How I became a journalist Part I

I'm a journalist who has published somewhere around 150 articles in what I estimate to be 20-30 publications. The latter is hard to define. My earlier resumes would count school newspapers, a community newsletter and a synagogue newsletter to back up the line in my cover letter that I've written in a dozen publications but now I have bylines in places such as Mental Floss, Nostalgia Digest, Run Washington, Arlington and Mental Floss Magazines; Washington City Paper, Santa Barbara Independent, Richmond Times Dispatch, AOL's Patch News Service, Cracked.com and nearly every newspaper in Northern Virginia.

How did I do this? For one, it's largely a function of time and having been doing this off and on for 13 years. A year ago I couldn't have called myself someone who's been in a nationally distributed magazines. A year before that, I couldn't have boasted about a writing credit on a West Coast newspaper, contributing writer status at MentalFloss.com, or bylines in Virginia's second biggest paper: the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Next month, I hope to be published with Deadspin and if you ask me where I've published a year from now, I hope to have a better answer for you.

The other key is finding stories. Let me go through my history as a journalist and explain how I got stories.

1. My first internship:
I was a junior in high school and wound up at a county board meeting outside a job fair where I was sitting next to a reporter who covered politics for the county paper. I chatted with him and asked about internship opportunities and that's where I got started. Unpaid internships (where newspapers require you to start if you have no previous clips) are usually desirable for cash-strapped newspapers because you're producing content for them and saving them money.

I worked in a newsroom for a small-town weekly about ten years after this internship and the place was teeming with interns. In my day, I was the only intern who showed up at the office that summer (although a friend of mine got an internship a couple months later with that paper but he trained on the school paper and was experienced enough to send in stories remotely. That friend, ended up majoring in psychology while writing for his college newspaper. He got a job that moved him into the middle of nowhere in Casper, Wyoming right out of college. A year or two later, he moved home to Washington and took a boring job writing manuals for some industrial training company while building up clips. He then got hired for USA Today after about 4 years and for the last year, he's been writing for his dream job at the Washington Post. If you want to know about someone else's job other than mine).

I thought this whole experience was a highly prestigious one and it blew my mind at first that the newspaper delivered to my home every Wednesday had my name on the top of it. The funny thing was that inside the newsroom, people didn't think what they were doing was impressive at all. At one point, the reporter who was assigned as my internship director asked me, "Orrin, don't you have anything else you want to be doing during the summer like go outside and play?"

Most of the story ideas came from the paper but I do remember writing two of my own story ideas: a tennis camp and a local artist. In the case of the former, I had attended that very same tennis camp. This happens a lot: Journalists write about what's in their immediate vicinity. In the case of the latter, I didn't write about the artist with any knowledge about what constituted good art. I just knew that the local library had two or three artists of the month and picked one at random.

2. Minnesota Daily
I went to college thinking I might possibly declare a journalism major and had one semester with a heavy journalism course load which included writing articles for the school newspaper as part of a practicum course. This is where I also got the bulk of my formal classroom-style training (approximately 2 courses) and I can't emphasize how useful that was.

Some personality clashes with the dean of the journalism program prompted me to declare another major. After two years, I spent a year in Americorps outside the academic world and when I returned, I decided to go to college out of state at the University of Minnesota. Because the costs were too expensive, I didn't stay more than one summer session but I did write one story for the newspaper that would impress my mom seven years later.

I was getting a ride to class from a guy who said he had been invited to an after-party for Minnesota basketball player Kris Humphries on draft night. I asked him if he knew where Kris would be and he called a friend. I had no affiliation with the University of Minnesota paper at the time but thinking this was a big story, I decided to be a few minutes late to class that day and look up the university editors email address and phone number. I spent class frantically wondering if things would work out. Was I going to be able to find the editor in time? Was I going to find the restaurant and convince Kris Humphries and his people that I was with the paper?

At the end of class, the library was closed and this was 2004 before the existence of smartphones, so I didn't have time to check my email and just took a cab to the restaurant in question. I got there and just asked if I could interview him for the school paper. They told me to wait at one of the outside tables while he came out from what was something akin to a VIP room.

It's also worth pointing out that someone who was drafted 14th in the 1st round would ordinarily be in Madison Square Garden and it was extremely unusual for Humphries to be celebrating with his family in Minnesota so I lucked out there.

It wasn't until the next morning that I was able to get in touch with the editor and the question then wasn't "can I write this article for you" but "I wrote this article for you, do you want it?" Since it was an NBA player, of course the answer was yes.

