rival political satire, "Primary Colors," that she was looking out for her own interests.
2) Co-writer Jeremy Pikser described the experience of working with Beatty as frustrating. He was paid by the studio a lump sum per each draft produced and Beatty spent months working and reworking a single draft. Tired of being away from his family, Beatty's ego and the lack of pay, Pikser left the L.A. Office where he and Beatty were writing the script to return to his family in L.A. The two finished the rest of the process via telephone and fax.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)-The Boy Scouts of America did not allow their brand to be used from the film, so Jefferson Smith got changed from being a Boy Scout leader to being a "Boy Ranger" leader

Dogma (1999)-William Donahue of the Catholic League lambasted the film and publicly protested against it for months without actually seeing the film, after which his office called View Askew offices and said "Dr. Donohue requests a special screening of Dogma so that he can speak about it intelligently." Kevin's response was: "So what has he been doing the past six months?"

Seargent York (1941)-When the film was being made, America still had an isolationist position and Warner Brothers initially worried that the film would be condemned for being seen as too pro-war in attitude. Jesse Lasky went to great lengths to avoid marketing the film as a war picture. By the film's release, however, Hitler had conquered much of Europe and the public attitudes towards war changed greatly, helping Seargent York become one of the studio's biggest moneymakers on all time.

Rio Bravo (1959)-Hawks' instructions to Martin who showed up in an almost comical cowboy outfit on the first day of shooting were not to play a cowboy but just play a drunk.

MASH (1970)-The studio sent Robert Altman a memo in post-production that he found condescending and in retaliation he recorded the memo and played out over the movie
on one of the loudspeakers

Almost Famous (2000)-Cameron Crowe's mother appeared on the set for a cameo, and Crowe made every effort to keep her away from Frances McDormand, who was playing a character based on her, apart. This was so that McDormand's interpretation of the part wouldn't be swayed, but when he left the set for a few minutes on the first day
of shooting, he returned to find McDormand and his mom having lunch together.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)-
1) Sean Penn improvised during his takes and tried to find ways to aggravate the actor who played Mr. Hand, even off camera. He also did things to get genuine startled reactions from the extras who played his classmates through unexpected improvisations.
2) Nicholas Cage, 17 at the time, lied about his age so that he could get a part in the film.

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)-Writers Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson named several of the places and crewmembers in the film spontaneously on things and people they saw around them at the Italian restuarant where they did a lot of their consolidation with each other for the film. Pescapada Island, for instance was named for one of the dishes on the menu. Some of the characters' names are named after waiters and patrons at the restuarant.

Charlie Wilson's War (2007)-Charlie Wilson said in a USA Today article that he had no qualms about the film saying, "Anything I might have objected to was provable." He had just suffered from a heart attack but was able to make it to the red carpet premiere

Thunderball (1965)-When Ian Flemming wrote the novel, he had just suffered from a heart attack and was spending time in a health spa. This is most likely why the beginning of the film is set in a health spa

Lost in Translation (2003)-The redheaded lounge singer wasn't a professional actress, but rather the real-life lounge singer of the Hotel where the cast and crew were staying at, and they thought her performance of the Scarborough Fair fit the theme of the film so well, they asked her to be in the movie

My top 100 films of all-time 87-80

2011-05-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

I just interviewed the Washington D.C. Filmmaker of the Month and we discussed films shot in D.C., opportunities for local actors and The West Wing. Click here

My top 100 continued. I don't entirely have it mapped it out (I might be guilty of forgetting a film or misplacing a film), but let's see how this goes:

87. Three Kings (1999) directed by David O Russell, Starring George “Please stop writing magazine articles about this guy” Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice-T, Nora Dunn

I was heavily debating between this and "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" and felt an urge not to over-Clooney my list*. The film certainly isn’t a conventional war film or even a particularly patriotic one. Like MASH, this is a film of people who are apathetic to the war around them. More significantly, they’re bored which explains why they initially go on their adventure. The film also deepens in unexpected ways. The film is very gritty visually and doesn’t shy away from gore (it even gets creative with shots of internal organs) but it’s not overly crude just for the sake of being edgy.

86. Cat Ballou (1965) directed by Henry Hathaway, Starring Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin, Dwayne Hickman, Nat King Cole

I’m not sure if I’m becoming guilty of overloading my list with goofy pictures of no technical value other than they just make me smile, because like “In Like Flint” this might fall into that category as well. It’s got some pretty heavy comedic leanings, but it’s a solid adventure that’s just as kinetic as the most fun Western you can imagine. The film really is a perfect fit for Jane Fonda too.

I did once review this film years ago on my blog, so that should cover it.

85. Fisher King (1991) directed by Terry Gilliam, Starring Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruehl

Sometimes Gilliam gets lost in his own imagination and the effect can be that the story gets diluted through cartoonish characters and deviations from the plot. This is a shame because some of his stories are really great. This is one such great plot idea and it helps here that these are probably the four best acting performances I’ve seen in a Gilliam film. It’s a great fusion of solid drama with the abstract stylings of Gilliam’s bizarreness.

84. Seabiscuit (2003) directed by Gary Ross, Starring Jeff Bridges, Tobey Maguire, Chris Cooper, William H Macy, Elizabeth Banks

This is my one clichéd Disney story of an underdog entity winning against all the odds. I would rethink this corny period piece until I remember that the film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar so other people must have thought it was pretty good too. The production values are great, the source material is converted to cinematic effect, and the acting is tremendous (I remember thinking: man, that actress who plays the wife should get nominated for an Oscar. She didn’t but she was Elizabeth Banks and became famous later). Also, it does have some very bittersweet undertones despite being a film made for no other reason than to stir up inspirational feelings.

83. Rain Man (1998) directed and written by Barry Levinson, Starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman

I generally don’t think a film can be considered great solely on the basis of one performance. “Rain Man” comes close. Hoffman is a fascinating character but Tom Cruise doesn’t get enough credit for his role even though he acts like Tom Cruise for the first half of the movie. While it’s a story about two people with very rigid temperaments changing (one because he’s biologically incapable, and one because he’s “a prick” in his own words) for the better.

82. Goldfinger (1964) directed by Guy Hamilton, based on the book by Ian Flemming, starring Sean Connery, Gert Forbe, Harry Sakada, Honor Blackman, Los Maxwell, Shirley Eaton, Cec Linder, Bernard Lee

Embodies the best of everything that you associate with James Bond: Beautiful scenery, ornate lairs, diabolical villains, creative technology, sexy women, and a convoluted plan for world domination. There’s not much more to say. Last time a James Bond film came out pre-Daniel Craig era, I found it amusing to see the reviews because there really isn’t much to say about a Bond film. You basically just check off a list of elements because as complex as the stories are, it’s mostly an excuse for the elements.

81. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), dir. Rob Altman, starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjoinis, Keith Carradine, William DeVane

This film is basically a response to the other Westerns of its time. It’s not really a great film on its own, because you have to see at least a couple other classic Westerns to really appreciate the way that this film turns those conventions on their head. It’s definitely a film worth watching a second time, if only for the fact that you’re not going to get everything anyone’s saying. It’s also a piece with a lot of symbolism that sort of pieces together in a thinky kind of way.

80. Goodfellas (1990), Martin Scorsese, written by Nicholas Pileggi, starring Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco

I'd probably characterize my reaction to this film as a classic that I agree is worthy of being a classic. Other people call this the most influential film of the 1990’s or whatever. I won´t say that´s untrue but I have no idea why, so if anyone wants to correct me about that in the comments. Didn´t Scorsese make other mob films? I just see it as a very good film within an already existin genre.

On a recent poll of best supporting actor winners of all time, I ranked Pesci #1 (& Waltz #2). To me the film is most notable for Pesci's performance and the very organic character change from Henry Hill, the relatively morally straight teenager who admired the local hoodlums, to a ruthless man and almost entirely unsympathetic character.

Great films I just don't get-Starting with A Fish Called Wanda

2011-05-07T08:12:00.001-07:00

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Just saw A Fish Called Wanda for the second time. This film is considered a classic and I thought it was OK the first time I saw it several years ago, but I found the film really flawed on second viewing.

The film is a combination heist thriller and romantic comedy. The romance is between an entirely irredeemable woman (Jamie Lee Curtis, who I've personally never found very attractive) and pretty much every other member of the all-male ensemble who she seduces as a fall-black plan every time something goes wrong. Not only is Curtis' character unsympathetic, she's uninteresting.

Her main love interest is a British barrister (aka lawyer with a wig) played by John Cleese. She's playing him so that she can get the inside scoop on a case he's trying. Although there's sappy music playing in the background during their scenes together, any sediment here is unearned: Cleese's character loses all credibility by not seeing through a hot young woman (who just happens to be a defense witness) posing as a groupie who wants to discuss details of his upcoming depositions during their lovemaking. He's also irredeemable himself as he renegs on a gift from his wife and then leaves her (along with his daughter) for a woman who is obviously a fraud.

What's worse, even though the movie's clearly a dark comedy, I don't think the film's flimsy romantic subplot was intended in any ironic way either.

One of the other subplots involves another one of the baddies trying to kill off an old lady who's a witness. It's completely predictable that nothing will happen to her because she's really sweet and this particular guy (Michael Palin) is a softie, so those scenes are a waste of time.

The film does have a couple high points. Although he's a little too mean-spirited to be endearing, Kevin Kline creates a character that's certainly amusing to watch. He's Curtis' main lover and is passed off as Curtis' brother for some reason (so she can screw more people) and he has a good running gag of blowing up completely and ruining everything when someone calls him stupid. Michael Palin, as a stutterer who loves animals, also brings something enjoyable every time he's on screen.

The film has some great scenes but as a film, I think it falls apart.

Other films considered classics that I'm not a fan of:
The Incredibles-This Pixar film that parodies superhero conventions is something I saw five years earlier in "Mystery Men" and a year later in "Sky High." I'm sure there are other examples too that I just can't think of at the moment, but "Sky High" (even though it fits squarely in the teeny-bopper genre) and "Mystery Men" are just as astute as "Incredibles" to me.
For a studio that is considered a hallmark of originality, "Incredibles" really didn't bring that much new to the superhero parody genre.

Viva Zapata-Considered one of the better films of legendary director Elia Kazan, the film tells the story of Emiliano Zapata, one of the heroes and key figures driving the Mexican Revolution as told through one of its heroes, Emiliano Zapata. The film isn't entirely accurate, but it's also oversimplified and hard to follow, so you likely won't even be able to notice those inaccuracies anyway. Besides, I get the impression that Kazan doesn't care much about the Mexican revolution. The film's purpose, as far as I can tell, is to give Kazan's prize pupil, Marlon Brando, an opportunity to flex his acting with dramatic speeches on how he wants to freedom, and later how he doesn't want to fight anymore, or how he wants a pinata that matches his sombrero- I stopped caring after a while.

Annie Hall-Considered Woody Allen's best film. I've never seen a romantic comedy and wished that it was good but it needed a Momento-style fracturing of the storyline to make it great. The film attempts to be clever and it really just feels like a stream-of-consciousness first draft of a better film. Woody Allen did experiment a lot with the conventional love story and some of those restuls are very good. I suppose a few misses are aloud along with the hits and we each have different definitions for what hits are. I'm just surprised so many have gotten behind this one as "the hit."

All That Jazz, 8 1/2 and The Doors-Sympathetic portraits of rock stars who had more sex and fame than most of us will dream of who we're supposed to feel bad for? Films about highly successful artists should at least attempt to bring them down to Earth so we can relate to their struggles and I found myself not really caring about why they caused their self-inflicted reckless behavior. A good film in this genre ("Ray" or "Walk the Line" comes to mind) treats the character like they're interesting stories.

These three films reek of vanity: be interested in their predictable problems, because they're famous people you know and love and want to know more about them. "8 1/2" reeks of vanity because it's autobiographical. "All that Jazz" is borrowed from the template of 8 1/2. It's probably the most promising of the three films (although 8 1/2 is the most praised): Roy Scheider does well in the part and it has a few interesting motifs.

Expecting me to like "The Doors" is pretty much the same as expecting me to subscribe to "Rolling Stone" magazine and worship rock stars like the magazine does. "The Doors" is even worse than those Oscar bait films about a guy with some disability who's limited in life, because this is a guy who's just inflicting his own wounds for the hell of it. It's the difference between the degree of sympathy we feel towards Charlie Sheen verse Temple Grandin.

The Graduate-Not a particularly bad film, but not a film that isn't great either. It's got great performances, no doubt, but it's just about a guy screwing his dad's friend's wife. It's a little bit of a stretch to say it's a big symbolic statement about the 60's. The filmmakers themselves said that the cross symbol at the Church scene was entirely by accident (I'll have to double-check but I believe that's the case)

Heaven can Wait and Shampoo-If Heaven can Wait is a best picture nominee, then I absolutely agree with Ricky Gervais: Ghost Town (or "Heart and Soul" or "Ghost Dad", take your pick) got robbed of a best picture nomination too. It's just a lightweight relatively fun film.
"Shampoo" is really a film about nothing except how studly and charismatic Warren Beatty is and how his politics and problems are interesting. Oh, and it was written by Warren Beatty himself. Nothing against Beatty (he comes from my hometown) but the guy's overrated. He's basically got one go-to move as an actor: shrugging his shoulders like the world is too hard for him. I don't think the quality of his films would be damaged that much if Matt LeBlanc replaced Beatty in every role he played.

