24, BSG and LOST this week

24 Season 7 episodes 1-5. Sara is right -- after season one every season of 24 is essentially a remake: Bauer is the one man who can save America, willing to go outside the law and torture to save everyone, some pansy liberals are trying to slow us down, there is a mole, main guys are undercover and hated even though they are trying to do the right thing, hard decisions are made in the line of trying to keep your cover to get to the main target. Season Five was the best season of 24, the one that worked the best, and I think it is time to go at this concept another way maybe. Still watchable, but dumb -- this has the makings of a bad season so far. I wish Tony had been the bad guy for longer, or the whole time. That had more legs. Also one of 24s main problems is they kill off likable characters faster than they replace them -- I am not sold on any of these new people. The best part of the show was always the RETURN OF X, and they have very few characters that can do that. Plus they do not want to lose the audience who has maybe not seen all the earlier seasons.

Battlestar Galactica's "A Great Notion." I usually hate stories that are unrelentingly grim, but this was so bleak I was laughing, as you would at black comedy or Beckett or gallows humor. Mostly I admired the fact that the writers were willing to take the idea of the 4.0 cliffhanger and spend a full episode dealing with the fallout. It was a good example of what Zizek calls the second death: you lose your civilization, but the full impact of that does not register until you lose the hope as well. (HIs example was of a woman whose husband dies -- she is actually handling it ok, until their beloved dog dies as well). One thing BSG does really well is COMMIT. The acting was superb -- apparently Olmos went around depressing everybody about how the show was not going to survive the upcoming writers strike, not because he believed it was true but to aid everyone in capturing a bleak mindset for their characters. He also ad libed the "main vein" line, which is stunning. I love this show -- it is not a guiltly pleasure, or even, I would argue a geeky one -- because it puts character and acting first, and in this regard has more in common with the Wire and Deadwood than Star Trek or Star Wars or Star Gate or Star Whatever. I found the advance of the mythology to be a little weak, which may be my fault -- they introduced major shifts in the status quo by revealing the fifth Cylon and discovering that the 13th colonies were organic Cylons, but, because I was a little in the dark on what the status quo was in the first place (I had to remind myself what the status of the 13th colony was in their minds -- quasi-Biblical myth?) some of the impact was lost. I think the writers wanted me to be stunned by the revelations, but I was more scratching my head.

LOST, Season 5, Episodes 1-2. Since the last season of Lost ended I have seen all of The Wire, the Sopranos, and most of Deadwood, and all of BSG. I think those shows are so good, the robbed me of some of my LOST enthusiasm. I enjoyed the start of Season 5 basically and it had some great moments -- "Why is there a dead Pakistani on my couch?" Hurly throwing a Hot Pocket at Ben, Hurley summarizing the events on the Island ("He had to push a button every 108 minutes or ... well I was never very clear on that"), the room in the basement of the church with the 70s computer at the Foucaults pendulum, Sun and Kate talking about Jin, Neil getting hit by a flaming arrow. The skipping record idea is a good one because it will allow us to get the history of the island -- maybe all the way back to the four toed statued by the end, and it promises to always give up something new, to shake things up constantly. But the dialogue in episode one was really bad -- especially with Halliwax in the cold open talking about time travel with the construction worker. "There are RULES" is weak sauce, especially since there sort of aren't and also because the rules are very much a writer's room problem that I would like to remain behind, but not IN, the actual dialogue. There were a lot of scenes of tension where you could not see someone's face but my group was calling out who it was correctly before they were revealed, even Anna Lucia. And I was not that invested in the emotional story of the lie because I was never super clear why they had to lie -- or how lying was supposed to protect the people back on the island from Widmore since the island moved. I thought the point about "Whatever Ben says, do the opposite" -- and they fact that it WORKED -- was dumb since the point of Ben's character is surely to anticipate that reaction and counter it -- say something that will make you do the opposite, make you think you are going against him, when doing the opposite is exactly what he wants. I was upset when he told the woman at the end he had lost Hurley -- sure he should have said "Hurly is locked up -- exactly where I want him [LOST logo; credits]." But my main problem with this season was that the goal seems wholly passive -- in order to save everyone on the island, the have to get to the island -- and then just stand there? No one has even raised the question of "and then what." Ben indicates they will never come back but what they are supposed to do there is very unclear -- and if I had more of a sense, or even a sense that any character cared about the question, I could care about them more.

By the way, since several viewers are unclear on this -- the old woman was Mrs Hawking from Desmond's time travelly flashback in Season 3 episode 8. I am also putting money on her being Daniel's mom.

UPDATE: I forgot something funny Brad said to me on the phone: "So if a person is standing next to a tent when they movie in time the tent disappears but their clothes stay and also if you give someone a compass then that goes with them?" This could be a complaint but this kind of pulpy silliness I have come to LOVE from Lost -- it is typified in the Constant, which I am starting to think is the quintessential Lost episode in the way it uses time travel sci fi to just tell a love story and does not get hung up on how it would actually work.