It was always pretty cool to me that I interviewed an NBA player on draft night but this wasn't as impressive for the first six years of his career when he was never better than the 8th man on many of his teams. Then he somehow caught the eye of Kim Khardashian and went so far as to get married to her for 72 hours which turned him into a tabloid sensation. I really felt like I made it as a journalist when my mom said to me "did you know Kim Khardashian got married to this nobody from the New Jersey Nets?" and I replied "oh yes, I interviewed him."

It's worth pointing out that the way I interviewed Humphries (not clearing it with a newspaper) is generally not advisable because it could be a bad investment of your time and it's hard to get access to subjects if you aren't yet commissioned to write the story. In the limited experiences I've had interviewing someone famous or highly important, I generally have a process of contacting the subject to see if he's amenable to an interview and getting some preliminary information from him or his press agent. I then use that preliminary information to form a pitch letter (convincing an editor to commission me the story) with the addendum that the subject has agreed to an interview. Limiting the initial interview to just preliminary information reassures the subject that I value his or her time.

That being said, journalists do pride themselves on ability to get access and I've heard stories of journalists going to extremes to get that access.

I also am now established enough that I can show someone my publication history or connections and they'll give me an interview.

3. Writing for the school newspaper at James Madison University
That fall, I came from the University of Minnesota to JMU because in-state tuition was cheaper. I wanted to pick up a minor in journalism but the journalism minor was abolished in the exact same year that I arrived.

However, I soon became a de facto member of the journalist department by joining the school newspaper.
I had been an avid track runner in high school and to keep close to the sport in my freshman year of college, I regularly checked a website on Virginia running to keep tabs on how runners from my county and area were doing in state competition. Going back to my old team's meets and watching them as a spectator for the first time opened me up to the possibility that track meets can be exciting to watch.

It's also worth noting that while running was my main extracurricular activity in high school, I was the 7th fastest runner on the team my senior year and 27th in my 7-school district but our district was largely relegated to the B-division in big meets. I remember watching an Oakton high school runner named Matt Maline break a course record in the A-section and wondering exactly what it would be like to run that fast. After all, I spent all my time running and couldn't even get to the top of my school's ranks and no one in my school or county was even allowed to compete against the best.

At JMU, I was reading the newspaper and noticed there were no stories on the cross-country team and the team sports being covered were less interesting to read about. I emailed the sports department and asked why they didn't cover them. They responded that they don't have anyone on staff who likes writing about track but I was welcome to write it myself. So I agreed and went to the cross-country championships about 20 miles away.

When I wrote the story on my own and it more or less looked like a news story was supposed to look like, they asked if I wanted to cover them for the whole season.

I decided "why not?" and jumped on board. At first, it was a relatively simple and stress-free activity but then I started covering track season and found things increasingly more difficult and I started hitting writers block. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect and when I wrote a state meet preview for Run Washington Magazine a couple years ago, it was a ridiculously easy 90-minute jaunt. To write a great sports story should take some effort but to spew out 600 words for a sports story to meet a deadline, should never be overly hard: The storyline's written for you (someone wins and someone loses) and supporting evidence is there in very quantifiable stats.

But if there is one storyline that is particularly messy, track and field is at the top of the list. You have to sort through over twenty events (many of them unrelated to each other) and pull out highlights and, if you can, try to string together some sort of narrative. And the whole winning or losing thing? In some invitationals, they don't even keep score.

I'm not suggesting this as an excuse because one can still write a comprehensible 600-word article just by paraphrasing the results, but I was an artist, damnit! No, I'm making that up, I just really sucked at writing up track meets with any degree of efficiency in my first year. I was overwhelmed by the large amount of information I had to keep track of. I had all these little details like runner's personal bests, qualifying standards, meet records and times and I was constantly scrounging around to find these details. I remember calling up a female runner on the team and asking her "hey, last Saturday that time you had, was that a PR?" which must have been a really wierd phone call for her. I also remember how I was bugging a friend on the team, Allen, at a movie screening an hour before deadline because I needed to double check his times and splits at the previous meet.

I also was visibly frustrated at the mandate to get quotes from three sources per story (trained newswriters ordinarily use their discretion) because as anyone who's watched a post-game press conference can tell you, most questions you ask in sports journalism are questions you already know the answer to. If I asked you how you felt about a race, the answer is going to be some variation of "good": The results clearly show you had a good race and if you did poorly, I wouldn't be interviewing you. If I asked you about a teammate's performance (a roundabout way to getting your quote quota), you're obviously going to say positive things unless you want to sour your relationship with your teammates. Rather than try to raise my game, I just sleptwalk through the process and it showed.

I also remember having an odd social relationship with the team that year. I was used to having a subject-reporter relationship with sources that lasted less then an hour. In this case, it's hard to know how to maintain that veneer when you're spending a lot of time with these people and are occasionally having a good time in their company. This likely was not that big of a deal but I felt overly defensive and tried unnecessarily hard to hammer in the point to everyone around me that I was there in a "professional capacity" which likely had the opposite effect. Ironically, I became great friends with a few of them in the years that followed.