The Queen-David Spade, when he was the anchor of "The Showbiz Show" said it best: This was a film that boiled down to about whether to read a press release or not.

The "Pinky" Controversy and Race Theory

2011-05-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

Thank you to all the new subscribers. I promised you all no more than 5 or 6 e-mails a month, but I'm just becoming more and more productive lately on the writing front. Click here for a Fun 10-Question Film Industry Quiz

I've read a couple books (Reel to Real by Bell Hooks and Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks by Donald Bogle) that examine movies from an African-American perspective and they spend the book finding a reason to criticize every single movie and be critical of absolutely everything.

According to one book, Whoopi Goldberg did a lot for the image of black people by showing strong empowered characters on screen, but oh no, she was usually not romantically paired with anyone in films, which sends the message that empowered African-Americans can't find love. The other book doesn't take exception to whether Goldberg's characters were paired romantically, but said the opposite of the first: Whoopi Goldberg bowed to white expectations by infusing too much colloquial dialogue into her films. And I kid you not: another book says that the dance scene between Goldberg and Demi Moore being switched for Patrick Swayzee in "Ghost" was a crack at how uncomfortable whites are at depicting blacks in lesbian relationships.

I absolutely applaud looking at films from a racially critical perspective, but a lot of these African-American critics are so damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't with anything, that why even try to make a racially conscious film if you're not Spike Lee?

I look at this great Elia Kazan film I just recently watched from a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't perspective. The film features the trials and tribulations of a light-skinned half-black woman (known as Patricia in the North and Pinky back home) as she goes back to her only surviving relative (her black grandmother) after graduating from nursing school in the North.

Complaints about the movie center around the fact that Pinky is played by an entirely white woman and that the filmmakers were too cowardly to cast a woman of color.

I choose to applaud the fact that the film was more progressive than films of its era.
By Jeannie Crain playing the part of the white character, it helped make the film marketable to white audiences. White people would see the film because Jeannie Crain was starring in it and the message would be spread to them whether they liked it or not. There were plenty of films showing black people being abused and they never reached mainstream white America, and I think the subset of the population that would have been enlightened by seeing the film, is also the same subset of the population that wouldn't bother seeing the film if it just starred Ethel Walters and Lena Horne. Why go through all that expense to make a socially conscious film if you're just preaching to the choir?

I also think seeing Jeannie Crain as a black person really drives the point home about how inane racism is. As Julian Bond, NAACP president once said race is a political construct, you often have more in common with someone of a different race genetically than you do of someone in your own race. I've already seen movies of black people being abused, but I've never seen a film of a person of Jeannie Crain's color being abused like a black person.

I admit, I wish they put her in a tanning salon or made some effort to make her a little bit darker, but there are probably some half-black people of her level of pigmentation out there. Putting in an actual mulatto woman who wasn't as famous as Jeannie Crain and couldn't draw in as many people would have been counter-productive, don't you think?

Passage to India Review

2011-05-02T00:36:00.000-07:00

David Lean’s films are epics, which I would define as at least a half hour longer than they need to be. The plot and storyline meanders but if it’s a good plot, you’re in for a grand adventure. It’s like National Geographic meets Shakespeare. The films tell dramatic stories while taking you on a journey to an exotic place, whether it’s the deserts of Arabia, the jungles of Southeast Asia, or the frigid winters of Russia on the eve of revolution.

In this case of “A Passage to India,” it’s a story about the grandeur of India (circa 1928) and the racial prejudice, national loyalty and sexual repression that lurks underneath. At the start of the film, the plot centers on the bonding between the fiancée and the mother (known only as Mrs. Moore) of a stuffy colonial magistrate as they form similar anti-establishment attitudes. They both want to “see the real India” and they don’t approve of the insular attitudes of the whites towards the natives. A college professor is sympathetic to their cause and arranges a luncheon with an Indian colleague (Alec Guinness in brown face) of his as well as a local doctor. The doctor proposes they go on a trip to the caves where trouble happens. The doctor and the betrothed Mrs. Quested get separated from the group where something happens in the cave (we’re not shown what) and the doctor is accused of rape.

The interesting thing about Lean’s films are that they’re too big for any one character. By the third act, the film isn’t even really about Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Quested, or the stuffy magistrate but rather the bonds of trust between the doctor and the college professor trying to see that justice is served to him.

The “what happened in the cave” mystery is one of those “Was the top spinning or not?” moments that makes the audience engage with the material and ask questions. It points the way to some complex symbolism (I’ve gotten a whole new appreciation for the film after seeing explanations from various message boards) and shows the film really has a lot to say and wonderfully subtle ways of expressing them.

If I can level one criticism, there were characters in the film who were boorish and apathetic to the British-Indian inequality and a very few liberal-minded people and almost nothing in between. If Mrs. Moore had the ability to look at the situation and see this is wrong, why was her own son (you'd think they'd share some of the same values) so distanced from that viewpoint that he couldn't even fathom it? If Fielding had a rational awareness of racism, he seemed to be the only one in the club. When society got progressive enough to realize slavery was wrong, even the ones who owned slaves could fathom the other side's argument. It felt like in this film, Fielding and his two friends were just living amongst zombies.

Shadow of a Doubt review

2011-04-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

Hey Friends. I'm excited to announce two articles in the pipeline for publication at the great website www.toptenz.net as well as an upcoming interview with Chris Gethart.
Be sure to cick on my artice 20 Greatest Actor/Director Pairings of All Time. I think it's one of my better ones

Here's a review of a Hitchcock film "Shadow of a Doubt" and how it's a product of its era:
So many Hitchcock films are great in their own right, that a lot of the films beyond “Birds,” “Psycho,” “North by Northwest,” “Rear Window,” “Rebecca” (only because it won Best Picture) and “Vertigo” easily get lost in the shuffle.

Shadow of a Doubt is another uniquely great film of Hitchcock that is definitely worth watching. It made a strong impression on me as a child and I only recently rediscovered it. The film features Joseph Cotton (primarily known for appearing alongside Orson Welles in “Third Man” and “Citizen Kane”) and Teresa Wright.

Cotton plays a serial killer by the name of Charlie with a need to lay low, so he crashes with his sister and her family for a while. His sister’s oldest child (Wright) is also named Charlie and feels a special connection to her uncle because she’s named after him and she’s also just plain bored with her parents. Like those Disney heroines who sing about how they can’t fully blossom into adulthoods under the boring old status quo, she philosophically muses about how her parents just don’t get life in a somewhat meandering monologue that’s obviously designed solely to justify her later attachment to Charlie. He would be the Prince Charming if we go with the Disney analogy and if that sounds kind of creepy because he’s they’re related, it sort of is. Relative to the usual levels of Freudian undertones you find in Hitchkock, the pairing can safely be read as just an innocent relationship between a girl and her favorite uncle.

In fact, I’d call this Hitchkock’s most innocent film in some ways. The film was released in 1943. This was right around the time that American cinema was being heavily encouraged to produce homespun American films (i.e. Mrs. Miniver, Going My Way, Meet me in St. Louis) to encourage the nation why America was so special and worth fighting for. I really see similarities here. I think it was Judy Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft who said on one of the AFI specials that “Meet me in St Louis” is such a great film because you just want to live there. I felt the exact same way about this film. The Newton household (and the town of Santa Rosa, for that matter) is a very charming and attractive place even though there’s a serial killer living in it. It helps put you at ease that he’s not really actively killing people while staying there. The signs of malice in Charlie don’t really manifest themselves into anything dangerously until well over halfway through the film which gives Hitchcock plenty of time to spend in a dreamy Vincente-Minelli-like world where we witness young Charlie meet her young friends in the park or the family engaging in the kind of dinners together that might have even been rare back then.

It’s a great film because this makes it all the more jarring when Cotton’s Uncle Charlie finally unleashes some of his murderous proclivities at the sweet, innocent niece. The drama creeps up on you but it’s a doozy.

How do I honestly look at the 1990's?

2011-04-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

In order to make my top 100 List or for any discussion on films in the 1990's period, it's near impossible to look at that decade with any objectivity and I thought it was worth discussing that because we all are children of one decade or another, aren't we?

The 90's was when I grew up. My movie diet during the 90's was a very different regiment than it is now.

One of the very first films I fell in love with was "Batman Forever" which has been eloquently torn apart all over the internet since. It's now remembered as the omen before the storm that was "Batman and Robin." While the performances of Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones would seem like overacting to adult eyes, they were larger-than-life to my 11-year old eyes. "Batman Returns" was too scary and dark for me but "Batman Forever" was bright and colorful and the violence was playful rather than just violent. Of course, if you're desensitized to violence, you would be dissapointed. Still, I can't say "Batman Forever" wasn't one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life.

I remember watching "Home Alone" and loving it, but it was hard to retain that love after watching it at least 10 times. Watching Home Alone was the go-to activity for any summer camp on a rainy day or any teacher without a lesson plan.

I had the same experience with the "The Lion King" which I remember watching it 3 times in one day in school. My homeroom teacher, my science teacher (same as my homeroom teacher) and my drama teacher all had their classes watch the same film. Talk about overload. Then a month later, I went to visit my aunt and uncle whose 2-year old daughter watched that movie all the time. When they took us on a big yacht trip, we got so seasick and had to be put down in the galley. To take our mind off our seasickness, my aunt put in a movie but the only thing they had was the Lion King, so it was the worst thing ever. I just wanted to throw up from seasickness and to make it worse, I was watching this film, I had recently watched 3 times and had practically memorized the Lion King by then.

I also grew up thinking all the great films involved sports and dogs. "Oliver and Company" "Homeward Bound" "All Dogs Go to Heaven" were some of my early movie-going experiences. I don't know if this is still the case today with kids' films but "Cool Runnings" "Iron Will" "Sandlot" "League of their Own" "Rookie of the Year" "The Air Up There" and "Mighty Ducks" were among the defining films of my childhood and they all revolved around sports.

If there were great films going on at the time like "Crying Game" "In the Name of the Father" "Howard's End" or "Ed Wood", I was pretty unaware of them and watching them in retrospect isn't the same as being there in the moment. It's true that argument applies to any film before the 90's too, but there's much more distance from a classic film so that we appreciate it as a classic. 90's films are still looked at through the same paradigm as films of the 00's which I'm much more familiar with.

Click on this link, please, to my column at examiner: bit.ly/ghxKrW

Harvey and Year of Living Dangerously

2011-04-17T21:22:00.001-07:00

2 More film reviews:
Also reviewed Network and 12 Angry Men here

I watched both of these films in an effort to keep up with supporting actresses in my supporting actress survey (click on supporting actress tag below):

Harvey (1950)
Harvey is a very uplifting and sweet film based around the peculiarly conceived notion that a man, Elmer, imagines himself to be in the presence of a 6-foot bunny rabbit. The film works well because the storyline makes some clever shifts. The film’s first act is about a mix-up in which Elemer’s sister Vetta accidentally gets locked up in a mental institution instead of her crazy brother. The second act centers around the rabid pursuit of Elmer after his sister is freed. In the third act they finally catch him, but convincing the doctors and themselves that he’s crazy is a whole other battle.

Josephine Hull won an Oscar (Supporting Actress) as the fussy sister who's somewhat of a social climber and hopes to marry her daughter off to a respectable man. James Stewart was also nominated as Elmer. The fact that you hardly notice that he keeps inviting people to dinner and that later becomes a significant plot point is what I think is most clever about this film: Elmer's sweetness really sneaks up on you.

The film isn't as much chaotic fun as a comedy like "Arsenic and Old Lace" or "His Girl Friday" but I found it very endearing. It had a great message about how people who are different or "crazy" might really be very valuable to the people around them if we stop to open our eyes.

Year of Living Dangerously:
When some middling reviews came out on “The Way Back,” there was some quote in the press (too lazy to look it up at the moment) that it was a big surprise because people felt that Weir never made a bad film. As far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty accurate. I’ve seen four Peter Weir films to date-Truman Show, Dead Poets’ Society, Witness, and Master and Commander-and they all rank among the best films I’ve ever seen. Weir was hired to direct “Witness” because making a film about the Amish needed to be treated with great cultural sensitivity and it was assumed that as an Australian, he’d approach their way of life as an outsider.

The same can be said for “Year of Living Dangerously” which makes a noble attempt not to look at the 3rd World through Western eyes. The story’s protagonist is Guy (Mel Gibson) an Australian reporter on assignment to cover political tensions in Indonesia. He’s greeted at the airport by an eager local photographer, Billy (played in an Oscar-winning gender-switching performance by Linda Hunt), who strikes up a professional partnership and serves as a local guide. As tensions rise and the country becomes closer towards violent revolution, so does the relationship strain between Billy and Guy. Part of that strain between them is over a complex triangle of affections between the two and an enigmatic attaché at the British Embassy played by Sigourney Weaver. More importantly, Billy questions whether Guy came to the country with intention of helping the people of Indonesia or exploiting them.

The film is beautifully shot, features excellent performances from the three leads, and is very well-paced.

Film Review: Johnny Belinda

2011-04-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

Hey Guys, I have watched a lot of movies recently (nothing new, just older stuff) and in a burst of inspiration, I got back into my film reviewing groove for the first time in a while.
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Johnny Belinda (1948):

Thiz film is the tale of an ostracized deaf girl, Belinda (Jane Wyman), in a remote corner of the world who finds hope through a caring doctor. The good doctor (Lew Ayres) is new in town and despite the her father’s inability to pay (living with his sister, he’s one of the poorer residents of the town), he teaches her sign language.