Michael Clayton

This movie opened a long time ago to excellent reviews. I have very little to add, except to say that the reviews are right. What makes the movie so smart is that it appeals to mainstream audiences with a solid John Grisham-esque story and appeals to the move-savvy viewer with excellent direction very much in the Stephen Soderbergh vein. The character’s are basically recognizable lawyer fiction types, but they are all at a much more human level of ambiguity, which is excellent. The “villain” in particular stands out because it would have been so easy to make her into a monster who has simply lost touch with humanity. It even would have worked with the theme. But as someone who is losing her way in the film we are watching, she is so much more compelling.

I wonder what I would say to someone who complained Michael Clayton was derivative of Soderbergh, who is an executive producer. It does feel a bit like a house-style: washed out colours; tense but subtle, smart music; hearing the audio of an earlier or later scene superimposed on a present one; deeply ambiguous moments, like Michael with the horses, or the closing credit sequence. But it a style I very much want more of, so I certainly will not fault the film for a lack of originality. Michael Clayton is the directorial debut of Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy – the guy is absolutely solid on every point. This is my favourite kind of film – one with such technical mastery that it makes something fundamentally dumb transcendent. It is not unlike Lost or Angel, on this point.

[I do not know if people are frustrated with these short, somewhat haphazard posts. It is a mode I want to try more, but it will not take over this blog for too long at a time. I like to put something small up, especially on a day with a guest blogger because I do not want to steal the spotlight from our new writers with a huge essay, but I am also trying not to disappear under a hail of guest-bloggers either.]

Hellboy 2 Trailer

I do not really have that strong of an opinion of the first Hellboy movie -- I remember kind of liking the world that they built (Nazi Satanists are always great fun), but also being mildly offended that the girl could control her powers in the comic but was forced into the Hollywood archetype "woman-out-of-control" thing in the film.

I do not have that strong of an opinion about the sequel but I ADORE how the trailer starts with "From the Director of Pan's Labyrinth," then for a more than a full minute looks like an almost serious film along those lines (the creature that appears at the 49 second mark is breathtaking) -- then it GOES TO THE ZOO as soon as Jeffrey Tambor appears. I mean if you are going to go to the zoo, Jeffrey Tambor is the guy you want to go with.

The effect is a little like what happens in From Dusk Till Dawn, where you are watching a realistic road movie, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, at the 54 minute mark , a whole other movie comes crashing in. I know it is not possible, but how great would it be if Hellboy did not appear in the film until after the half-way mark, as he appears in the trailer?

The Will and Grace Series Finale

Will and Grace was a weak sitcom. Its ostensible selling point was its focus on homosexual characters. But really it was an NBC show that cravenly attempted to grab the often differing audiences of NBC's two biggest hits by attempting to combine the willful (and wonderful) cruelty of Seinfeld with easy Friends-style feel good togetherness. Most often this resulted in terribly awkward emotional shifts in the last few minutes of every episode -- characters who have been mean for 27 minutes suddenly, and very often for no reason, find heart in the last 3. Often the cast would split into pairs so that one pair (usually Karen and Jack) could be mean and silly, to balance the other pair (usually Will and Grace) being heartfelt. The only thing that was even remotely funny on the show was the occasional brilliance of Megan Mullally's Karen Walker, a woman so rich that, in my favorite joke on the show, she scoffs at Grace's suggestion that they take the subway during a taxi strike, because she thinks "magical trains that run underneath the city" are some crazy fantasy of Grace's, like an urban legend.

I never watched the show regularly, but I saw much of it in syndication, as I tend to do any chore that can be done in front of the television in front of the television. Recently I caught the series finale and was kind of blown away by how they ended the show. I am going from memory here, so some details may be off.

Jack and Karen are isolated by a dumb sub-plot in which Karen loses all her money but Jack inherits a fortune from a minor recurring character the show killed off. They make a few meta-jokes about how they are not enough without Will and Grace (a nod to the rejected Jack and Karen spin-off), and they sing Unforgettable at the piano as a farewell. End of subplot.

Will and Grace get in a huge fight over priorities: He wants to move in with his boyfriend Vince and adopt a child, but rejects the idea because he says Grace needs him. Grace is given the chance to rejoin her estranged husband in Italy, raise their daughter together, and repair her marriage. When she wants to go Will is furious because he was willing to give up his "normal" life for her, but, in the same circumstance, she is not. This, of course, has been the central conflict of the show since the first episode -- they are in every way husband and wife, except that because he is gay they end up with a strangely intense friendship that gets in the way of "normal" relationships. The surprise is that in the finale the show fast forwards, and we discover that Grace did move to Italy, that Will did movie in with Vince and adopt a kid, and that Will and Grace have not spoken in more than two years -- though they think of each other often and their significant others encourage them to get back in touch.