I've since learned that beat reporting is an entirely different beast but it has its advantages. You can become an expert very quickly if you repeatedly cover something, it increases your desire to learn (I soon knew the names of nearly every top runner on the Eastern seaboard), and it makes you highly valuable. For instance, I wrote a story about a cross-country runner from Dartmouth some six years later. In a supporting interview, the coach told me that his team was one spot away from running for nationals to which I responded "wait a minute, isn't the field for the national cross-country championships determined by a closed door selection committee?" which caused the coach to retract his boastful statement.

This was a very small deal, but if my beat was something like nuclear proliferation, my depth of knowledge from covering the same thing over and over might have had the effect of keeping some Iranian diplomat honest about whether or not he intended to start World War III.

More to come............

A superquick Oscar prediction session

OK, superfast rundown here:
I've seen 7 of the 9 Oscar nominees at this point--Her, Gravity, Dallas Buyers Club, 12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips, Nebraska, and American Hustle--in addition to approximately 15 other films this year.

Best Picture:
Will Win: 12 Years a Slave
Should Win: 12 Years a Slave is a good choice. Certainly not a lightweight popcorn movie. But weighty, thoughftully made, and effectively told. It's also not as brutal and depressing as one might think. In other words, go see it.
Personal Preference: A slight edge to Her although I can proudly say I personally responded to all seven of the films I've seen. Outside of those seven, I very much enjoyed the little-seen Girl Most Likely and the indie
film In a World but I didn't see them as Oscar nominees.
Got snubbed: This is somewhat of a sad state if filmdom we're currently in where there are very few films outside 8 or 9 that really are nominee-worthy. Last year, I could only think of Moonrise Kingdom and the Master that were legitimate snubs. This year Saving Mr. Banks and possibly August Osage County are the only films I can think of that are visible (a great indie film that doesn't capture the public imagination is just a great indie film that never got traction, that's a marketing problem) films that have yet to go mainstream.  Go five years before that to 2007 and you have In the Valley of Ellah, Zodiac, Eastern Promises, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War, Into the Wild, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Once, Persopolis, Assassination of Jesse James, Ratatouille, Bourne Ultimatum, Great Debaters, American Gangster, Evening, Things we Lost in the Fire, Love in the Time of Cholera, Reservation Road and Hairspray.


Best Director:
Will Win: Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Should Win: Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity as I like a good director-picture split
Got snubbed: Paul Greengrass, Captain Philips

Best Actor:
Will Win: I'm hoping Bruce Dern or Leonardo DiCaprio pulls off an upset and I'll predict Bruce Dern so if he wins I'll be double happy. The money is on McConaughey but you don't need this blog to tell you that. I
Should Win: Bruce Dern. It's the subtlety right down to the physical movements and posture of the character that truly impresses me
God snubbed: If I could nominate one more person, I'd go with Joaquin Phoenix in Her followed by Robert Redford in All is Lost followed by Tom Hanks

Best Actress:
Will Win: Cate Blanchett. I'm moderately pleased with this as she's a great actor who should have a lead statue. I'm not particularly pleased to see Woody Allen pick up a seventh statue for acting considering he doesn't rehearse them and his films aren't ever profitable (ha! you thought I'd go with the molestation charges, but I came up with other reasons not to like Woody Allen at the moment) but that's OK.

Should Win: Amy Adams is a revelation. I see her in 2 or 3 films a year (not intentionally, she's just in everything) and she's freakin' amazing
Got snubbed: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue is the Warmest Color

Best Supporting Actor:
Will Win: Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
Should Win: Jared Leto although I'm pleased Michael Fassbender got nominated and should the unthinkable happen in terms of an upset, I'd be pleased.
Got snubbed: Tom Hanks should have gotten at least a little traction considering his snub for best actor. Daniel Bruhl was brilliant in Inglourious Basterds so it's too bad he won't be joining us here.

Best Supporting Actress:
Will Win: Lupita Nyongo, 12 Years a Slave. Some are predicting Jennifer  Lawrence but that's ridiculous.
Should Win: Jane Squinn, Nebraska
Got snubbed: Scarlett Johansson, Her or Scarlett Johansson, Don Juan

Best Adapted Screenplay:
12 Years a Slave is a front runner which would be a very good choice. Terrence Winters in Wolf of Wall Street would be equally good

Best Original Screenplay
Her is my choice. As I previously wrote in my last post, the original screenplay should go to "Her." It will likely go to American Hustle

Best Cinematography
The nominees are Grandmaster, The Prisoner, Inside Lleweyn Davis, Nebraska and Gravity. Grandmaster is a film I've never heard of before while Prisoners is an interesting choice here as it is one of the few films not nominated for an Oscar that doesn't qualify as a popcorn movie. Inside Lleweyn Davis got snubbed nearly everywhere else. Nebraska, Gravity and Inside Lleweyn Davis seem to all stand a chance and I'll go with Gravity as the photography played such a large role.