It’s an uplifting and engaging story, but it does take some surprisingly dark turns for a movie from 1948. For instance, Belinda gets raped and impregnated. I would have expected slightly more repercussions over the rape thing. It’s the kind of non-derivative plot point I admire that after Belinda is raped, the doctor convinces the dad not to direct his energy towards anger at the mystery perpetrator but rather towards comforting the daughter and it shows how strong Belinda is that she’s never let herself get caught up in victimhood too much. Still, the film rushed things a little too fast when Belinda’s emotional trauma from the incident seems to be cured over the course of a single conversation and a suggestion by the doctor that they go into town. It also seemed like a very plausible and worthwhile idea to go after the rapist. Although he eventually got his, it was a little disconcerting that the villain
went unpunished for so long in the movie.

The strength of the film is in the relationships between Belinda, her aunt, her dad and the doctor. Although the young woman develops closer bonds with her father (Charles Bickford) and Aunt (Agnes Moorehead) through her maturation, it’s really about the relationship between the young woman and the doctor (Lew Ayres) if we’re going by who gets top billing in the opening credits. Their relationship definitely straddles the line between platonic and romantic love. In the middle of the film, the doctor suggests to the dad he marry the daughter to save her the shame of being a single mother, but the dad says that it’s no use if he doesn’t love her. It doesn’t seem that particularly evident that he’s later willing to marry her except for economic necessity (there’s one sort of half-kiss between them) and, ironically, that doesn’t take anything away from the film’s storybook ending.

Jane Wyman won a well-deserved Oscar for the film as Belinda even though she didn’t speak a word on screen. She’s the first husband of Ronald Regan and their marriage was being strained at the time because both of their acting careers had plateaued. Wyman’s marriage was already through by the time she won the Oscar, but winning did give her plenty of consolation after a reportedly rough year. Also, Agnes Moorehead slept with JFK (and famously spilt the beans that he wasn’t a good lover) which means two actresses in this film had sex with presidents. Bit of trivia for you.

One other thing that strikes me about this film is that it’s set in Nova Scotia, Canada, but it seems like some of the actors and actresses weren’t informed of this, because they’re talking in Irish accents.

Updating my Top 100: 100-88

2011-04-14T17:51:00.001-07:00

While top 10 lists are pretty attainable to keep in your head, it's near impossible to really keep a Top 100 although somewhere in my archives I did tackle the task of trying to create the top 100 films I've ever watched.

I decided recently to try redrafting it, since I've seen many more films and my take on films has changed as I've gone along. The first time I ever made a top 100 list was in 2003 (the cut was a much lowered bar: films like Cool Runnings and Aspen Extreme made it) and because a) it really is hard to squeeze all the new films into 100 and b) films need some time to age, I'm going to go with greatest films up to 2003. A lot of the newer films are just going to surface in the bottom ranks of the list just because comparing classic films and recent films are like apples and oranges.

This entry was tiring and I'm not sure if I'll make it all the way to one even though I have the list written out. Leave comments and click on my links and I might be inspired to continue!

100. Cider House Rules, 1999, dir. by Lasse Holstrom, starring Tobey MaGuire, Michael Caine, Jane Alexander, Charlize Theron, Kathy Baker, Paul Rudd
A beautifully shot coming-of-age period piece that my coworker at Blockbuster made fun of me for liking and that I'm still ashamed to say that I have a lot of reverence for. It's not necessarily a profound film and if Miramax succeeded in getting the film an Oscar win over Dreamwork's American Beauty (fresh off the heels of Saving Private Ryan vs Shakespeare in Love, the two were engaged in a fierce marketing battle) then there might really be reason to hate this film. Nevertheless, it is a good film.

99. You Can Count on Me, 2000, dir. and written by Kenneth Longorean, starring Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, John Tenney
I always group this one with "Wonder Boys" and "Almost Famous" as very honest character-driven pieces that came out in the same yaer, and I could easily exchange this with "Almost Famous." It's a film about how little of an adult you feel like when you're in the presence of your adult sybling. Laura Linney plays a "responsible" single mom and Ruffalo plays the "irresponsible" brother coming for a visit. Both characters are full of doubt about themselves in different ways and the way in which these two lost souls intersect on this visit is very moving.

98. 25th Hour, 2002, dir. Spike Lee, starring Ed Norton, Rosario Dawson, Barry Pepper, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox, Anna Paquin
It's been a somewhat frustrating experience originally liking and championing this film when it first came out and then watching it get praised in retrospect for all the wrong reasons. When publications such as The AV Club, RogerEbert.com, Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine and others came out with Best Films of The Decade list* 25th Hour seemed to come at the top of many of these lists because a lot of people wrongly hailed this film as the definitive cinematic artifact of 9/11. In truth, it has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 except that Spike Lee filmed it in New York right after the event and you can see the buildings missing in the skyline in the background. I like 25th Hour because it's a film with a great sense of dramatic tension, with the story taking place over just one night, and I think the characters are taken in very interesting directions. It's also very well-acted.

*I don't have the time to look up specifically which ones named it so high. I believe AV Club had it listed at #2 and Roger Emerson of Roger Ebert ran a poll in which 25th Hour placed pretty high for the wrong reasons.

97. Sunshine State, 2002 dir. John Sayles, starring Angela Bassett, Alan Rickman, Mary Steenburgen, Edie Falco, Timmothy Hutton, James McDaniel, Gordon Clapp, Jane Alexander

I love good ensemble films and I love films that have a great sense of place. There's also no place I love more than Florida which is what this film is about. It's about a seaside town is an unrealized slice of paradise to a lot of people. The beachside town has historical significance for the black residents because it represented a civil rights victory enabling them to get a "piece of the beach." From that subpopulation, a woman forced into exile through a teen pregnancy (Bassett) and the much more succesful ex-NFL player who impregnated her are both returning to town because a decision has to be made as to whether to sell their land to make way for a new development. In the meantime, there's a seaquarium mermaid entertainer who's bored to death of living in the same town too long (Falco) and a tightly wound spokeswoman for the new development freaking out that no one's sharing her enthusiasm (Steenburgen) and failing to notice that her husband is repeatedly attempting suicide (Clapp).

96. Our Man Flint, 1966, starring James Coburn, Lee J. Cobb, Gila Gollan

It's difficult to quantify just why this is a great film except by the measure that I've watched it over and over and over and still enjoyed it. It's camp, which I previously wrote (in my post about Glee and the 1960's Batman show) is something you enjoy because it's consciously bad. The film is a parody of James Bond films that is played straight in a way, but is ultimately very silly and I find the film both hillarious and very classy. The actor, James Coburn (Great Escape among other films), was a very slender actor who stood out for me in the films I saw him and like the actor who played James Bond he won an Oscar well after his superhero days. He won in 1998 and was a very pudgy old man when he appeared on the podium to accept*.

*I saw his acceptance speech only in retrospect

95. Birth of a Nation, 1915, dir. by DW Griffith, starring Lillian Gish
This film prompts an interesting debate: It's undoubtedly a historic artifact, being the first major epic, the first silent film to tell a story, the first movie that approached feature length, and a number of other firsts. It's also a very racist and misguided film that helped launch the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan. I omitted this film the last time I made my list but I recently reconsidered because the film has great historical value. More importantly, there's just a certain magic existent in it: you're watching the experience of right and wrong change right from under your eyes.

94. Catch Me If You Can, 2002 dir. by Stephen Spielberg, starring Leo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Amy Adams, Martin Sheen, Jennifer Garner, Ellen Pompeo
I thought it was a great time capsule and one of many great examples of how Spielberg's films are always solid stories that rarely dissapoint. Beware, there are always a lot of Spielberg haters out there.
Link to a review

93. X-Men 2, 2003, dir. by Bryan Singer, starring Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Famke Jannsen, Hugh Jackman, Brian Cox, Alan Cumming, Halle Berry, Shawn Ashmore, James Marsden, Anna Paquin, Kelly Hu, Rebecca Rojmain

I wasn't a comic book geek growing up. Of the few superhero series I was exposed to as a kid, X-Men was one of my enthusiastic favorites and I was delighted to see the cartoon (or rather the comic) translated cinematically so well. X-Men 2 was superior to the first in working the kinks out. I've enjoyed the scientific bent, the realistic modern tone, the sleek visuals and the great special effects. Most importantly, the cast is incredible.

92. Evita 1996 dir. Alan Parker, starring Madonna, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce

I remember watching this in a movie theater when I was in 8th grade. I was in my third year of Spanish and I have always had an interest in Latin Ameircan culture and history (I later took courses on Latin American history and geography in college) but I was dissapointed with this film because they almost never spoke. I didn't know the difference between a musical (songs interspersed with dialogue) and an opera (all songs) back then. This film has grown a lot more on me in subsequent viewings. One of the few Non-Disney musicals to be made in the 25 or so years prior to the genre's return with "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago", this film wins me over for its great musical numbers and because it's rich in historical context. Although it's merely song and dance, the film has almost as much to say about the period as a history textbook.

91. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962 dir. Robert Mulligan, starring Gregory Peck, Robert Duvall, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford

I was struggling with placement here and whether to put this at all. The film is ranked 58th on imdb and it's on the AFI top 100, so others haven't hesitated to list this as a classic. My brief conflct, aside from taking up a space on the list, was that the book (which I've personally read) itself is a masterpiece. Is this just something to watch if you're too lazy to read the book? I think in this case, the performances elevate it. Gregory Peck competed against Peter O'Toole of "Lawrence of Arabia" and won at the Oscars, and it was because he took an iconic figure and made it his own (O'Toole did the same thing too, to be fair). I also do like a good courtroom drama (even though I detest lawyers and being in court).

90. Master and Commander, 2003 dir. Peter Weir, starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany
In a way, this movie is the best historical epic I've ever seen because even though it doesn't serve the story, it serves history. For example, in a story set in the Napoleonic Wars on the high seas (where every minute of this film takes place) we would naturally be looking forward to seeing exciting naval battles amd while we do get our share of exciting naval action, we mostly experience the HMS Surprisespending their time waiting and trying to maintain their sanity so that when a battle actually does come, you realize the magnitude of it. The human element of the movie, the multi-layered friendship between Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, doesn't disspaoint either

89. Wait Until Dark, dir. Terrence Young, starring Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin

Audrey Hepburn is such a sweet, precious concoction that it's hard to imagine her in a thriler. That is, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to kill her. In "Charade" (which also makes my list), the villains are so quirky and (even cute in a Looney Tunes kind of way) that you never really feel like she's in danger. Wait Until Dark is a great thriller that really does push that line. The film is also very minimalist in its use of space. Audrey Hepburn plays a blind women and the film takes place almost entirely in her apartment. As the audience, we are privy to more than she is and are given the point of view of the villains. A pair of thieves willing to kill for a valuable stash of trafficked drugs in Hepburn's possession. With their mark being blind, they set up their ruse in our plain sight. It's a brilliantly suspenseful film

88. Gangs of New York, 2002 dir. Marty Scorsese, starring Leo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson, Jim Broadbent, John C Reilly, Brendan Gleason, Gary Lewis
Review Here

Stand-up comic declares war on the internet!

2011-04-08T09:21:00.001-07:00

Chris Gethard is a stand-up comic and comedic actor. He's currently making the rounds of the comedy scene in New York City through stints at the UCB Theater, appearance in internet videos and guest stars on TV shows.

However, Gethard hasn't caught my attention for his acting. He's caught my attention (and the attention of a few others including Dan O'Brien at cracked.com this morning) for his curiosity about how internet anonymity brings out the worst in people and his creative attempts to be proactive about it.

One of the commenters on his imdb page decided to post something really nasty about Gethard and Gethard tracked the commenter down and flew him to New York for an interview on his youtube channel:

Chris Gethard is a comedian by profession, but in this video, he's not going for humor. He's acting as a social scientist, and perhaps with this video he's creating an artifact of Web 2.0, that seems as valuable to me as any book put out there by 98% of professors who lecture in media, new media, technology and culture, sociology, and the like. He's really getting to the heart of the negative effects of the internet.

In another similar "sociological experiment" Chris did a comedy routine on youtube and collegehumor.com's video feed in front of a live audience in which he talked about his experience with commenters on the collegehumor.com website. The fact that he performed it in front of a live audience is significant here. Comics like to point out the deficiencies of the world around us so their act often demonstrates how dumb a person is or how dumb a group of people are. In the video, he's making the live audience laugh by pointing out how dumb the collegehumor.com commenters are and because the live audience isn't really the target of his jokes, it works comedically. But his larger audience is the people watching his routine through collegehumor.com and he's downright attacking them. He goes on to provoke them further at the end of the routine to give them his worst and he'll even go on the message boards themselves and respond to it.

I checked the message board myself and the fact that Chris called them out didn't alter their behavior that much. These people, who might be perfectly civilized adults in real life, knew that this comic was going to read their comments and they still posted terrible things. It's to Chris's credit that he directly showed me how these people really had lost it. It's also to Chris's credit that because of his experiment, I understood how bad it would feel to read all these hurtful comments and how cruel people can be to anyone who gets put involuntarily or voluntarily put in front of any kind of spotlight where they're exposed to strangers. If Chris had a PhD in front of his name, he might be published somewhere for something like this. Who knows?