Separately, they recall meeting in college (living across the hall from one another, as they did for much of the show) and we cut to a college dorm where this scene takes place:



It seems like a flashback, until Will and Grace come down the hall with boxes for their children, who we just saw. Earlier in the finale Will and Grace wonder what life would be like if neither of them moved on. They are imagined by the camera twenty years later aged (with make up effects), balding, fat and bickering. (The good jokes are always about Karen -- she appears in this altered future looking exactly the same, since all of her is plastic surgery anyway). Now, at the tail end of the finale, Will and Grace meet again, again they are expertly aged by make up effects, but this effect is no longer for laughs -- they genuinely look twenty years older. They have not spoken now in nearly 20 years as they meet as they did the first time across a dorm hall. What we thought was a flashback turned out to be a flash forward. In the next scene we learn that the kids will marry each other, and that Will and Grace will be in-laws. They agree to meet each other at the bar they went to at the end of the pilot -- a bar where they were mistaken as a newly married couple, and where they kissed to satisfy the people who mistook them -- there the central conflict is established with the irony driving the emotion. Jack and Karen join the aged Will and Grace and as we zoom in on their drinks, we zoom out to show them all young again, without stage make-up, as they were before the flash-forward. The end.

Given that this is a sitcom, a land in which all problems are resolved in 30 minutes or less, and a pretty dumb sitcom at that, I was shocked at the uncompromising emotion the show went for. Their relationship really was holding them back from being adults, and being adults loses them 20 years of possibly the most important relationship of their lives. The deadlock of their relationship is not avoided or glossed over -- it has a tremendous cost and will only resolve itself in the next generation. This is an oddly intense novelistic answer to the central conflict, I thought, even worse because I can see a pretty easy (arguably) against-the-grain reading of the end -- given weight of the ten year show, my imagination is seized by the idea that Will's son, or Grace's daughter, is gay, and that the pattern will continue. Will and Grace, after all, were a couple in college before he came out. And the final scene of the gang together in present time is overshadowed by the knowledge that this moment exists only because the show needs a closing image -- these people, who have been such intense friends for more than ten years -- and ten years of the audience's life if you have been following the show since the pilot -- will not speak for two decades.

I do not know what to say about this except that I was really surprised and surprisingly moved. You really have to give a generic sitcom like Will and Grace extra points for being surprising.

I tried to find good youtube clips to go with this post, but I am going to have to make due with the little I did find. These are bad compilation videos, but you will see images of Will and Grace comically aged in the first, and Will and Grace seriously aged in the second. Both have that final shot of the gang together.

Beowulf 3D

The weirdness of sitting in a theater and watching Crispin Glover, as a mutant monster, reciting Old English poetry -- in 3D! -- is surely worth the price of admission. This movie, surprisingly, is pretty good, and is making me seriously consider teaching the poem in conjunction with the movie -- if only because it makes the poem accessible and because the film gives such simple, useful examples of irony and metaphor.

Beowulf seems, in part, to be tailor made for a screenplay because the original story breaks so easily into the classical three act Hollywood structure. Teaser: Grendel attacks. Act One: Beowulf v Grendel. Act Two: Beowulf v Grendel's mother. Act Three: Beowulf v the Dragon, in which Beowulf dies taking the monster down. The end. In a strange, unintentional way, this structure has already been presented to us in film in the first three Alien movies: in Alien Ripley fights the monster. In Aliens Ripley fights the monster's mother. In Alien3 Ripley fights a four legged version of the monster and dies taking it down. Obviously, in some lost codex, is the fourth part of the Beowulf poem, in which our hero is cloned as a Grendel-human hybrid who teams up with space pirates to defeat Dan Hedaya. Certainly Grendel in the movie Beowulf bears a striking resemblance to the alien that appears in the fourth Alien movie.

Gaiman's script for Beowulf is pretty solid. He looks at the original poem and figures out how to tie the three stories together more closely into a cyclical family romance, so that it avoids being merely episodic. It even gives the poem, written in an era before psychology and the interior monologue, a little Freudian oomph that seems more part of the myth than part of the characters, which works out well, since film, especially the action film, is not good with interior states. The film uses the most basic symbols available -- the sword and the cup -- simply and economically. Beowulf strips down to fight Grendel and a sword hilt in the foreground obscures his genitals. Then he enters a cave that has a shape that will not go unnoticed. Confronting Grendel's mother in a sexually charged scene, she strokes the sword tip until it melts into silver goo in her hands. That was the sex scene. The cup Beowulf took with him, used as a metaphor for the original King's wife in an early scene, returns later and is offered to someone else. We know what is being offered instantly. Beowulf is forced to damage himself in the same way he damaged Grendel. Ray Winston is credited as two more characters in the film besides Beowulf -- for metaphorical reasons. All of this is obvious, and you could complain about its obviousness, but it chimes with the un-anxious simplicity of a poem written before Milton and Spenser (though this is probably a simplification in itself).