Best Score:
The electronic futuristic score of Her impresses me a lot, but Gravity was bold and dramatic. I can't speak to the other three nominees. This might be a good opportunity to spread the wealth. In the past, Atonement, Finding Neverland, and Babel have saved themselves from a shutout by winning here. 

Best Song:
We have U2, Karen O, Idina Menzel, Pharrell, and a man who's approaching the EGOT (I know there are four nominees, so I suspect Menzel is just a performer, and for all I know Karen O is not nominated). This is quite a crowd of performers and I'd like Pharrell Williams to win because his song is the one everyone's singing along to on the radio and he's had a great career behind and in front of the scenes.

Best Costume Direction:
This is a very close one as 12 Years a Slave has old-timey costumes (how can you lose with that), American Hustle has some stylized costumes for a modern era and Great Gatsby has some flashy costumes. The more subtle choice here is American Hustle. The costume design in those movies wasn't flashy or particularly historic but they jumped out at you quite a bit.












 

My Oscar wish list

Dear Oscars,

First off, I'd like to thank you for:
1. Nominating Leonardo DiCaprio
Despite being a three-time Oscar nominee, DiCaprio gets overlooked quite a bit. DiCaprio's role in Wolf of Wall Street is not just another great role indicative of the best actor of his generation (I can't speak from personal experience) but one that has been sparking water cooler discussion as well
2. Nominating Amy Adams and Christian Bale in American Hustle
While I'm not a huge fan of Cooper or Lawrence's performances, Adams and Bale are both phenomenal in their categories. I see Amy Adams in approximately 2-3 films a year (not intentionally. It just so happens she's in everything) and I've never seen these sexy and vulnerable sides to her. Christian Bale completely transforms into his role as well.
3. Snubbing Oprah for Best Supporting Actress
She's a talk show host who doesn't need an acting award. The five people who were nominated in place of her all act for a living and would likely benefit from it more.
4. Nominating guys like Pharell, U2, and Arcade Fire in the music categories
At the Golden Globes, with Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, and U2 all being nominated for best original song, we had that category alone having more twitter followers than all the other categories combined. Three of those artists got left off but I won't really miss them. We now have music producer and all-around cool guy Pharrell Williams and Arcade Fire nominated for Oscars in addition to U2. Great to see popular music artists at the Oscars.
5. Selecting nine solid films
This is somewhat subjective but I think this is the first year I can remember where I'm actually excited to see all nine films. I've seen six (seeing a seventh tonight) and have nothing but positive things to say about all of them and the other three look promising as well.


Please:

1. Choose a good host for the Oscars ceremony
This one has already been botched. Ellen DeGeneres is a wonderful personal success story having risen from gay pariah from a less tolerant era to America's favorite talk show host. But that was ten years ago and being gay or lesbian should be no big deal. I'd argue she's no longer the funniest lesbian comedian (Wanda Sykes is) or the most adorable out actress named Ellen (hello Ellen Page) anymore. In other words, we should be at the point where Ellen DeGeneres should be awarded or denied something as prestigious as the host of the world's most viewed television event on the basis of her merits. While she's great at certain things, I don't believe hosting an Oscars telecast is one of them. Her whimsy observational humor consisted barely registered the last time she hosted the Oscars in 2007 and this is even more of a travesty when there are so many gifted comedians who would kill at this gig.

2. Give Bruce Dern a solid chance
If you told me two years ago that Matthew McConaughey-- who has spent fifteen years as a poster boy for acting mediocrity -- would have a string of good roles in 2012 that boosted him to even better roles in 2013 including one that would land him an Oscar, I would have thought you were insane. Before I saw "Dallas Buyers Club", I spent much of this Oscar season thinking McConaughey's winning streak was shameful considering he was such a lousy actor for so long. I now understand what the buzz is about: McConaughey walking away with the Oscar wouldn't be a travesty as it's a capable performance. The thing is Dern also blows you away. Comparing Dern's performance to McConaughey's performance is like apples and oranges but I hope voters are giving Dern a solid consideration. After all, McConaughey's been a great film actor for two years, Dern's been at the top of his game for a period nearly twenty times that long.