How much Chris is personally affected or bothered by the problem isn't something I'm sure of but there are some stars who aren't particularly geared towards fame and act rather unusually towards some of its trappings. Some people (3 very very random examples: Kanye West, skier Bode Miller in the 2006 Olympics, Greta Garbo) don't react to media and fame in ways that their press agents would be proud of. They get caught up in what the public at large thinks of them and trying to rebel against it. Chris, in a way is one of those rebels. He's not just answering the media's questions
(even though the media isn't news outlets) about him but daring viewers (like that live audience) to be critical of the media itself.

For example, I specifically remember several years ago, being on an internet message board and discussing on Tina Fey's page (or maybe it was the SNL page, don't remember) whether someone like Tina would read about what we were writing in the message boards. It seemed inconceivable that even though imdb is the easiest place to look up information about films, that she being famous would use it. She probably has her own version of imdb (and the internet for that matter) and wouldn't ever use the same website as us commoners, and therefore wouldn't ever see any messages we'd be writing about her or her show on the web page.

Ironically, this was parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Sigourney Weaver is obsessed with what everyone's saying about her on imdb.

This is ridiculous to us because of sheer numbers. It's not that Sigourney Weaver or Tina Fey aren't able to look up comments people have made about them to imdb, but even if they did directly address some of the people who were commenting about them, it would be such a small ripple that most of their fan base will never personally hear from her.

Because of the vast scale of imdb.com with the thousands upon thousands of forums, only a few message boards (usually, the just-released films, ongoing TV shows and main message boards) get any traffic at all. Because Gethard's show business career is very small at this point, only four people have ever bothered visiting Gethard's message board and posting something which doesn't make for very much active discussion, so he's very likely to see it. It would be very easy for commenters to not consider that difference between Tina Fey and Chris Gethard and voice their opinions of both the same way.

The difference between the ordinary person and the famous person used to be much larger, especially with twitter, and I think because Chris Gerhard is currently on the bottom of the rung of fame that he's in a unique position to be at the center of this discussion and I think it's been a good discussion to have so far.

Other reading of mine (please click here, or i make no money off this writing):
Why the Internet is Killing Print Journalism

Best Supporting Actress Grades of All Time (Pt II)

2011-04-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

Part I is here

I've also written historical highlights over on helium:
http://bit.ly/hHFGG2

Best Best Supporting Actresses of All Time (Part II):

1991 Mercedes Ruehl, Fisher King C+
Character: Anne, girlfriend of an out-of-work radio DJ (Jeff Bridges) who's (and I'm referring to the DJ, here) guilt-stricken over inadvertently causing a shooting spree

Analysis: I like this film very much and was originally going to give Ruehl a decent grade. She does create a unique character and command attention when she's on screen. Then again, the shrill domineering wife stereotype (never mind that she's not yet a wife, she still fits that stereotype) has been around since the days of W.C. Fields and beyond. My other problem is that Amanda Plummer, a shy bookworm who's sworn off men through adulthood, gave a more memorable performance. Ironically, neither Plummer nor Ruehl had very prominent careers after winning the Oscar.

1992 Marisa Tomei, My Cousin Vinny D-
Character: Mona Lisa Vito, Loudmouth car mechanic and girlfriend to "Cousin Vinny" (Joe Pesci)

Analysis: I'm pretty sure that no other award in the history of the Oscars generated speculation in the Hollywood Reporter that Tomei was only rewarded the Oscar because the presenter (Jack Palance) that night read the wrong name off the teleprompter. That's literally how far below the standard she was. How awkward it must have been to be Marisa Tomei that night: Going to all the post-show galas and many of the people who are congratulating her don't actually believe she legitimately won. Nonetheless, Tomei made up for her "fluke" win by legitimately earning two more nominations.

As for my judgement? I'm in the camp that it was a pretty unremarkable performance. If I'm marking Ruehl several points down for playing to a stereotype, than I can't ignore Tomei who I would mathematically express as something like Ruehl's stereotypical shrill squared. Not completely flunking her because it was an honest effort and I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the award.

1994 Dianne Wiest, Bullets over Broadway B+
Character: Helen Sinclair, an aging Broadway diva who commands a lot of attention for cast and crew around her

Analysis: Anyone else see the irony that Woody Allen, largely incapable of writing outside his own personal experiences and still hated by all of womanhood for dumping Mia Farrow, has been able to write and direct the women in his films to five Oscars?
Oddly enough, I'm not the only one who picked up on the notion that the quality of Woody Allen's characters declines the further they stray away from the mold ofnebbish Jewish men living in New York. While the sheer volume of quality movies proves this is an oversimplification, I can't help but notice how well this film plays into that theory. The main character, played by John Cusack, is a neurotic New York playwright with a confusing love life. Wiest's character isn't a fully fleshed-out person but rather a distraction for Cusack's journey to artistic self-confidence.

At the same time, that doesn't really take anything away from Wiest's performance which is a pretty entertaining piece of an otherwise unremarkable film. Wiest's role is fairly stereotypical but she really owns it and has fun with it.

A wee little ad break Should the Oscar Winners be Aloud to have longer speeches?

1995 Mira Sorvino, Mighty Aphrodite A

Character: Linda Ash, a prostitute who begins a platonic friendship with the protagonist (Woody Allen) after he discovers she's the birth mother of his adopted daughter

Analysis: I just really liked this character. She's just a giddy ball of energy and I was completely disarmed by her. Not everyone has felt like Sorvino winning was a good thing. I do think Kathleen Quinlam could have also done Oscar justice by taking home the trophy, but I don't bear a grudge towards Sorvino. She hasn't had much of a career after this film and she is the daughter of a Hollywood actor, so those are a couple reasons to resent her right there.

1997 Kim Bassinger, LA Confidential B-
Character: Lynn Bracken, a prostitute who becomes romantically entangled with a pair of cops in a noirish expose of police corruption

Analysis: This is an odd one because I could put forth an argument that this was a moving performance and a deserving win, but I can just as easily argue the opposite. I can see her as being a prostitute with a heart of Gold (sort of like Donna Reed and others) who infuses the very bloody story with some brighter moments. On the flip side, if you take the performance away from the context of the story, it's not particularly memorable. Similarly, if you're watching the film expecting a juicy crime thriller, she's kind of chewing up scenery and getting in the way from the good stuff. So let's call it a split decision: B-

1998: Judi Dench, Shakespeare in Love F
Character: Queen Elizabeth I

Analysis: Epic fail! Dench did very little except dress up and wear a stern facial expression for 12 minutes of screen time. I am aware that Straight won an Oscar on half that screen time, but she was actually doing stuff. This was clearly a make-up for Dench not winning the year before for "Mrs. Brown." It also highlights the Academy's compulsion to award an Oscar to anyone or anything that has to do with British royalty.

2000: Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock B
Character: Lee Krasner, wife of the brilliant but perpetually drunk and child-like artist Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris)

Analysis: Major bonus points for that distinctive New York accent. True, Marisa Tomei and Mercedes Ruehl donned a New York accent (or perhaps a New Jersey accent for Tomei? She sounds like the women of Jersey Shore) but I felt like if Rex Harrison's character from My Fair Lady were on a street corner with Lee Krasner. Anne and Mona Lisa Vito, he would be able to pinpoint Krasner to within a 3-block radius in Queens, he would call out Mona Lisa for being a fake, and plead for Anne to stop talking because her shrill voice was annoying the hell out of him.

In other words, Harden did her homework. It's easiest to measure the effectiveness of Harden (and Harris, for that matter) on the basis of how into the film you are, since it's really a relationship film that rests on their shoulders. I was pretty engaged for the first half, got a little tired 2/3 of the way in, and nearly tuned out with 30 minutes to go but held on. So that would be somewhere in the range of a grade of C. On the other hand, it's a testament to Pollock and Harris that the relationship between the brilliant crazy artist and the long-suffering wife has its own uniqueness here in that it's nothing I've quite seen before.

Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind A
Character: Alicia Nash, wife of brilliant mathematician John, who gets more than she bargained for in her husband when it turns out he's a schizophrenic (in addition to being socially awkward).

Analysis: I've always felt that Connelly won this one from the trailer alone. Specifically, that one tear-inducing line which is cemented in my brain from all the TV spots I must have seen too many of in 2001: "I need to believe anything extraordinary is possible." (In the extended cut of the trailer, she actually follows that line with "Boo yah! How do you like them apples, Maggie Smith?") In all honesty, I liked the movie a fair amount and find the performance very deserving. I just specifically don't remember that line ever popping up in the film or even working in the context of the film.

Anyways, this is a undoubtedly great performance when you consider the fact that Alicia Nash is a terrible character on paper and, therefore, if you feel any sparks flying between Connelly and Crowe, you have to credit that entirely to Connelly. For example, has anyone noticed how awkwardly scripted the John-Alicia romance was in the film? In an earlier scene, John tried to pick up a girl using the ill-advised method of treating her as if she were a biological specimen.

Later, Alicia shows up and asks him to dinner for a reason that isn't really given and he tries to consummate their relationship by saying he dislikes social protocol and would prefer to skip to the intercourse. Is the film suggesting growth on John's part? He hasn't really picked up social nuance since the earlier scene. Perhaps, we're meant to believe that John has just found the right woman for him (and by that I mean one who will tolerate idiocy)? If this seems too good to be true, that's because it isn't. The real Alicia Nash divorced John after just six years of marriage and the two were remarried nearly 40 years later in the year of the film's release, 2001 (publicity stunt?).

Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chicago D+
Character: Velma Kelly, an inmate on Chicago's death row who passes the time singing and dancing with her new gal pal Roxy Hart (Rene Zellweger)

Analysis: This analysis gets interesting when you consider that Chicago has become one of the most popular plays in the last 20 or so years and there have probably been many famous stars who played the role of Velma. I know that everyone from Wayne Brady (Who's Line is it Anyway?) to Usher to Jerry Springer has played Billy Flynn.

Whoever played Velma before Zeta-Jones (internet broadway database lists the originator as Bebe Neuwirth) must have been an improvement, because Zeta-Jones' performance rung hollow for me. It never resonated past the singing and dancing. For that reason, it wasn't the least bit memorable. Zellweger, on the other hand, infused her part with pathos underneath all the glitz and glamor.

2003 Rene Zellweger, Cold Mountain B+
Character: Ruby Thewes, a tomboy hillbilly helping the more lady-like Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) defend their plantation against evil homesteaders

Analysis: Zellweger's win had been a pretty easy target for haters and I'm not surprised that she was voted the Worst Supporting Actress Winner of All Time. This was the first Oscar season I closely followed so I have some sense of context for this one. For one, this was a year in which Miramax (controversial movie studio known for actively campaigning for their films) hate was pretty high and "Cold Mountain", a late December release got the bulk of the hype that year. I don't know what the Oscar voters were thinking, but the purveyors of the internet at the time were reacting to Cold Mountain's snub as if the Wicked Witch of the West had finally been melted. From that point of view, Zellweger's anti-conformist tomboy can be seen as carefully crafted Oscar bait.

Personally, I have seen A LOT of films from 2003 and, while it's a close call, I unabashedly maintain that Cold Mountain is the best of all of them (See my article celebrating the talents of Anthony Minghellia for more). Likewise, I understand how you can make a joke that Zellweger comes off as she's auditioning to replace Ellie May Clampett on "'The Beverly Hillbillies" but that's only because we're likely to make fun of anyone who wins an Oscar for playing a Hillbilly. The fact of the matter, however, is that Cold Mountain boasts several great acting performances and Zellweger sticks out in the cast. She brings an energy and provides a sort of Han-Solo-like comic relief to the epic. I think it's based on whether you buy the film as a whole.

2004 Cate Blanchett, Aviator C
Character: Katharine Hepburn, the 4-time Oscar winning actress

Analysis: I wasn't really impressed with this. I think the Academy just loves Katharine Hepburn and four Oscars wasn't enough. It also makes more sense when you consider that it was a great way to honor her because she literally died the previous year. Personally, I don't even think this performance channeled Katherine Hepburn as much as it did a slightly raunchier version of Hepburn's character in "Bringing Up Baby" or "Philadelphia Story." I never felt like watching her performance got me any closer to realizing Hepburn as an actual person. It seemed like cheap entertainment.

2005 Rachel Weisz, Constant Gardener A-
Character: Tess Quayle, activist traveling to Africa accompanying her Diplomat husband and sticking her nose in the business of evil pharmaceutical companies

Analysis: Oscars in the supporting categories ideally should go to scene stealers and Weisz's character really lit up the room in the film's initial scene. While her husband-to-be is conducting a question and answer session at an official state function, Weisz stands up and makes a lot of noise about how the British are really just imperialist pigs disrupting the whole stuffy Victorian affair. From that point on, she has your attention and while it's the way the scene was written that first hooked you onto her character, she sustains it.

The character drifts from present to past (by which I mean she lives on in the memory of her husband) and so Weisz is playing the image of a woman from the point-of-view of a man who's in love with her. If she appears overly idealized in some cases, that's why. It's a very clever role and Weisz is a very good actress. I'm happy to see her enjoying a respectable career since her Oscar.

2006 Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls A-
Character: Effie White, a singer being given the chance of a lifetime by a Motown-like recording artist

Analysis: It's a pretty big coincidence that this was the only season of American Idol I watched start to finish, so I was familiar with Hudson beforehand. Her singing and dancing are, of course, up to the standard of what you would expect in a musical like this and the singing is what you remember more than anything else. That's how all musicals are.

In my book, however, Hudson won this on the acting. Lots of people can sing and you can't sing anyone with pipes into a film and have an Oscar. There have been a lot of musical stars like Rex Harrison, Yul Brenner, and Liza Minelli who have won Oscars but I believe they all cemented their wins through acting. Hudson herself was only the 7th best singer in her season of American Idol. The character had an arc that went upward and downward and I think Hudson got on both slopes of it.