The script also handles nicely the differences between the poem and the film. Since one of the main themes of the film is the difference between the poem and the life -- Beowulf, in his old age tells his wife to remember him not as a hero or as a king but as a man with flaws -- when the film diverges from the poem it is no mere whim, but a conscious irony. If you do not know the poem you do not need to, but if you do you will get more out of the changes. Absurdly, but in a fun way, this ridiculous over-the-top 3D motion capture animation film presents itself as "what really happened."

Also, Gaiman does not forget to give even minor characters, like the Queen and the fratricidal would-be priest, character arcs.

I have heard complaints about the technology, that they all look like freakish puppets, but the film embraces its role as a cartoon so well I do not think you can complain about this. I think it actually helps in some ways. The 3D experience seems to me to be crucial here. You may have some resistance to a whole film in motion capture animation, but just the gesture of putting on the 3D glasses makes you complicit in the absurdity, and so you care less about a possible realism. You have on 3D glasses. They SHOULD look like action figures. (The story fits the technology as Toy Story does -- especially years ago, everything Pixar was going to make was going to look plastic-y anyway so why not do a story about plastic action figures?). I have heard complains in which the scene where Beowulf fights naked is compared to Austin Powers -- what random object will obscure his genitals next. I think that joke is being made in more than one place more because it is easy than because it is true.

Plus Angelina Jolie shape-shifts into mutant high heels, even when naked. This is a really fun movie.

Pushing Daisies 2

I blogged about Pushing Daisies last week, but I wanted to write a brief follow up -- because this week's episode, "Pigeon," was easily my favorite. The overbearing narration and exposition was gone, for the most part. The phrase "unorthodox urban honey pioneer" surely encapsulates everything that is great about this show -- and they know it because they repeated it. That might have been over-doing it, but it really is a great turn of phrase. The episode switched gears at every commercial break -- a different kind of quest in each act -- which was really a lot of fun. But the thing that officially made me love this show was taking a They Might Be Giants song, and turning it into a diagetic musical interlude.

I grew up on musicals (I attended a performing arts high school) and I kind of hate them, but I really admire the sheer balls required to bring any part of them to bear on any kind of contemporary story. I love genre, and the American Musical is one of the most challenging popular genres to keep alive in a form other than horrid cloying cartoons, and nostalgia -- especially the nostalgia of "wasn't it great when everyone went to see live shows instead of staying at home and watching television," an attitude that drives me up the wall. Mulan Rouge did its level best, and I thought it was reasonably fun, but it was also kind of a dead end aesthetically -- I mean it does not exactly open up a space for a lot of movies in the same vein. Same goes for South Park. South Park's meanness kind of kills the central thing about musical, though the songs are often really funny. The Nightmare before Christmas is great, but the music is almost always much less memorable than the film's other virtues. David E. Kelly created the horrible Cop Rock, but I have always been very sympathetic to his attempts to have characters sing on Picket Fences, Boston Public, and most importantly the much too maligned Ally McBeal. (You can read my very brief defence of that show the "The Best of the Blog" on the right -- the show was often stupid, but it had virtues you could not find elsewhere). Buffy tried a musical episode, but it relied almost exclusively on the good will the show earned in its earlier episodes. I cannot remember a single song, and it would not be in a top ten, or even top twenty, list of Buffy episodes. Scrubs tried to repeat the move, but it was so awful I dove across the room to grab the remote before they were a few bars into the first song.

There are a few things that are great about the way the song appears in Pushing Daisies. For one thing, the characters singing are in a car, a place, like the shower, where it seems somehow natural to sing, especially on a big "road trip" (which is sort of what this is, given that the aunts have been indoors for so long). Having Swoosie Kurtz being annoyed with the singing is an easy, but fairly effective, way of providing a lace for an audience who is not going to go for this. The best thing of all is the choice of song. Ally McBeal often went for nostalgic songs, clearly rooted in another age and time. "Little Birdhouse in Your Soul" certainly has a kind of recent nerdy nostalgia to it, but it is a genuinely good song that is nothing but fun -- just what you want in a musical. And the audience for the band and the show overlaps enough (I imagine) that many people, like me, were able to sing along. Singing along with characters in a musical is really the best the genre can achieve. I have to be impressed with a show that did it, even it it was just for a moment.

UPDATE: Pushing Daisies has been picked up for a full season. Whodathunk? Kick-ass.

Pushing Daisies

There has been some excitement about Pushing Daises from folks who like smart weird TV. For those that are watching it the attitude has been the sadly appropriate "this is great: this will be cancelled any second now." It was created by Bryan Fuller who also brought us Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls -- similarly quirky shows that deal with death and spirituality in a very pop-silly way.