3. Allow the performers to sing. Show some decent clips.
There are so many opinions on what works and what doesn't  in the "Oscars." I think most can agree that montages tend to be excessive. Personally, I think a short clip for each film and a film for each performance are most welcome additions. It even becomes somewhat of a parlor game among Oscar buzzers to guess which clips will be shown for which nominees so don't deprive them of that.
The Oscars tend to play with the format for score and song quite a bit. This is a year where we have some great musical artists so not letting them play during the ceremony would be a mistake.
 
4. Don't award Jennifer Lawrence a victory
Not only is she not that good in her role, she just won last year and is only 23 years old. Two-time Oscar winners are a rather elite club: There's no need to let her in prematurely. Of course, the Oscar should be decided on merit but let me point you to that "not that good" part of my argument above.

5. Give the original screenplay to "Her"
There seems to be some sense that David O. Russell is owed something because he's been nominated three of the last four years in the picture and director categories. That's simply not true. Being nominated three times is humongous for someone like David O. Russell who isn't yet idolized in film schools and doesn't have an amazing commercial reputation. We can afford to give the screenplay to the best candidate in this scenario and that would be "Her" by a mile. It's innovative, it's delicate, it's well-paced, and it's both depressing and inspiring. Besides,  Russell didn't even write "American Hustle" the way you saw it on the screen with all the ad-libbing and scenes that were entirely thrown in at the last minute. Russell deserves more credit as a director this year and unfortunately better candidates have that slot locked up.

Jason Sudeikis and We're the Millers

Part of the fun of watching SNL is seeing actors transform from nobodies into film stars before your very eyes. I remember when Jason Sudeikis was a highly inconspicuous featured player who had just a few lines in the entirety of the 2004-2005 season. He seemed to blend into the background so well, it was hard to imagine him being up to the task of leading the show when the  older cast members left. His early bit with Kristen Wiig "Two A-Holes..." was hillarious but it didn't make any arguments in favor of Sudeikis being a guy with great range when you saw him using the same persona for game show hosts and other straight men and it didn't help that he was being relegated to those roles.

Saturday Night Live lends credence to the thesis, however, that performers need time to grow with the audience. Like 90% of performers on SNL, Sudeikis gradually surprised me with new sides of himself. When Anne Hathaway hosted, we discovered Jason Sudeikis could sing. When Obama ran for office, we discovered Sudeikis could make a great Biden and four years later, he was even more hillarious as Romney. He was even impressive in the Lord Wyndemere skits and he wasn't the star of it. In short, Sudeikis is still the quintessential straight man he was when he started but he's refined that persona to be able to play variations.

In his first post-SNL vehicle in which he's a leading man, Sudeikis plays a slightly darker shade of the same guy: A bit more self-centered, a bit meaner, and a bit more prone to wreckless behavior. As a drug dealer devoid of any personal attachments (all the better for his character to arc in the opposite direction), Sudeikis's slight adjustments fit the story well.

In this film, Sudeikis plays a drug dealer who recruits three neighbors--  Emma Roberts as a teenage runaway, Jennifer Aniston as a stripper (not particularly convincing. She comes off as an improbably white trash version of Rachel) and Will Poulter as a sheltered teenage kid with an absentee mom  -- to help him evade border police while carrying drugs back from Mexico. As you might expect, the film will aims for sappiness points as the group of misfits bonds and forms a makeshift family as they experience misadventures together. What one might not expect is that despite being rather dark and edgy, the film manages to find some room for those heartfelt moments and does indeed earn its ending.

Also worth noting that certain set pieces (like Jennifer Aniston stripping her way out of a sticky situation or Nick Offerman licking Jason's ear off) don't work as well as others, but the heart is there.

Philip Seymour Hoffman passes away

I called my sister (who could be categorized as an ordinary moviegoer) the night Philip Seymour Hoffman passed away and she scratched her head when I delivered the news. "The guy from the Hunger Games?" she asked after IMDBing him. "Oh no, what's gonna happen to the sequel?" Because there are members of my immediate family (the main readership of this blog) who think of Hoffman primarily as the guy from The Hunger Games, I feel compelled to raise awareness for this late great star.

Was I a fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman? Let's just say I was a fan of great films around the turn of the century like "25th Hour", "Almost Famous", "Cold Mountain"*, "Big Lebowski" and "Talented Mr. Ripley." In other words, it was impossible not to be a fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman if you started becoming serious about watching films in that era because he had a great supporting role in practically every underrated film in those years. I'm not even counting "Magnolia" or "Boogie Nights."

If you might have missed Philip Seymour Hoffman in those years, it's because a lot of those movies weren't as famous now as they were back then. One might think Hoffman had a crystal ball predicting what would be a classic years later. Considering his talent and his heavy interest in the theater (his estate went to a foundation that would award promising playwrights with grants), it seems likely that Hoffman had a great talent for discernment.