2007: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton A
Character: Karen Crowder, A corporate attorney and spokeswoman for the morally dubious multi-billion dollar conglomerate of "U North."

Analysis: "Michael Clayton" was a movie of fascinating characters and Swinton was no exception. In an early scene the camera lingers on her looking at herself in the mirror without a shirt and adjusting her bra. She's a woman who's heavily invested in image from a professional sense and she also knows of the challenges she has as a woman in a man's world. Perhaps, she also knows the advantages of being a woman as well. Know one would think of her as malicious if she were to do something deadly. We later learn that she is the antagonist but Swinton has a darkness underneath her all along and it's great that you can see it lurking underneath the surface.

Best Supporting Actress Grades (Pt I)

2011-03-31T18:41:00.000-07:00

Hey Guys, I was published on Cracked recently! My article got 1.1 million page views and I hope to publish more articles.
Here is the rough draft of the article I pitched: http://bit.ly/gotzNg

Here is a list of every Oscar-winning performance I've seen for Best Supporting Actress with my grades and assessments. I'm excited to say I watched 4 new films for the first time in preparation of this list and rewatched 4 others.

1939 Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind C+
Character: Mammie, the house servant

Analysis: Imagine that you know nothing about the Oscars but are armed with a relatively good knowledge of the Civil Rights movement and have seen your share of old-timey films. Now someone asks you when do you think an African-American first won an Oscar. Your guess would probably be way later than 1939.

It’s a pretty remarkable and forward-thinking achievement that the Academy honored someone like McDaniel this early in history. At the same time, McDaniel’s character is controversial because it was very much a stock stereotype (known in cultural studies textbooks as “the Mammy“ which I believe was named after her) that contributed to the negative perceptions of blacks as joyfully subservient to white overlords. The debate when discussing McDaniel has always been centered on whether she transcended the mammy stereotype. I’d say only marginally.

1947 Celeste Holm, Gentleman’s Agreement A-

Character: Magazine fashion editor Anne Dettrey who befriends and takes up the cause of the crusading journalist protagonist (Gregory Peck)

Analysis: It’s a testament to Holm’s staying power that most comments I’ve read about this film come from people who are baffled as to why Peck’s crusading journalist character ended up with Dorothy McGuire’s weak-willed heiress rather the outgoing fashion editor. Holme’s Anne Dettrey is spunky and outgoing and I might have considered her a little over the top until I came to the conclusion that her profession basically required her to be a socialite. I could have easily seen Holm's character cut out of this film and pasted into a screwball comedy in place of Barbara Stanwyck or Rosalind Russell, yet it never feels like Holm is in the wrong movie here.

1948 Claire Trevor, Key Largo B+
Character: Gaye Dawn, a washed-up floozy assisting a band of gangsters in robbing a hotel in Key Largo, Florida

Analysis: I like to see a film like Key Largo rewarded: not quite a classic but solid film that’s one of the lesser-known entries by a legendary director. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this film but Trevor was pretty memorable and stole a lot of scenery.

1950: Josephine Hull, Harvey B-
Character: A middle-aged woman, Veta Louise Simmons, mistakenly incarcerated in a mental institution when she tries to seek mental help for her brother (Elwood, played by James Stewart)

Analysis: Josephine Hull reminds me a lot of Aunt Bee from “The Andy Griffith Show” or Margaret Dumond from the Marx Brothers movies. The stuffy quasi-motherly old lady upon who (in the case of the latter) makes a perfect foil to the chaos and comedy that engulfs the scene.

I'm going to make it a rule to avoid comparing the Oscar winners to their competition, but that doesn't mean I can or should avoid comparing these actresses to past versions of themselves. If Hull, for example, is being rewarded for adding a dark twist to the prissy aunt character (trying to lock up her brother so that she’ll once again fit in with her society friends and attract a proper suitor for her daughter isn’t really the most honorable of intentions), then this role pales in comparison to her performance in "Arsenic and Old Lace." As Aunt Abby, Josephine Hull seems like the sweetest old lady until we learn 20 minutes in, that she and her sister lured old men to her basement to poison them. It's the ultimate in dark humor and it's hard to ignore the comparison here.

1953: Donna Reed, From Here to Eternity A
Character: Alma Burke, a sophisticated call girl (yes, she’s a prostitute, but not the kind you find in a back alley somewhere) in Hawaii as the bombing of Pearl Harbor nears. She gets romantically entangled with a rebellious young private.

Analysis: “Analysis” might not be a fitting term here because I just loved this character and there’s not much more to that. Montgomery Clift’s antihero character is so enigmatic and Alma’s slow crawl to his heart is just about the only thing that makes us empathize with him.

1962: Rita Moreno, West Side Story A
Character: The fiery Puerto Rican Anita is the proprietor of a dress shop and confidante to Natalie Wood’s Maria

Analysis: There's a personal authenticity to this role as Rita Moreno herself was one of the few Latin American actors in Hollywood at the time who didn't whitewash her name (technically, Moreno isn't her real last name, but still) or ethnicity (see Rita Hayworth, Martin Sheen, etc). According to the imdb trivia section, Moreno was also raped as a child and channeled those repressed emotions during the scene where she's roughed up by the Jets in Doc's general store.

In all fairness, the demanding nature of the song and dance numbers leaves me impressed with the entire ensemble. Each of the three secondary leads (Moreno, Russ Tamblyn as Riff and George Chikaris as Bernardo) brought their own talents to the mix and it's just as sweet that Chikaris also won an Oscar.

1966: Sandy Dennis, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf B
Character: Honey, an invitee to a small dinner party that descends into a night of hostility and chaos

Analysis: For any fans of the Office out there, the fourth season episode "Dinner Party" was modelled after this film.

This performance topped the list by Movieline.com of the 10 most histrionic Oscar-winning performances for a supporting actress ("She sells a performance that should be shown at Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings"). It also topped an internet poll for best in show.

It's certainly a performance that's out there. More specifically, it's just a bizarre work in which four people (two couples) are constantly changing from being offensive to being offended to being giddy and carefree, to being devastated, to everything in between. The screenplay alone requires all four actors to clear massive hurdles before the storyline begins to make sense to the audience. I think Sandy and the others completed it. To use the hurdling analogy, however, I felt like the other three actors were more leading the way across the track while Sandy Dennis was struggling to stay in the field.

1974: Ingird Bergman, Murder on the Orient Express C-
Character: Greta, a Swedish missionary on board a train car the night someone is murdered

Analysis: There are few standards by which I can universally measure all of these performances but a cold and hard rule should be that you shouldn't expect an Academy Award if you can't even outact the other supporting actresses within your own ensemble. Granted, the film boasts one of the best ensembles of the decade and the equal share of screen time between Bergman and three or four other ladies might lead to a splintering of opinions on who stands out the most. Still, I have trouble even seeing the argument that Bergman is the ensemble's stand-out character. In my opinion, Bergman has nothing on Lauren Bacall or Jacqueline Bisset in terms of dramatic impact. She's practically invisible in this large ensemble piece and since she is already Swedish, it's not even that much of a stretch.

1975: Lee Grant, Shampoo C-
Character: Felicia Karpf, the wife of a Los Angeles businessman who introduces her on-the-side lover and hairdresser to her husband so that he may invest in his hair salon

Analysis: If I fail to touch on any prevalent attitudes about what Shampoo is really about in this analysis, bear in mind I'm writing about this performance and film in somewhat of a vacuum, since I know nothing about the film except what's on the back of the DVD cover. With that being said, Grant also commits the cardinal sin "Thou Shall Not be Overshadowed by your Costars and Expect to Win an Academy Award" but the story demands that she be a forgettable character.

The thematic thrust of the film is that the protagonist has lost his moral compass in his sex life and to cement that, the three women he's screwing are all interchangeable to him. Goldie Hawn plays the woman he begins the film with, Julie Christie plays the woman who he attempts to end up with, and Lee Grant's character is just a conduit in the middle. So to be fair to Grant, her character's not supposed to be remarkable because the story's told from the point of view of a person
to whom Grant's character is insignificant.

1976 Beatrice Straight, Network B
Character: Louise, the estranged wife of a television executive engaged in an extramarital affair

Analysis: Straight was supposedly on-screen for five minutes and forty seconds, making her performance the shortest of any Oscar winner to date. It seems a little unfair that for just six minutes, you should be granted what now amounts to the greatest honor an actor can have. Then again, if you took the highlight reel of some of these other performances, you'd probably get about 6 really good minutes.

That being said, this is a film that will make drama teachers' mouths water. There are several scenes that should be watched a minimum of fifty times by aspiring drama students. Beatrice Straight's one big scene (she's in another scene that lasts about 10 seconds) where she confronts her cheating husband fits that bill. She descends into all kinds of different places emotionally and it's a very convincing transition through each of them. When she goes from yelling at her husband to facing the fact that neither of them knows what to do, her delivery of the line "I'm not gonna give you up that easily Max" is just so perfect in the moment.

1980 Mary Steenburgen, Melvin and Howard B
Character: Lynda Dummar, a go-go dancer married to a perennially unlucky drifter of a husband

Analysis: Well, the feminist movement can be relieved that this award didn't start a "Show your boobs and get an Oscar" trend. For those who are curious, Steenburgen shows significantly more skin here than as Auntie Clara in Back to the Future III. I just was not expecting that.

But I digress, Steenburgen's character has a little bit of ditz to her which adds color to the character. Underneath that, however, she's not only a foward-thinking woman, she's more mature than her down-on-his-luck husband and can see that he has no place in her future. So it's a double-layered performance

1982 Jessica Lange, Tootsie B
Character: Julie Nichols, Soap opera actress and single mom who's the object of the cross-dressing protagonist's (Dustin Hoffman's) affections

Analysis: The question I'd like to pose here is: Does it takes more acting effort to fall in love with someone than to be the person that someone is falling for? In the case of the latter, you have to sell the audience that you're the kind of girl who's worth all the trouble. Lange also has to make the character innocent (or rather, naive enough to be fooled by Dorsey/Dorothy's ruse) but not entirely stupid. With her trademark Southern charm, Lange sells those qualities-innocent, virginal, charming- in every film she's in. Nothing new here, but it's a role that highlights her pretty well.

1983 Linda Hunt, Year of Living Dangerously A
Character: Billy, a half-Chinese photographer who gives professional and personal guidance to an Australian foreign correspondent (Mel Gibson) covering the Indonesian civil war.

Analysis: When I wrote "Billy" in the synopsis, I was not misspelling "Billie." The character in the source novel is male and director Peter Weir opted to cast a female. Supposedly, it's not some commentary on gender roles but rather, Weir just felt Hunt was best for the part. This would make sense for a high school play where your star drama student is a female and maybe there aren't enough guys trying out. But this is Hollywood, there should be more than enough capable males showing up to audition for any speaking part in any movie you are casting for.

In the end, I have absolutely zero complaints because even if I'm not reading the film as any commentary on gender and don't award Hunt any "degree of difficulty" points for switching sexes, it's a terrific performance. Billy's eager smile when he meets Guy fills the mood with a childlike enthusiasm. It later resonates in a haunting way as he/she bears that grin with his/her last words. It's also a testament of just how seamlessly Hunt into the role that the interplay between Billy and his unrequited love (played by Sigourney Weaver) comes even halfway close to working. I would say Linda Hunt is good enough to make you forget Billy Kwan is a guy, but honestly, the site of Sigourney Weaver dancing with a woman nearly 2 feet shorter than her who has romantic longings for her is a little too jarring to work, no matter who you put in the role.

1984: Peggy Ashcroft, Passage to India B-
Character: Mrs. Moore, a liberal-minded woman in England traveling to visit her son in India. She does not share his racist views and wishes to see the "real India"

Analysis: Ashcroft had been acting as early as 1935 (she was in the Hitchcock movie "39 Steps") so it's been a long time coming for the lady. I'm a softie for awards that are given to someone at the end of their career if it doesn't come off as a lifetime achievement award. In this case, it didn't. Mrs. Moore displays a certain amount of youthful exuberance and she's enigmatic enough to make the deep levels of symbolism work.

Archer: How to do a parody/live cast

2011-03-22T13:41:00.001-07:00

I bumped into the crew of J. Edgar recently. Click here to learn about Clint Eastwood's latest film: http://bit.ly/exIeNZ

I've been accepted to Demand Studios as a blogger. Attached is some verification code, I'm supposed to give them:

metaname= "demand-studios-blog-verify" content="B8fBJnrtePKhB4lh3VSOMhN

Archer has had such a strong sophomore season that it's gaining notice as one of the strongest comedies of the 2nd half of the 2010-2011 TV season.

The show isn't just another spy parody but a first-rate spy parody. The key to the show is that the characters are uniquely idiosyncratic creations. They don't really fall consistently toward the stereotypes that they're targeting.

For example, let's compare Archer to James Bond which is what most spy parodies are aiming at:

James Bond is a ladies man. Archer sleeps around a lot as well but he doesn't have any standards, he's completely willing to pay for sex and often confuses his girlfriends and paid escorts for one another. He also pays consequences for sleeping around (paying child support, risk of STD's, etc.) and that's an avenue that everyone from SNLto Austin Powers has used.