Pushing Daisies has an exhausting premise. For no reason a guy has the ability to touch things and bring them back to life. If he touches them again, even accidentally, they go back to being dead, this time forever. If he brings something back to life for more than a minute the universe "course corrects" (as Desmond on Lost would put it) and takes the life of a random person in proximity. I got tired just writing that, but nowhere near as tired as I get hearing it reiterated at the beginning of every episode by a condescending, if endearingly sweet, narrator. Joss Whedon has said that the first six episodes of any show are the pilot -- you have to keep reintroducing your concept in your first six episodes because anyone of these might be a viewer's first one. Firely does this deftly. Pushing Daisies tries to use variations on the lesson to keep us from getting bored -- at least they do not repeat the rules the same way again and again over the opening credits for example -- but there is so much that needs explaining, I cannot imagine there is any way to do it where you do not feel like you are getting punched with the exposition fist. At least one reviewer said the narrator makes it work because he is so perfect; the narrator does a yeoman's job, I agree, but in my opinion there is no way to pull it off gracefully. Explaining the premise is like one guy lugging a sofa into the room every week. (To make matter's worse this is not the only place the narrator intrudes -- constantly the show is telling when it should be showing). And the arbitrary rules do not grow from the story -- they feel imposed by the screenwriters to gives their characters good conflicts: Ned brings his childhood sweetheart back to life, but they can never touch now (ten bucks says the creator's favorite star crossed lovers were Rogue and Gambit); Ned went over the one minute mark when he was a child and accidentally killed his sweetheart's dad; keeping his sweetheart alive killed someone else. And so on. Good conflicts all, but not natural ones.

The show feels like nothing else on television, but it feels a lot like early-1990s Tim Burton, especially the colors, and whimsical stock characters. Since even Tim Burton is no longer Tim Burton, I suppose this is necessary, I still feel like I am watching re-runs.

On the other side of these problems, however, is a charming cast, possibly the most charming I have ever seen -- in part because none of the actors is overexposed, none of them are standard issue. Lee Pace, who plays Ned, is a relatively new actor but I already love him. He has the weirdest part to play, the strangest mix of emotions about his powers, and he carries it off brilliantly. Suppressed friendliness, love forever chained to fear.

I fell head over heals in love with Anna Friel years ago when she did Pantene Commercials in the UK (and this new wonderful Virgin Atlantic commercial there as well). Pantene is pronounced Pan-TEN in the UK by the way. (and Adidas in the UK is prounced AHD-ee-das not Ad-EE-dis).





She is elfin, but completely approachable, beautiful in a unique and specific way. I would describe her as quirky-beautiful -- exactly the mode the show is going for. Plus her name is "Chuck." My heart absolutely melts.

And Chi McBride, whose best role was the principle on Boston Public (a show I loved) -- has tremendous presence, and does weird better than I would have expected. Swoosie Kurtz is great to see again, and even Kristin Chenoweth, who I kinda hate, really gets the part she is supposed to play.

The show has a lot of problems, but the casting alone is enough to keep it afloat for me. This is the TV equivallent of buying a comic book just for the art. It probably will not be enough to keep it afloat for the network so watch it now.

Mitch Reviews Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited

[A second guest blogger joins us, with a review of Wes Anderson's new movie. I asked Mitch to keep it to 500 words, but now I think that may have been unnecessarily harsh. Point being, if you think this is too short, that is my fault, not Mitch's. He may have more to say in the comments. A spoiler follows, but I do not care much about spoilers for a movie like this , whose virtues are elsewhere.]

I want to live in the world inside Wes Anderson’s head, where everything is immaculately framed by revealing nick-knacks and is perfectly choreographed to ambivalent folk music. Anderson’s worthy new film, The Darjeeling Limited, reinforces this desire.

The film’s title refers to a powder blue passenger train transporting three estranged brothers through India on a self-imposed “spiritual journey.” Anderson also continues to study the human response to death – in The Royal Tenebaums Gene Hackman’s pending death (counterfeit or otherwise) motivates his reconciliation with his family, in The Life Aquatic Steve Zissou vows to avenge a dead friend and in Darjeeling the three Whitman brothers must finally make sense of their father’s death after a year. One wonders if Anderson is secretly working on a five-part box set of films about the stages of grief.

As with the director’s other films, the aesthetic is impeccable. The messy red Sanskrit on the exterior of the train, the Julian Davies song on Jason Schwartzman’s iPod player, the set of monogrammed luggage designed for the film by Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton – there is an inimitable magic in Anderson’s arrangement of this stuff. These elements, like good song lyrics, might seem trite or needlessly random when taken out of context, but sequenced correctly they crackle with a sudden and brief harmony.

The screenplay (written by Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola) characterizes the backstabbing brothers with much glee. If one character leaves a scene, the other two instantly form an alliance against him, until he returns and the process repeats. In one very entertaining scene, each brother attempts to one-up the strength others’ illegal painkillers. Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody and Schwartzman navigate the subtleties of the material charmingly. Wilson is particularly good as the bandaged, overbearing Francis; but the synchronicity of the actor’s recent suicide attempt and his beaten-up demeanor in this movie absolutely boggles my mind.

Viewers (like me) who were put off by the abrupt character death towards the end of The Life Aquatic might be frustrated by a similar plot swerve in this film. Granted, the execution here isn’t as hasty as in Aquatic, but its occurrence and necessity to the plot still troubles me, like the old screenwriting adage against suddenly “burning the barn down” in the third act.