Although he had the lead in small films like "Owning Mahowny", Hoffman had a sort of breaking out in 2005's Capote. While the film only grossed $28 million domestically, (which while admittedly better than Owning Mahowny's $1.1 million) it earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination and it gave Philip Seymour Hoffman the ultimate accolade for a leading man: a Best Actor Academy Award.

At that point, Hoffman could have gotten some meaty leading man parts** and been spared the indignity of only having my sister remember her as "The Hunger Games guy" eight years later. He could have also just stuck with his bread and butter and been a subtle character actor.

Instead, he did a little bit of everything. He carried films as the lead or co-lead in "Doubt" (my personal favorite), "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead", "Synecdoche New York" and "The Master." He lent his weight behind smaller indie films like "Pirate Radio," "A Late Quartet," and "The Savages." He stole scenes in supporting roles like "Ides of March," "Moneyball," and "Charlie Wilson's War." He even played a classic action villain in "Mission Impossible 3," he had a comic cameo in  "Invention of Lying," and he dove into a fantasy franchise with the "Hunger Games."

In short, Hoffman knew no boundaries when choosing films and his filmography is astounding. A highly experimental piece that Roger Ebert named the best film of the year (Synecdoche), Sidney Lumet's most acclaimed film in years (Devil) and a quiet anti-hero sports film inspired stylistically by "All the President's Men" that got nominated for Best Picture (Moneyball). He might be remembered as the quintessential character actor, but because his film choices were so smart, he was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood in my book. Was there a film role he couldn't take on? Was there a better indication that a film would be something special than seeing his name in the opening credits?

I haven't even said much about his acting, but it's probably just to let it speak for itself

*To be fair, "Cold Mountain" is largely remembered as a failed Weinstein Oscar vehicle more than an underrated film but its a great historical epic in my opinion

** I know you're thinking of that Arrested Development reference. Shut up

About a Boy pilot review

Nick Hornby, the author filmic inspiration (if you're not a book reader*) of "High Fidelity" "Fever Pitch" and "About a Boy" is like a wittier 21st century version of Douglas Sirk. Most of his characters seem to exist unapolagetically outside conventional society. We have people on suicide watch ("Long Way Down"), late bloomers whose idiosyncratic obsessions take the place of normal relationships ("High Fidelity" and "Fever Pitch") and "About a Boy" which is about a guy whose life exists entirely in terms of leisure and running mundane errands as shown in this clip from the 2002 filmic adaptation:

He lives off the royalties of a song his dad wrote so he never meaningfully earned any income and sees human relationships in curiously absent ways. He has some interest in dating and makes the admittedly foolish mistake of thinking single mothers are low-effort and high-reward. His plan to meet single mothers backfires when his first date results in a hanger-on and her son who get the whole gang in trouble on an outing to the park. Although his dating scheme is foiled, he ends up  forming an unconventional but meaningful friendship with the 11-year-old kid and that's how we have our titular story.

The American TV adaptation's pilot features most of the movie and book's plot in the opening episode which is somewhat of a necessity and not much of a concern because there's a lot more fun to be had. David Walton plays the lead and it's disappointing that he doesn't present us with a character significantly different from his California sun-dried womanizer in "Bent." Hugh Grant is by no means a great actor but he bought a sort of aimless whimsical charm to the role. In the film (and book) his lies to the eventual love interestish character about his child were fairly minimal and he makes an honest effort top backtrack on his lies. Walton is unapologetic and, frankly, quite sleazy. There's no middle ground in terms of whether to root for or against him. 

The degree to which the character (ok I'm just going to look it up) Will contributes to society is also changed here. Instead of the son of a song writer who sits around collecting royalties, Will at some point did something to earn money himself. He's a musician who's suffering from the dismantlement of his band but wrote a hit song once and lives on the royalties. The con about this is that as an ex-musician Will is considerably more cliched whereas Hugh Grant's Will was truly a unique creation. On the other hand, this scenario provides something more for Will to strive for in terms of his maturation: Reclaiming his friends and former band mates in addition to the regular sitcomey stuff (dating, career, etc.).

One clear strength of the TV show is the relationship between Fiona and Will which was relatively unexplored in the film. Toni Collette is a highly underrated gem who always brings something to whatever film she's in but she was underused in the 2002 film. Minnie Driver, one of those actresses who was famous some time ago but you can't remember if they're even still alive, has the potential for a great career reinvention here with a solid character role on TV. 

As for Dakota, the object of Will's desire in the first episode, she was only intended as a plot device to get Will and Markus together but it might be interested to see her pop up again. I certainly wouldn't wish to see a romantic relationship blossom between the two but I'd want to see her pop up at some inopportune moment and make his life miserable.