However, Archer (H Jon Benjamin) wasn't created solely to parody James Bond. He has other idiosynchratic (and positively entertaining) habits that have absolutely nothing to do with James Bond: He's a spoiled child with severe issues to work out in his relationship with his mother.

His mother (Arrested Development's Jessica Walters) is the equivalent of Q but she's a lot cheaper and the repercussions of her past sexual exploits figure a lot into plots.

Lana would be the equivalent of one of the more competent Bond girls. Because she's black (or mixed-race) and sassy, it's easy to compare her to Halle Berry's Jinx, but we could easily go with Moonraker's Holly Goodhead or Spy Who Loved Me's Triple X. Nonetheless, Lana is somewhat of a high-maintnence girlfriend and she's a bit catty with the other ladies of the office. Speaking of which....

Moneypenny's equivalent is a character (played by Judy Greer) who's changed her name from Carol to Cheryl to Karina over the course of the show because of a need to get noticed more. Reading this as a Bond parody again, the Moneypenny-Bond sexual tension is subverted by the fact that Moneypenny's equivalent is a very loose woman who's already slept with Archer multiple times before and it's not even that big of a deal to either of them. Reading this as more than a parody, Cheryl/Carol is also wierd in a way that's difficult to categorize: She's particularly vicious to HR rep Pam, she's borderline abusive to accountant Cyrill and sometimes gets overly excited. It all comes to full circle in the second season when we realize that Carol/Cheryl has spent time in an insane assylum.

The Q equivalent, who has been given considerably more screentime this season, is Krieger, who's kind of a mad scientist. It's exactly where you'd expect a parody to take Q. In one recent episode it was revealed that he was making clones of himself.

The other characters are equally complex and cooky: HR rep Pam is slightly condescending, has a big mouth, and is sexually undesirable. Accountant Cyrill, on the other hand, is very much a stud but is in sexohaulics anonymous (sexual insecurity is figures into a lot of characters' backstories for some reason).

Because the characters are so rich, I was thinking that the show might be undervalued because it's in cartoon form. Cartoons are great for flat-out humor and special effects and there's no doubt that cartoon characters can become iconic like Bart Simpson, Stewie, or Bugs Bunny. Still, it might be just a little easier if these characters were attached to live actors.

Which is why, I thought I might theorize on who would play Archer if it were live:
Archer: Josh Hartnett, Mark Wahlberg, Ashton Kutcher, Adam Scott, Luke Wilson
Lana: Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba, Mila Kunis
Cyrill: Rob Lowe, Topher Grace, Dean Cain, Will Ferrell, John Michael Higgins
Mallory: Jennifer Coolidge, Frances McDormand, Catherine O'Hara, Jane Curtin
Cheryl/Carroll: Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Judy Greer (honestly, if I had to pick one person from the cast to play their voice part, I can't think of anyone else who could pull it off but Greer)
Pam: Alex Borstein, Drea de Matteo, Jennifer Coolidge
Krieger: Will Ferrell, Matt Bessar

Best Actor Oscar Winners (1927/28-2009)

2011-03-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

I get slightly teary-eyed watching this. Best Actor Winners I've seen:

1934-Clark Gable, It Happened One Night-A-
Gable was the first quintessential leading man. He was malleable enough to be put into a romantic comedy, a stirring class-tinged drama, an adventure, or an epic and still maintain his charm. I suspect if marketing to the four quadrants existed in the
1930's, Gable would hit them all. What I like best about this part is its duality: Even while he's involuntarily falling in love, Gable exhibits a certain stubbornness to even believing in the concept of love.

1936-Paul Muni, Life of Emile Zola-B-
Muni is somewhat stiff in the role but stiff acting appears to be the norm in many films of the time. Like a lot of films I've seen in the 1930's, there was a certain stuffiness to the acting that affected all but the exceptionally great screwball comedies and gangster pics. I haven't seen the original Scarface, but if Scorsese's affection for the film is to be believed, Muni really breaks out into new territory there.

1939-Robert Donat, Goodbye Mr. Chips-B-
A fairly good performance. It includes that requisite aging over the course of the picture that always seems to help. I would probably list Robin Williams from "Dead Poets Society" as my preference for filmdom's archetypical teacher/mentor figure, but that's neither here nor there. His performance is also interesting because it highlights the sexual naivete of characters in this era (a significant part of the film's plot centers around his courtship of Mrs. Chips).

1941-Gary Cooper, Sergeant York-C+
Cooper's screen persona is that of a folksy everyman. Sort of like Jimmy Stewart except he's a little more broody. In this film, he dials up that folksiness to the point where the character isn't too far removed from the Clampetts on "Beverly Hillbillies." The performance is also somewhat static throughout the film. Cooper's version of York doesn't seem that much different in temperament from the start of the film to the end of it. At the same time, that might be a good thing.

1942-Jimmy Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandee-A
Another one of those aging performances. Cagney was a very energetic presence on screen and it's cathartic to watch him let loose all that kinetic energy.

1944-Bing Crosby, Going my Way-B-
Crosby had a very affable persona and was someone you liked seeing on screen. Whether it took Bing Crosby effort to be "Bing Crosby" I have no idea. In other words, Crosby wasusually Crosby on screen, but this was a fairly good use for him.

1947-Ronald Colman, A Double Life-F
Pretty hammy. It reminds me of that episode of Frasier where that great actor the Crane brothers admired as kids delivers his lines so over-the-top, that no one would ever believe them. That's the big question: Is that era's style of dramatic acting over-the-top by today's standards?

1951-Humphrey Bogart, African Queen-A
Bogart deserves an Oscar somewhere. The chemistry between Bogart and Hepburn in African Queen was pretty make-or-break for that film and Bogart certainly bended enough to meet Katherine halfway. Bogart was a very effective hard-boiled detective and I don't know if I would have preferred seeing him nominated for a gritter part like "Big Sleep" or "Maltese Falcon." From what I've seen, "African Queen" and "Sabrina" are the two films that stretched him the most.

1952-Cary Cooper, High Noon-A
Cooper's Sheriff Will Kane is as iconic a Western sheriff and heroic a role as there ever was. More importantly, it's unique to what Cooper brings to the screen. It's one of the few times I've seen Cooper in a film and not thought Jimmy Stewart could have easily replicated it.

1956-Yul Brenner, The King and I-A-
Making your mark on a role is an indication that you've owned it and can you imagine anyone else portraying that role? If sexual chemistry is also a mark of a great role, Brenner and Kerr are remembered as a great screen couple and you can also read the entire relationship is unromantic.

1957-Alec Guinness, The Bridge on the River Kwai-A
Guinness' character is a morally complex (and ultimately morally misguided) and its his handling of those moral complexities that make the film so great. His chemistry with Colonel Saito is also something that can't be undervalued. Guinness was one of the great chameleon-like actors but he could have built a career playing characters of strong resolve like this one and it would have still been just as distinguished.

1962-Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird-A
Atticus Finch in the book is so endearing that he's almost impossible to live up to but Peck did it. He beat Peter O'Toole for Lawrence of Arabia, but his role is just as iconic. Peck's character here is the definitive father figure of filmdom (feel free to disagree with me) and beacon of justice.

1964-Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady-C
In middle school science classes, we're taught to look at the scientific method through controls, independent variables, and constants. Maybe that's a good way to describe how I see various movies in terms of what the actors bring. In My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison is the control/constant while Audrey Hepburn is the independent variable. The Rex Harrison screen persona is such a caricature of prim British stuffiness that it's even being caricatured on "Family Guy."

1965-Lee Marvin, Cat Ballou-C-
No matter how you look at it, Marvin's win is pretty extreme category fraud. Other than that, it's not a particularly bad performance. The other problem is that Marvin doesn't particularly stand out within the ensemble either. Jane Fonda is brilliant as the antihero Cat Ballou and so is Michael Callan as sex-crazed Clay Boone.

1969-John Wayne, True Grit-C+ (Didn't see the film whole film)
Watching John Wayne's performance next to Jeff Bridges' performance is like having an Olympic champion from Beijing play against the Olympic 1968 champion where you see how far movie-making (and even acting) has come. It might have helped if it was Wayne's best film. Wayne is older and not particularly good-looking at this age, but that shouldn't necessarily have been held against him. In some of his better performances (Searchers, Quiet Man), I could have seen him earning an A-.

1971-Gene Hackman, French Connection-B-
I love Gene Hackman but I've always thought of this film as more of a technical achievement than a human story. Of all the directors who've won Oscars for best picture, I've had the opportunity to directly question, um, one of them and that was Friedkin. I asked him what he wanted his picture to be remembered for and he replied that he wanted his film to be remembered for the way it portrayed cops as not what you always associated them with. Hackman certainly ups it on the toughness scale for this role, but I can't help but feeling his performance plays second fiddle to the car chase scene.

1975-Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-B+
Nicholson is a great actor of both great intensity and the ability to bring that intensity with variation. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest didn't fully resonate with me the way it captivated and continues to captivate audiences and that's where the gap between A and B+ comes out of.

1976-Peter Finch, Network-A
For the ratio of Finch's screen-time to your average best picture Oscar winner or nominee's screen time (minus Marvin), Finch is almost like a one-scene wonder. Network is almost like an ensemble piece with Holden, Dunaway, the Holden-Straight marriage and Finch's arcs commanding equal presence. Finch commands the screen with what he has and his inspired diatribes are what you remember more than anything else. It doesn't hurt that Paddy Chayefsky's script is widely regarded as among the greatest ever put to screen or that Finch's dialogue would become so eerily prophetic, but Finch's possession by some maniacal suicide-inducing force commands enough attention on its own to earn the top mark from me.

1981-Henry Fonda, On Golden Pond-B
Fonda in his prime is so much better than Fonda as an old man. It's a sad, inescapable fact. Samuel L. Jackson was quoted in Charles Barkley's book (I know, it's an unlikely source, but go with it) as saying that Oscars are won for moments and not for whole films. I can't help but thinking that the Oscar was voting on the basis of the scene where Fonda, whose prime years of his career existed during the Hayes and Breen codes, startles his son-in-law by pressuring him to discuss his sex habits. Nevertheless, it's a great drama with great moments all around. I do think that using the independent variable/control analogy, Jane Fonda bent a little more than her dad did. (For those keeping score, this is the second time, I downgraded an Oscar winner for being outacted by Jane Fonda)

1986-Paul Newman, Color of Money-F
I like Paul Newman just fine but there's really nothing to celebrate about this perfomrnance at all (the picture fares slightly better at a D). It's very clearly just dues. I do enjoy it when an actor I've known for a while finally gets his Oscar but not when it's so blatant that it's distorting the Oscar race.

1987-Michael Douglas, Wall Street-A-
I enjoyed seeing a popular film get a win and I think Michael Douglas is one of the best actors of his generation. I'm not sure why he doesn't get Oscar nominations as often as some of his contemporaries (this was his only nom). Gordon Gecko has also become iconic which has been great for the legacy of the younger Douglas.

1988-Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man-A
Playing someone with a mental disability can often be cheapening in the wrong hands, but Dustin Hoffman's performance is multi-layered which is what I imagine a person with his condition would be. Raymond Babbit is a very complex person and just as his rare moments of lucidity and warmth are infinitely rewarding for his brother to experience, they are for the audience because they're so genuine in Hoffman's hands.

1991-Anthony Hopkins, Silence of the Lambs-A-
Somewhat of a tangent, but why is he still Dr. Lechter. Wouldn't the state of New York strip Hannibal Lechter of his medical license once he started eating people? Anyway, it's a performance of frightening intensity. If I had to explain away the minus (which normally wouldn't be worth explaining since that's really just an intuitive gap in judgement), I always felt that the refined classical-music listening angle to the character was a little bit of a crutch.

1992-Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman-A
Pacino gets so much flak for this performance of the type that I just gave to Paul Newman (too blatant an attempt for dues). I wish that the historical consensus on Pacino in SoaW wasn't "bad performance, awarded because of dues" but rather ""Your Mileage May Vary"". In Kirk Douglas' autobiography, he mentions that when Pacino does the tango blind, it's practically his favorite performance in all of acting. I think it's a mesmerizing performance and there's not a false moment in here. The reasoning behind Pacino's dramatic monologue at the end is a little bizarre (saying that Chris O'Donnell's shouldn't have to tattle because he's poor) but that's the fault of the screenplay and not him.

1994-Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump-A-
Is this a standard person-with-disability role or is it a life story about a guy who's been through a lot? At times, you almost forget that it's the former. The film would have been hokey if not for Hanks. The fact that it's a life story with different stages doesn't prompt me to cry "Oscar bait" on this performance. With little to no make-up (although there's a lot of excess facial hair in the cross-country running scenes), Hanks authentically infuses the character with the maturity and growth of each experience.

1996-Geoffrey Rush, Shine-B
Rush is a great actor and I think this is a perfectly good performance. If I had to nitpick about why this isn't an A, I don't think I entirely understood him inside and out from a perspective of his disease. I understood the emotional scarring from the character's father, but what exactly did the disease do to him? I felt like the diseased man that Dustin Hoffman portrayed gave just a little bit of a more engaging and complex picture with Babbit than Rush did with the character he was portraying.

1997-Jack Nicholson, As Good as It Gets-C
It's not in Nicholson's top ten performances, that's for sure. I don't even particularly like the film and the May-December romance doesn't entirely work. If you're going to award a third Oscar, even to the great Jack Nicholson, it should be for going into new territory. It's not an overtly bad performance, though.