Then again, it seems unfair to chastise a film for a sudden death, when the whole premise of the story hangs on the reaction to sudden, unexpected death? If I really want to live in Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic head, I suppose I have to accept that the same ideas are bound to whiz by a couple of times.

Green Wing

[Apologies to my British readers who already know this. Back me up in the comments.]

Of the not insignificant amount of television I was exposed to in my two years living in England, Green Wing was surely the best of the bunch. It is an hour long comedy with an ensemble cast centered around a hospital. There is is a story in the sense that things happen, but there is not really a "plot" to the episodes: each episode shows a day at the hospital and maybe the aftermath at a bar or something.

Comedy relies on surprise, and Green Wing does what Adult Swim did when it first premiered -- jokes always come out of left field. This is harder to do in live action than cartoons, where there is more range for the anarchic -- but Green Wing pulls it off. Part of the genius of the show is that underneath all the madness is a hospital drama about a new female doctor trying settle her romantic feelings for two of her colleagues. I think that plot only serves to lull us into a false sense of security at regular intervals, before ABSURD jokes like I have never seen come flying out of nowhere. Hour after hour the show continues to surprise, which is not an easy thing to do.

When something dull is going on the film speeds past it and when something interesting is going on the film slows down to catch it. The editing, on one level, is not exactly rocket surgery, but coupled with an amazing, original, and indispensable soundtrack the show taps directly into the idea that comedy requires perfect timing and rhythm to work. This principle is usually reserved for describing single jokes, but Green Wing essentially replaces story structure with a comic rhythmic structure on a much larger scale.

I could go on about the show for days -- including Dr. Alan Statham who is surely one of the great comedy creations (though his first scene is not representative of the genius of the character). But someone put the first eight and a half minutes of the first episode up you YouTube, so here it is for you to see for yourself -- much better than me trying to put examples into words.

[As a side-note I often hear people wishing they would make Region 1 DVDs of British television. Do what I do -- get a region free DVD player (not even that expensive) and then get DVDs through EBay or whatever. British TV rocks.]

Arrested Development and George Bush

I really liked Arrested Development when it first aired, but I was a night security guard then and missed most of the first season. Then I was in England, where it did not air. I watched random episodes this year, and loved them, and so decided to buy all three seasons on DVD and go through them in order. I am virtually done now. I have the second half of season 3 left, but I saw most of those when they were re-run on G4. I know I saw the last four.

Because I missed this when it was on, I wanted to know -- did everyone watching at the time notice the weird political skeletal structure on which the show was built? Because I am only just now watching these fully paying attention, I only just now picked up on it.

Obviously I noticed stuff like the Bluth company doing business with the Iraqi government. That is explicit -- a picture of George Senior shaking hands with Saddam prompts someone to say that it will ruin his career, at which point the narrator shows us an image of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam. There is a broad (maybe too broad) joke about homeland security being stupid, and a "Mission Accomplished" banner put up at the Bluth company for a minor accomplishment. The whole end in Iraq, with GOB's Burning Bush trick ("Burn Bush! Burn Bush!") -- of course I saw that.

What I missed was the family structure thing. I thought GOB's name was "Job," like in the Bible. Turns out it is "George Oscar Bluth." While his father, George Senior, is in prison he is put in charge of the corrupt Bluth company, but just as a figurehead. Michael Bluth, the smart one, is given a vice president role. Michael really runs the place; George Senior wants to keep him in the background so if the Feds come he will not take all the blame. Buster is GOB's even stupider brother.

So GOB (George Bluth junior) is the president. He is just a figurehead for the real power, the vice president. And behind the scenes George Bluth Senior, who used to be president, pulls the strings. The names chime as well: George Bush /George Bluth, sons also named George, GOB / Jeb . This makes jokes like GOB using George Bush's malapropisms, George Michael's school election campaign (in which he starts by aiming for the Christian vote), the clips of Fox news, and GOB's putting up posters that say "Everyone Makes Mistakes" funnier.

Two questions.

Am I the last one to notice this?

And

What is the status of this? It is not exactly a satire. Or is it? It is just like this odd structural detail that throws some jokes into high relief, but stays underground enough so that it never interferes with the other, random jokes the show feels like making, so that the show never becomes polemic. Is that right?

Review of a Review of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

[I want to try out some mini-posts. I want to see if this is a good or a stupid idea. These will not interfere with my regular posting schedule: Comics Out will be up later today, when I have gotten and read the comics.]

The Village Voice's Nathan Lee reviews I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. He writes: "Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical. " The review then goes on to back this point up, demonstrating how the film carries a positive social agenda to the un-adventurous Adam Sandler comedy demographic.

That is all very well. Fine. But back to First Principles. I have said over and over here that before you get to your theory or message or theme or idea you must deliver the basics: story, character, and the demands of the genre you are working on, if you are working in a genre.