It's hard to say if it's going to be a good show, but the source material is good enough that it's worth sticking around.

*I'm really not a book reader. I just like Nick Hornby novels

Bedazzled and Marathon Man Reviews

Bedazzled
This 1967 Stanley Donen comedy pulls off the feat of centering around a truly miserable character without ever feeling like a downer of a film. Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) is a lonely short-order cook with a crush on a waitress at his diner who he's too shy to approach. The devil (or at least some vague devil incarnate) comes along, introduces himself (his name's George and he's played by Peter Cook) and grants him seven wishes in exchange for his soul.



Stanley promptly uses up one wish after another on Margaret and, because the devil is a trickster who can't be taken at face value, they all backfire. That's OK because Bedazzled isn't really a love story. Instead it's a meandering meditation of love, death, good and evil, and religious dogma that's imbued with an absurdist wry humor that only British comedy can do. In other words, the film feels a little aimless but that's part of the charm: Delving too deeply into romantic comedy territory would make the film feel hackneyed while delving entirely into religious politics would make the film feel preachy.



Marathon Man
Marathon Man is a Dustin Hoffman vehicle that stands as one of the best-known thrillers of the 1970's. Fitting into 1970's conventions to minimize on back story and to emphasize action (Brad Pitt, Bennett Miller, Ben Affleck, and George Clooney were all attracted to this style when they made Moneyball, Argo and Good Night and Good Luck respectively), the film is centered around the evolution of a relatively complex character but is primarily action-driven.
 
That relatively complex character is graduate student Thomas "Babe" Levy (Hoffman) whose remains haunted by his father's persecution and subsequent suicide as a result of the Red Scare. Seeking to enter into the same field of study as his father, Levy hopes to exonerate his father's work. The title of the film derives from the fact that "Babe" is a long-distance runner but if you assume that this is the "Prefontaine" or "Chariots of Fire" of the 1970's, be warned that this is not a running movie at all and a suspiciously minor plot point. The running scenes are reminiscent of the way French New Wave films juxtapose motifs (I'm thinking specifically of Breathless where the guy is shown looking at a picture and smoking a cigarette like the matinee idol he's trying to emulate) as an avant-garde way of providing characterization.



In the film's first hour, there's a twin narrative occurring alongside a love story between Babe and a fellow grad student that turns out to be nothing more than a red herring. In the other story, Roy Scheider plays "Doc" who turns out to be Babe's brother (apparently, the Levy clan had terrible taste in nicknames) and he's tracking an ex-Nazi dentist played by Laurence Olivier. Olivier's role and the presence he brings to that role (it was the final of his 10 Oscar nominations) provide the film with its most memorable moments. People might not know the plot details of Marathon Man but many are familiar with the dentist's torture scene as well as his "is it safe?" monologue.



Similarly, that's how I felt about the film: I'll remember the film's overall tone (very dark for a Dustin Hoffman film) and a handful of moments such as Olivier's torture scene, the sewer scene, the drag race, and the reveal that Doc is Babe's brother (Scheider's character is a very enigmatic figure and his involvement in the story goes without an explanation for what I'm guessing is an hour). The plot is highly dense and takes a couple of viewings to really grasp and even then there's a feeling of discomfort of blanks left unfilled. You might call them plot holes (i.e. how exactly did a traffic hold-up turn into a drag race filled with murderous rage and what are the odds that a tanker would be there?) but it seems like a certain story convention that's seemingly being emulated by the biggest names in Hollywood today. I felt a similar disconnect from The French Connection which is another film of great praise that I seem to be in the minority on.



Rather than end this review with a conclusive statement on what was wrong or right about the film, I'll ask other people who have seen it to explain the film's appeal.

Don't hail Brooklyn Nine Nine as the future of comedy yet: Straight-Man-Funny Man Dichotomy

Brooklyn Nine Nine is starting to get a little bit of critical steam now that it won the Golden Globe for best comedy.

Erik Adams at the AV Club just posted an article: Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn't TV's best comedy---But It's Getting there. In an effort to stop the  critical Brooklyn Nine Nine train from turning into a massive bandwagon, I'm going to put my foot in the ring and caution other critics to praise it as the next big thing just yet. I previously included Brooklyn Nine Nine on my 2013 list of shows that didn't measure up and I'll expand upon it here.

First, let's talk about the Golden Globes:
Anyone who uses the Golden Globes as a barometer for critical temperature should note that the Hollywood Foreign Press is composed of some 90-odd part-time journalists who only have the illusion of importance. The only reason anyone pays attention to them is because they finangled their way to a TV deal with NBC in the early 1960's (a contract that was dropped from 1968-1972 when the FCC questioned their voting procedures). If they line up with other awards, it's largely coincidence if you look at it statistically and in the case that the Golden Globes does something idiosyncratic, it should be taken as a fluke.