1998-Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful-B
This is certainly a controversial win. For one, Benigni was already honored with a best director nom and a foreign film win and he didn't really need the best actor award for validation. In addition, the film's trivialization of the holocaust for joke fodder won over audiences at the time, but in retrospect, the film has come off as a little tacky. Lastly, Benigni's campaigning (with the encouragement of the Weinsteins) was a little excessive at the time.
I definitely agree with the first count and the field was crowded enough to have a pretty good winner. Then again, how often has someone with genuine comic gifts been rewarded by the academy for using them. I'd have to look this up but I believe many comic geniuses have only been nominated or awarded by the Academy for going serious.

1999-Kevin Spacey, American Beauty-C+
Spacey basically won for playing a character on "Weeds." But in all seriousness, Spacey has some great moments in here but I found "American Beauty" to be awkward and unsettling (although maybe unsettling was part of the point). Because the film rests on Spacey's shoulders, I can't help but blame that on how Spacey interpreted the part. Two brilliant things about the performance stick out years after watching the film: How Spacey continued to remain a sort of there-but-not-really-there presence at dinner tables as he was beginning his slow descent into suburban madness and his scene with Chris Cooper where he responds to the twist of what his homophobia is all about. At the same time, Spacey's conversion from caring so much about work to saying F-you to his boss or talking back to his wife felt a little rushed and didn't pack as much dramatic punch as I would have wanted.

2000-Russell Crowe, Gladiator-A
Crowe is, in my opinion, the best actor of today. His choices as an actor are very subtle and intricate. The role here is undeniably a showy one. He makes grand pronouncements about saving the Roman Empire by usurping it's corrupt (yet unimpeachable) emperor which doesn't lend itself to being played half-assed. Yet, his intricacies and subtleties make the downs and ups of his arc richer. The parts of the storyline where Maximus is weak in prison or feeling destitute, it's all there.

2003-Sean Penn, Mystic River-B+
I remember being impressed with Penn when I finished watching the movie. Upon retrospect, it was just a lot of yelling, but I have to go with my first impression or at least split the difference.

2004-Jamie Foxx, Ray-A
Possibly, the performance of the decade. He completely inhabited Ray Charles and bonus points for the singing and playing. His moments of vulnerability, of charisma, of empathy (at times) for causes (fighting segregation) or people around him (his late mother and brother) are all moving.

2005-Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote-C
Hoffman is a great actor but I never saw Capote's charisma when I saw Hoffman on screen. It was reported that Truman Capote, despite being flamboyantly gay in an era where being out of the closet was difficult, was such a charismatic figure that everyone flocked to him. Even macho men like John Huston and Humphrey Bogart enjoyed his company. I never saw that with Hoffman's version of Capote. His chemistry with Clifton Collins Jr., however, and the aspects of the story that revolve around Capote's friendship and guilt over Perry Smith worked well and is the reason this isn't being downgraded to a D. The other reason for the low grade is that it was a very competitive year filled with great performances.

2006-Forest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland-A
The mannerisms of Idi Amin and the gravity of his presence are both captured very well by Whitaker. Amin turns out to be a very scary presence and it's to Whitaker's credit that the full terror of his ways is, at first, overshadowed by his charisma and self-assessment that he's a visionary trying to do good. It is very hard to believe that despite being in so many high-profile films (Crying Game, Good Morning Vietnam, Color of Money, etc.), Whitaker was never a well-known actor until this Oscar came along.

2007-Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood N/A
I don't think I can properly discuss this one. I saw about an hour of the middle of the film in a movie theater while waiting for another film to start. I then saw it on netflix, but I was distracted with having pieced together with what I watched before with what I was watching at the time. I believe I have seen something like 80% of his performnace, but it wasn't enough

2008-Sean Penn, Milk A-
A very good performance by Penn. Harvey Milk was a charismatic force of nature, but with Penn's performance, it's all the little things that add up to making us mourn the character's inevitable death and being moved by his presence. In the film, Milk always comes off as a guy who always feels a little bit out of place whether he's gay in a straight world, someone without political background entering politics, or a guy ill-suited for monogamy. Penn also plays that uneasiness very well.

Also, check out this article: Is the star era over?

How to watch Glee: Two Parts Camp, One Part Reality

2011-03-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

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This past year as I've made connections with the TV critical community and have read a lot of TV criticism (as a byproduct of being considered for the AV Club's TV Club), I've found it very amusing to watch critics try to make sense of something like Glee. Co-produced by Ryan Murphy, known for his past successes with Nip/Tuck and the cult hit Popular, Glee is a show that's impossible to ignore. The show has high ratings, accolades, and drives water cooler talk among both the young and the not-so-young.

The show is, at times, undeniably original, bold, entertaining, and capable of being brilliant. At the same time, it's a melodramatic mess. There are great problems with continuity with characters blatantly changing to fit whatever the episode's theme of the week is.

To an extent, I watch Glee the same way I watched the 1960's Batman TV series. The show was universally defined by anyone writing about it as "Camp." "Camp" has always been one of those words that is difficult to define and it's equally puzzling to understand why I like watching it.

Let me take a shot at it:
I might have been laughing at the over-the-top nature of the content but that doesn't mean I'd classify the show as a comedy. Laughing at an awful movie like the robots from Mystery Science Theater 3000 doesn't make me want to applaud the filmmakers. The humor was unintentional because neither I nor the filmmakers intended for the film turn out so badly.

Batman fails completely as a crime drama, but it's creators also know that the show fails towards that end. But the key is that Batman isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at kids and as my 8-year-old self can attest, it succeeds at convincing kids that it is a convincing drama. Because the show's standards of good/bad aren't specifically aligned towards me, there's no point in judging the work and I am free to watch with detached amusement.

Likewise, Glee invites the more educated viewers to detach themselves from the inconsistencies of the show as well. This isn't uncommon. It's just like how we're supposed to ignore how entirely unlikely it is for so many murders to occur in a small seaside town of 8,000 in "Murder She Wrote" (let alone how the town could avoid not becoming hollowed out by plummeting property values) or how Adrian and friends are always finding themselves bumping into murderers outside of their line of work (i.e. Randy's dentist is a murder, Julie's class speaker is a murderer, Adrian goes to his college reunion and finds his good friend married a murderer, etc.) on "Monk."

Glee's lack of consistency falls somewhere between camp and parody. It's creators are certainly aware that these characters have flaws, so we should detach ourselves from the exercise of complaining every week of how inconsistent the characters are. That would be like complaining about "Friends" upon discovering that Joey Tribbiani is really an actor named Matt LeBlanc.

Glee also has one other element that we're supposed to realize is not to be taken at face value: The reasons that characters on Glee break out into song are thinly plausible at best. But when you think about it, since the musical genre evolved past the backstage dramas of the 1930's (i.e. 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933), characters have never had any valid reason to spontaneously break out into song. Audiences have just been conditioned to accept that as a convention of MGM musicals (I previously wrote a very good blog post about this). Glee is just not shy about exposing these same conventions. Much like Austin Powers overpiles the dry witticisms after he kills someone and makes the audience more aware of the convention's ridiculousness, Glee has fun with the conventions of musicals. It's half-parody. It's also a good excuse for some musical numbers.

So, to watch Glee take the continuity and the song transitions with a grain of salt. The rest is legitimately good, wholesome narrative. It might be confusing to sort out at first but try it.

Defending the Academy on Diversity

2011-03-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

Recent controversy that the Academy Awards are not inclusive of diversity on the basis that they had no African-American nominees are baseless. Statistically, it had to happen sooner or later and I object to the notion that the Academy needs to reserve a spot for a black actor just so it can sidestep the racial debate.

You've had years where there have been as many as 5 nominees.

2009: 3-Freeman, Sidibe, Monique
2008: 2-Taraji P Henson, Davis
2007: 1-Ruby Dee
2006: 5-Hotsou, Whitaker, Smith, Hudson, E Murphy
2005: 1-T Howard
2004: 5-J Foxx, S Okendo, D Cheadle, J Foxx, M Freeman
2003: 1-D Hounsou
2002: 1-Queen Latifah
2001: 3-H Berry, D Washington, W Smith

23 noms over 10 years= 2.3 a year. And that means an average of 2.3/20=11.5% of the nominations have gone to African-Americans. If African-Americans make up significantly more than 11.5% of the SAG, you have little basis for complaint.

Not to mention an additional percentage of non-whites:
2010: Javier Bardem (Hispanic) 2009: Penelope Cruz (Hispanic) 2008: P Cruz (Hispanic) 2007: Javier Bardem (Hispanic) 2006: Penelope Cruz (Hispanic), Rinko Kikuchi (Asian), Adriana Barazza (Hispanic) 2005: Charlize Theron (White African) 2004: Caitlin Sandia Moreno (Hispanic) 2003: Ken Watanabe (Japanese), Benicio del Toro (Hispanic), Keisha Castle-Hughes (New Zealand/Maori), Ben Kingsley (Half-Indian), Shoreh Aghdoshloo (Iranian) 2002: Selma Hayek (Hispanic) 2001: Ben Kingsley (Half-Indian).

This is an additional 15 nominations over 10 years. Theron, Castle-Hughes and Kingsley are only half non-white but still that's an additional 7.5%. So that's 19%.

Let's also establish of there's an American favoritism or a UK/USA favoritism:
2000: Julie Walters (UK), Judi Dench (UK) Albert Finney (UK), Russell Crowe (New Zealand), Javier Bardem (Spain), Benicio del Toro (Mexico), Geoffery Rush (Austalia), Juliette Binoche (France)
2001: Kate Winslet (UK), Tom Wilkinson (UK), Maggie Smith (UK), Helen Mirren (UK), Judi Dench (UK), Nicole Kidman (Australia)
2002: Daniel Day-Lewis (UK), Michael Caine (UK), Catherine Zeta-Jones (UK-Wales), Selma Hayek (Mexico), Nicole Kidman (Australia), Russell Crowe (New Zealand)
2003: Ben Kinglsey (UK), Jude Law (UK), Naiomi Watts (UK), Samantha Morton (UK), Djimon Hounsou (Benin/Nigeria), Benicio Del Toro (Mexico), Ken Wattanabe (Japan), Keisha Castle-Hughes (Australia),Charlize Theron (South Africa), Shoreh Aghdoshloo (Iran)
2004: Sophie Okendo (UK), Imelda Staunton (UK), Kate Winslet (UK), Natalie Portman (Israel), Catalina Sandino Moreno (Colombia)
2005: Judi Dench (UK), Kiera Knightly (UK), Rachel Weisz (UK), Charlize Theron (South Africa),
2006: Helen Mirren (UK), Judi Dench (UK), Kate Winslet (UK), Peter O'Toole (Ireland), Djimon Hounsou (Benin/Nigeria), Adriana Barraza (Mexico), Rinko Kikuchi (Japan), Cate Blanchett (Australia), Penelope Cruz (Spain)
2007: Daniel Day-Lewis (UK), Tom Wilkinson (UK), Javier Bardem (Spain), Marion Cortillard (France) Ellen Page (Canada), Julie Christie (India), Cate Blanchett (Australia) (X2)
2008: Kate Winslet (UK), Penelope Cruz (Spain), Heath Ledger (Australia)
2009: Helen Mirren (UK), Colin Firth (UK), Carey Mulligan (UK), Christophe Waltz (Austria), Penelope Cruz (Spain), Christopher Plummer (Canada)
2010: Colin Firth (UK), Helena Bohman Carter (UK), Christian Bale (UK-Wales), Geoffery Rush (Australia), Nicole Kidman (Australia), Natalie Portman (Israel), Jackie Weaver (Australia), Javier Bardem (Spain),

73/220 nominees are non-American: 33.1%
66.9% of nominees are American
65.9% of nominees are American or Canadian
30/220 or 13.6% of the nominees are from Great Britain
39/220 or 17.7% are European
11/220 or 5% are Australian

Considering almost a 1/3 of the nominees are not from the US and the Academy/Hollywood is centered in the US, charges of xenophobia are not really valid

Stock Stereotypes: The Elegant, Cultured and Well-Educated Villain

2011-02-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

Good News: I'm very close to being published on cracked.com. My article has been approved. Also check out Ten Best Western Movies of All-Time

Since discovering tvtropes.org, I've been very interested in various stock characters in fiction, and when someone on a message board I frequent recently asked me which of several examples was the best "Elegant, Cultured, and Well-Educated Villain," I thought I'd take on the trope in general:

I think when the questioner asked me for a good example of an elegant and sophisticated villain, he was missing a key point" Making a villain elegant and sophisticated is more stereotypical and cheap rather than something that's admirable, don't you think?

If you make a villain elegant, cultured, and well-edecated and nothing more like it's kind of boring and familiar. Very weak movies such as Jonny English and The Avengers have introduced us to characters like these with little to no variation.

Portraying someone as overtly intellectual is just a screenwriter's prop to show us that they're smart or that they mirror qualities of the protagonist (presumably the protagonist is smart too) which makes them a more ruthless enemy.

Ironically, I think of these traits with regard to Hannibal Lechter's character as a weakness of the way the screenwriter(s) of Silence of the Lambs constructed him. Lechter is undoubtedly a great character but his penchant for listening to classical music before eating someone or entertaining people at a formal dinner party come off as over the top. Similarly, Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) of Batman Begins Henri Ducard was never a very strong or memorable character and his somewhat philosophical solliloquies on why he should poison the city to show the ways of humanity is bad was a case of telling more than showing.