I am glad, if Nathan Lee is right, that I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry carries a good social message to people that might not otherwise hear it. But it is a COMEDY and so its first job is to be FUNNY. I have no idea whether it is funny because Nathan Lee failed to tell me if it was funny, surely a top priority in a movie review of a comedy.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End -- Really?

Let me start with some choice quotes about PotC: AWE from Nathan Lee's Village Voice review:

"Long before the third, fourth, or fifth climax in this endless, obligatory summer diversion, I slunk into my seat in a passive, inattentive stupor, fully submitting to the fact that I hadn’t the slightest idea what the hell was going on."

"When Depp freaked his funk in The Curse of the Black Pearl, it seemed a sneak attack—the deployment of frisky, flamboyant, softly subversive shenanigans across the cold, impersonal grain of corporate entertainment. Dead Man’s Chest put him in the spotlight and he withered; blooms of such mincing, mascara’d rarity depend on nooks and shadows to flourish. At World’s End is even more aggressive in flaunting and defanging his spectacle, resorting more than once to the multiplication conceit. Give ‘em what they want has never been so literal, to such diminishing returns."

"Of all movies, this is the last you’d expect to talk and talk and talk and talk, but on it goes, everybody yapping about what they just did, what they’re about to do, what they should be doing, what it will mean if they do X instead of Y. Dude, just fucking do it."

In his Onion AV Club review Scott Tobias wrote: "Should the franchise warrant still another sequel, the dialogue might as well be in Esperanto."

When I read this I believed it, but last night I saw the movie anyway, in part because I had some free time, and some friends figured it would be a fun distraction, and I did not want to seem like a spoil-sport. Around the time the film, in a single scene, alluded to the penultimate scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey AND the Matrix I fell into that stupor Lee describes, and got to thinking. Where does the obligatory come from in Lee's phrase "obligatory summer diversion"?

My own list of complaints about the third Pirates film would have to include things like keeping the death of the Kraken off screen -- time taken discussing everything could have been used for a key, and probably visually interesting, scene. Lots of new pirates were introduced who seemed like they might do something, but their major role was to sit round and the cheer at the end. Elizabeth went through a number of changes in this film, but in the end she was just left stranded with nohting to do, and no direction. And, appallingly, the film expects you to remember things from the first film while throwing NEW incomprehensible mythology at you: the sword, the heart (old stories and new rules), the compass, the coins, the map, the objects for the bowl, gods, phasing through solid objects, the land of the dead, the pirate rules (does anyone else here watch Fairy Odd Parents?). I say "throwing" but I mean "talking about." Just one example: why can Barbosa and Depp can come back from the dead, but Elizabeth's father cannot? Because the writers want to write for Depp and Barbosa, but not for Elizabeth's father. I have seen movies make no sense in the past, but they were things like Charlie's Angels 2, or even Ocean's 12, where it was part of how the film is supposed to work -- these movies have no plot like ice cream has not nutrients, you are just supposed to enjoy the patter and the visuals. I do not know how much fun Pirates 3 would have to be to justify its incoherence, but I think, at the least, it would have to be the most charismatic, pure fun, energetic film ever made, for starters. They would also have to serve me some kind of free, excellent dinner during the film.

This is not the first film I saw in the theaters that I knew would be bad beyond belief: Spiderman 3, Terminator 3, Matrix: Revolutions, Johnny English, Star Wars 2 and 3, Daredevil, Hulk, Titanic, Identity. Pearl Harbor is, to date, the only film I have ever just walked out of -- Sara and I left the theater on December 4, 1941.

Social pressure gets me into the theater a lot of the time -- I feel like I have to see these films sometimes, to talk about them, and there are always some people I know who go and invite me along. Also I do get the occasional surprise: I enjoyed Live Free Die Hard for the most part, and Alien vs Predator was actually kind of fun. In some ways these films are the worst of all, because they lure me back into thinking that the critics and my instincts may be wrong. Why is seeing summer movies so much like being addicted to something that is clearly bad for you? I did avoid both Fantastic Four movies, but that is not enough.

The thing that kills me is the hours spent on Pirates 3 -- four, including travel time. I have so much unwatched stuff available on DVD I have so much more confidence in: I could have seen four episodes of 24, Battlestar Galactica, the Wire, or Deadwood. Not to mention all the things I only saw once that deserve a reviewing, like Lost and Samurai Jack. (I know I am comparing TV to movies, but I see the good movies as well as the bad; it is TV I am behind on).

Instead of seeing Transformers -- with its reportedly stupid jokes and awful pacing, and baffling visuals -- I will be at home, watching Avatar. Maybe later I will rent Transformers, and just watch the action sequences. Only I can stop myself from hitting my head against a brick wall.

Ratatouille (Spoilers)

[The Commonplace Book entry will go up tomorrow. I wanted to put this out now, because something similar appeared on theonionavclub blog, and regretted not putting it up when I wrote it Sunday night.]