The Golden Globe nominees in the comedy film category have included Patch Adams, There's Something About Mary, The Tourist, Alice in Wonderland (the Tim Burton version), Analyze This and Sydney Pollack's highly forgettable remake of Sabrina. No one else has followed suit in honoring any of those films and I suspect no one has even rented these films from Blockbuster..errr, I mean Netflix

Adams also points out that it's rare for a show to dominate critical buzz early, but it's worth pointing out that 30 Rock (which really was a juggernaut in its first season), Arrested Development, Modern Family all won in their first year of Emmys eligibility, and the Office won in its second season after a first season that was just six episodes.

Now, let's talk about Brooklyn Nine Nine:


The show makes sense from a dollars-and-sense perspective. Andy Samberg is pretty hot coming off a highly visible 7-year SNL run and Mike Schur (Brooklyn Nine Nine's co-creator) was able to custom-cater a hit smash to ex-SNL cast member Amy Poehler's comic persona with "Parks and Recreation."

The problem with trying to do the same for Andy Samberg is that Samberg was never a particularly capable live performer (a decent impressionist at times, I admit) and that capturing lightning in a bottle for Samberg would involve taking over a great deal of Samberg's highly off-beat wackiness with him. To try to  put Samberg into any sort of straight sitcom is problematic from the start.

On top of that, Schur chose to make Samberg a cop, and not just a cop, but a homicide detective. Why they picked the most clichéd setting in TV show history as a vehicle for a comic actor who no one would ever picture as a police detective is beyond me.

Samberg is wacky beyond compare here and lacks a straight man to balance him out.

A straight-funny man dichotomy requires someone grounded in reality which is ironic because Greg Daniels and Mike Schur's first two series (The Office and Parks and Recreation) were known for their hyper-reality.

Take the example of 30 Rock:
Liz Lemmon is the straight man to everyone except in episodes where Tina is going a little bit off the rails and then Pete Hornberger acts as her straight man. As evidence of this, in episodes that don't feature Liz's neuroses, Pete has noticeably less screen time.

30 Rock tends to isolate their demented characters (the ubervain Tracy/Jenna duo, the ubermoral country bumpkin Kenneth, and the ubersnob Jack) and play them off the straight man. That doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't plenty of Tracy/Kenneth interactions but it means that the form of bizarreness is happening in isolation. When Tracy and Jenna are being self-centered showbiz type, it's usually countered with a strong balance by Liz or Pete reacting to Tracy and Jenna as if they're behavior is bizarre. Similarly, Liz (especially in Season 1) is highly stressed out by Jack because he's a bizarre boss making bizarre requests (like that episode where he misleads her into thinking he needs a great joke that night because he's wearing a tuxedo) is another example of bizarreness in isolation played against a straight man. In short, the straight-man-funny-man dichotomy on 30 Rock is one of very sharp contrasts (from 3 different sources) which is used to good effect.

Back to Brooklyn Nine Nine:
In Brooklyn Nine Nine, we have one character acting really bizarrely for a police detective rather than having a sharp contrast between him and the rest of the world, various characters like Boyle cheering him on and adding one liners on top of the mix, and characters like Diaz and Santiago who  join in sometimes and are sometimes dismissive of him for being an immature man-child. Boyle, in particular, is troubled, because he occupies an odd middle ground between class clown wannabe, shy guy, and straight man.

In short, there isn't a good distinction between the clowns and the straight men in this cast. Andre Braughter's character, Ray Holt, is a very grave and stern man. He almost works but a straight man isn't about being gravely serious to the point that where your grave seriousness is a comic trait.
A straight man, rather, is about bouncing off the funny in a way that establishes a comic baseline. Even if Holt were a perfect foil, so many of the characters are wacky, that it doesn't work. If we were to take Holt seriously, he'd have fired well over half the staff by the third episode which runs into the problem that we'd no longer have a show. 

On top of that, we'd have Chelsea Peretti who's a brilliant cloud cuckoolander in that she's so bizarre but she doesn't mesh well with the rest of the cast. The upside is that Peretti would kill on any other show with that character and I look forward to seeing that happen if this show gets cancelled.

What's the net effect of this? Som might point out that even if there's not a good straight man, characters are still saying funny things and since we're all still laughing, isn't that the point of a comedy? I'd argue it renders any attempt at pathos or sentimentality ineffective because I'm taken out of the realism completely which keeps it from being a show who's characters I want to follow week in and week out.