Four of my favorites are Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, Wall Street), Magneto (Ian McKellan, X-Men and Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz, Inglorious Basterds) and Cal (Billy Zane) from Titanic. The first three don't jump out at me as being elegant, well-educated and sophisiticated for the sake of being well-elegant, educated and sophisitcated and they tell rather than show. Landa speaks many languages and is occasionally poetic and from there we see that there's more to the villain. Other than that, the writers don't go out of their way to show he's sophisticated. Similarly, Magneto might have some sense of refinement and knowledge but it's just organic to the story. If Gekko is enjoying the high-life it's because that's what people in his profession do, and if he appears educated, it's because intelligence oozes out of everything he's saying.

As for Cal, that's just a classical example which is executed very, very well. There's usually only room for one or two iconic performances in the mould before everything else seems stale. It also helps that his villanous character is organic to the era of history and he represents an old-money/new-money dichotomy which is a legitimate fear.

Asfor an example that I find very odd, Chirstopher Lee as Count Dokoo in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Even if Christopher Lee nailed the part, it would be hard to make it fit in place with some of the sillier and base characters with which George Lucas populated the Star Wars universe. If Hannibal Lecter was acting alongside the muppets, it would be tonally awful. Same thing here.

Another more nitpicky concern is that the cultural, elegant and well-educated are traits that are specific to us here on Earth, so I don't think it ever holds up in a fantasy world or galaxy far, far, far away. Cultural and elegant applies to perceptions of someone who has, for example, read Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. I don't doubt that people in the Star Wars universe are well-educated and cultured, but for all we know, someone who's cultured and well-educated on Tattoine might be someone who sounds by our standards as if he's speaking in ebonics.

Another interesting example is Henry Blackwood from Sherlock Holmes but this could apply to any villain from Victorian times and it reminds me of how we tend to assume people speaking with British accents are automatically more refined. I read Blackwood as disturbed. He might have sounded refined, but that's because he comes from Victorian times where everyone is refined. In order to fit this category, you have to be more refined than the protagonist or anyone else.

Examining Parks and Recreations' Sense of Place

2011-02-23T20:25:00.001-08:00

A strong sense of place sometimes can play a big role in a movie or a TV show. In the cases of films such as "The Shipping News," "Fargo," "Oh Brother Where Art Thou," or "Junebug," I've even heard the setting be referred to by the film makers as a character within the story.

Among TV shows, "The Office" has a pretty strong sense of place as well. In the show's title sequence, the three external shots of Scranton- a graying two-story skyscraper, a historic main street clogged up in traffic, and a glamorous "Scranton Welcomes You" sign with nothing very glamorous behind it- reflect the particular shade of gray that most of the show's characters have resigned their lives to. "The Office" legitimately feels like it's set in a small Rust Belt city and it adds to the show with its exterior shots, its water cooler discussions about the Scranton Strangler, and Dwight's side businesses of hay festivals and bed-and-breakfasts.

When Greg Daniels' follow-up was announced as a show about the trials and tribulations of workers at a city parks department in Indiana, I expected that the show would have a very strong sense of place because he did so well with "The Office." More importantly, because the show is set in a city hall and its characters are in the business of maintaining a sense of place, the show depends on convincing us that Pawnee is important.

It dissapoints me to say that almost two years later, I really don't know very much about Pawnee at all and I wonder if the show itself has put much thought into what Pawnee is and what Pawnee isn't. Complaints that palm trees have appeared in exterior shots weigh pretty heavily on the anti-place side of the argument.

Let's try to answer a few questions:
Is Pawnee a stand-alone metropolitan area or a suburb of a larger city?
What's its size?
Is it a city with a historic downtown or is it part of a larger sprawl-based pattern?

I assume it is a stand-alone metropolitan area because Pawnee has its own newspaper or the newspaper would be named after the bigger town. Considering every interview we see is conducted by the same reporter comes to the department, it's safe to conclude that the newspaper is of the small-town variety (think under 100,000) that employs only one or two professional reporters. The town also has a couple dance clubs. I've lived in a couple small towns (both had populations of about 50,000) and they both had dance clubs converted from pedestrian mall store front space. That's not out of the question, either.

Then again, the town has its own TV station and TV morning hosts. I could understand public access programming, but TV personalities and Regis-and-Kelly clones isn't really much of a small-town vibe to me.

As for the downtown issue, I don't see any skyscrapers in the background. Then again, I rarely see exterior shots at all.

I also doubt the writer's knowledge of the state of Indiana when you consider that Anne and Chris' relationship was almost killed by his moving back to Indianapolis. Virtually, nowhere in Indiana is more than two hours away from Indianapolis. The show acted as if he was relocating across the Atlantic.

I posted this on an IMDB message board and got some good responses. Here are the three best:
Response 1:"Sometimes smaller towns can have decently sized city halls, especially if they're historic. I always imagine Pawnee to be a decently sized town, but kind of in the middle of nowhere (stand-alone metropolitan area), which gives it that small town feeling. Maybe I imagine it like this because I'm from Minnesota and I know a lot of towns that have the same sort of atmosphere.

I do think it's a pretty big deal that he's going back to Indianapolis, though - even a two-hour commute is kind of long for a newer relationship. And I think Leslie's main loyalty is to Pawnee, not to Indiana, although of course I'm sure she has some state pride as well. But perhaps the writers avoid making a lot of references to Indiana itself because they want Pawnee to feel more universal - you know, like it could be Anywhere, USA, so we can all relate. But I did think Donna's "The Last Supper" featuring famous people from Indiana was pretty great.

Small towns have their own newspapers! They're small and usually supplemental (i.e., people from the small towns get them as well as a larger newspaper from a more urban center), and they're HILARIOUS. Seriously. My grandmother lives in a tiny farming town in southern rural Minnesota, and I always ask to see the paper when I visit her - they include things like police logs (which are filled with "2AM: called to city park to investigate noise complaint. Found pack of teenagers. Sent teenagers home with warning.") and notices about local marriages and deaths and events. So it makes sense that Shawna with the Pawnee paper reports on the goings-on of the Parks and Rec department - that's exactly the type of stuff that goes into local small town papers.

I don't know what it's main industry is, but I think Sweetums might have its headquarters there, and if they have a harvest festival, they're probably near a rural area."

Response 2:

"It is a little weird RE: the size of Pawnee. It's apparently big enough to have a local television station with two locally produced morning shows, and has its own radio station. I've always felt like Pawnee would be around 20-30 thousand people, but such a small city wouldn't have all of that. I'm from a city about that size in Wisconsin, and we do have our own newspaper (actually, a very nice one; it was the first newspaper in the state that had an online edition), but not local television stations (and the one local radio station would be the college station). For the most part, though, this show could be set in my hometown. It's one of the reasons I love the show so much.

btw, 2 hours may not be much (Pawnee is in Southeastern Indiana), but that could suck for a relationship, pretty much seeing each other only on weekends.

As for state pride, there's Leslie's "Go Hoosiers!" moment (no, Go BADGERS), and the references to Bobby Knight and Indiana's love of basketball.

I have a good friend who's originally from Indiana (not exactly sure where, but it's a smaller town), and he speaks with a Southern-ish accent. He sounds kind of like Woody Harrelson did on Cheers (who is originally from Texas, though). I do wonder if the characters on this show should have an accent similar to my friend's."

ETA: I was going through the cast, seeing where they're from originally. Nick Offerman is from Joliet, Il, which is another perfect Pawnee-like town (but it would be, in my estimation, quite a bit bigger). Chris Pratt is from Virginia, Minnesota.

Response 3:
"I always envision Pawnee to be similar to a town/city like Grand Island, Nebraska. The similarities are really stirking. nebraska is a pretty big state where almost the entire population (2 million) lives in the southeastern corner of the state. So most of the state's population is crammed in to one area much like Indianapolis, Indiana. Lincoln (200,000 people), and Omaha (500,000) are both right next to each other in the SE corner of the state. the next biggest city in the state is only about (50,000) and it is Grand Island... A city which is born almost out of necessity because there are no other major population centers throughout the rest of the state.... so the state needed a centrally located midsized city located off I-80... and that's what grand island is, and i'll bet that's what Pawnee city is supposed to be. Grand Island is about 4-5 hours west of the major population centers in southeastern nebraska FYI, kind of like Pawnee is supposed to be (though like the op pointed out... they flubbed the size of indiana. this makes sense in a state the size of nebraska, but in indiana you can get pretty much anywhere in 2 hours. heck, you can get from indianapolis to columbus ohio in under 2 hours too.) Anywhoo, Grand Island is very similar to Pawnee. They're completely cut off from the other big cities in the state so they have their own little small media center with their own nbc affiliate station, a couple funny local talk shows on tv, their own radio stations am/fm, a little bit of a night life and a mall, a nice capital building, a newspaper, etc. etc.... and because they are like their own little stand alone mecca out there away from the other big cities in the state... they have a nice sense of civic pride."

Winter Shows Part II

2011-02-16T22:29:00.001-08:00

My take on the new winter shows:

Mr. Sunshine, ABC-Mr. Sunshine has a lot going for it: Allison Janey, Nate Torrence, Matthew Perry, Andreas Anders, and the setting of a sports arena among other things.

I like what Nate Torrence and Allison Janey have done with their characters. Andreas Anders wears on me just a little bit but that's also because she has the misfortune of having to take that same winning screen persona and tweaking it for the fourth time in 6 and a half years (For those of you keeping score: Fall 2004-Joey, 2006-Class, 2009-Better off Ted, January 2011-Mr Sunshine) because that's just the nature of the TV industry. The same problem applies for Perry and James Lesure: I've seen these exact characters in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Las Vegas. As a result, I feel like I'm watching a show that exists within the same universe as those two shows where Matt Alvey quit show business and decided to manage a sports arena and Mike Canon quit the Montecito to join him.

As a result, the show struggles to define its own brand. It feels like a cross between Aaron Sorkin, Scrubs and a less colorful Wes Anderson film. If the show's going to go quirky, I hope we see more quirkiness out of Perry, Lesure and Anders. As it stands, Torrence and Janey are carrying the show and could become breakout characters if the show builds any traction.

One last little note: I liked that the pilot ended on a pretty strong note. It wasn't sappy but not meaningless either. We got the sense that Ben (Matthew Perry's character) would begin to reexamine his life a little but it wasn't going to be a drastic makeover.

Off the Map, ABC-I would estimate that, even though this is an exciting medical show that takes you to the third world, 80% of the show's content is entirely interchangeable with Grey's Anatomy. The focus is on interpersonal relationships, characters with chips on their shoulders trying to prove themselves, romances, and occasional medical emergency.

Bob's Burgers, FOX-Is anyone else irritated by the growing trend that bad animation is making some sort of stylistic statement that ultimately enhances our viewing experience? Two of my favorite animated shows as of late have gone the South Park route of sloppy-is-trendy with regard to animation: "Life and Times of Tim" and this show. Nonetheless, Bob's Burgers is far weaker than the other shows on the Sunday night animation line-up which is going to doom it to unfavorable comparisons. I still like it, however. There's a lot to this show that's not particularly groundbreaking, but i do like the way the ensemble seems to bounce off each other. The three kids are all utterly oblivious to the wishes of their dad and there's a Malcolm in the Middle vibe with the frustrated parent character.

Retired at 35, TV Land-An old-fashioned system is never really out of date as long as audiences exist who grew up on that format. The main appeal of this show is George Segal who won this TV reviewer over on "Just Shoot Me." Jessica Walter is already on Archer so there hasn't been as much of a chance to miss her. The show had a novel premise and was solid enough in the pilot to keep me going. In the second and third episodes, however, the show drifted into pathetic. In focusing so heavily on the sex lives of the older characters, the show is trying too hard to be edgy and putting unnecessarily gross images in my head. The show also fails to answer the question of how the son doesn't seem to mind actively participating in his parent's sex lives as a wing man (for the father) or a buffer (for the mother). I was glad to see local TV star and short-lived SNL castoff Casey Wilson back on the airwaves although it looks like she's a guest star.

Is there only room for one It guy from Britain?

2011-02-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

Dave Chapelle once said that there's only room for one black comedian and that was Chris Rock before he came along. I'm just using this as an example, but it seems like public attention really only stays glued to one British guy at a time.

Jude Law was that guy from 99-04 with Talented Mr Ripley,

Paul Bettany with his 2 collaborations with Russell Crowe (ABM and M&C) and his career beginning to go solo with Dogville and Wimbledon gave him a run for his money.

Some people were pegging Orlando Bloom a successor in the hype for Elizabethtown and Kingdom of Heaven but he panned out.

Then it was Clive Owen with his GG win in Closer and then going on to star in (I believe) Domino and Children of Men.

Then Daniel Craig with James Bond in Casino Royale and picking up a pretty busy schedule over the next couple years with the sequel and Defiance.

Now it looks like Colin Firth with A Single Man and King's Speech. I originally was curious to know what might have happened if Bettany, Law, and Owen might have even been denied the starring Oscar-bait role for The King's Speech because they weren't hot in the now before finding out that that's exactly what happened. The film's production crew was considering Paul Bettany but the studio vetoed it because he wasn't as much of a star. Theory validated!

This, of course, is absurd. Not that long ago, Bettany had the second largest role in a Best Picture nominee (Master and Commander, 2003), had a prominent role in a Best Picture winner (A Beautiful Mind, 2001), and was tapped to become a star of his own in Wimbledeon. Meanwhile, Colin Firth was pretty much placed in movies to make Hugh Grant look more attractive to ladies (to be fair, this observation was first made on Saturday Night Live).