I can think of only a handful of children's entertainment on a level better than Ratatouille: Chicken Run, Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Nightmare before Christmas, The Emperor's New Groove, The Triplets of Bellville, Iron Giant (from Ratatouille director Brad Bird), Muppets. If we think it is fair to compare TV shows to film in this regard, I would add Charlie and Lola and Pocoyo (though Pocoyo is for little-littles). If we can expand to teen fare I will include Samurai Jack and Avatar, and a few episodes of Batman Animated and Teen Titans.

The film is simply beautiful -- literally every hair is perfectly rendered, as is Paris. Correspondence, rain, and building fronts are so fully created they look like live action. The action scenes are swift and exciting and the story is paced and structured excellently -- enough action to keep things exciting, but enough time spend on happy stuff as well. Brad Bird knows how to tell a story. It is engrossing, from beginning to end. The jokes are great but they tend to rely on a visual, or the delivery. Chicken Run really wins on verbal humor, which I do not think a perfect kids movie can be without. (I think I will post soon on why Chicken Run is one of my favorite films of all time).

Special mention should go to every scene starring Anton Ego, voiced perfectly by Peter O'Toole (even Ian McKellen could not have done a better job with the character). With a type-writer that looks like a skull, in a coffin shaped room, looking like the apotheosis of the Adams Family, he bring a very good movie a notch up every time he is on screen. When he tastes the food I laughed and cried at the same time, no exaggeration. If you do not you have no heart. Further special mention should go to the opening short, my favorite of the Pixar shorts.

But here a complaint (though not an aesthetic one): women have nothing to do in Pixar movies, as wonderful as they are, and Ratatouille is especially egregious in this regard. Jeanne Garafalo's Collette simply has nothing to do. As in the Incredibles, Bird sets forth his thesis, not entirely wrong and kind of daring in a kid's film, that some people are just born special. The rest of the population, in Bird's view, just needs to accept their low status, or risk turning into villains like the bad guy in the Incredibles (Batman has no place in Bird's superhero world; this half of Bird's thesis seems off). In the end it turns out our useless human "chef" Linguini has a talent, though a lesser one than our genius; Collette was never a good chef and will never be anything but the girlfriend. Besides the old woman in the opening sequence, she is the only female character in the movie, including EVERY rat. The next Pixar movie will be about a robot. Seriously guys -- get some female characters that are not hangers on. It will make your movies more interesting. They will not give your movie cooties.

Live Free or Die Hard Review

I have not seen the first Die Hard in years, but I remember it being one of the best -- maybe the best -- action movie ever. I seem to have blocked out Die Harder and Die Hard with a Vengeance, but I vaguely remember there was something about an airport, and Samuel L Jackson, and the brother of the guy from the first film. I went to see Live Free or Die Hard because it looked like an old fashioned action flick, I love Bruce Willis, and the complaints of the reviews centered on zeitgeist (McClane is like Rocky, and Rambo; Willis and Ford are still in stuff like this in their 50s), and on theme (a movie about tech being bad uses CGI) -- things I do not care about for a film like this.

Also NYC buses featured one of the best ad campaigns I have ever seen -- the side of the bus has a long black rectangle and in over-large block letters that threaten not to fit it says "YIPPIE-KAI-YAY MO" and then it cuts off, as if the curse word simply will not fit. At the bottom, in small letters it says "John 6:27" a parody of a biblical citation that replaces chapter and verse with month and day. Half a quote, and a very common first name that is the name of the main character is all they need to remind me about Die Hard. That kind of stuff gets into your lizard brain. They programed me for this back in 1988. I am only human, for Christ's sake.

The dialogue in Live Free or Die hard is not great, especially at the beginning; many of the "quips" would best be deleted. There is nothing approaching the iconic "Yippie-kai-yay Motherfucker" (Slate had a whole bad article on the phrase, by the way). Also it seems to get a PG-13 rating no one can even say "fuck" which seems absurd, especially as the film wants to allude to this famous line. And the plot and the main bad guy -- whatever, lame Bond stuff. There is a lot of "implement phase 1" stuff and "Do you want to break into the Pentagon? Double click yes" that Eddie Izzard makes fun of. And the cameo (is it a spoiler to say who?) felt unnecessary. Also the film has the black vulcan from Star Trek Voyager in a minor role, which was distracting.

But the film basically does a great job delivering bang-em-up action sets often enough to be satisfying, and fun enough to inspire round after round of applause. The film also smartly ratchets up the audacity (man vs man, car vs helicopter, man and car vs kung-fu chick, Semi Rig vs fighter jet) and the stakes (save a stranger, save a friend, save a daughter). Bruce Willis is such a bull, and the action is all old-school. This film will not, and should not, take on Kill Bill and the Matrix. It smartly stays on its own turf. There is a great line where Willis fights a girl who knows Kung-fu and says "Enough of this Kung-fu shit" and then runs her over with an SUV. That's exactly it. That's what Die Hard is supposed to be about.

One of the complains in the reviews was that McClane was such a relatively regular guy in the first film -- he feared flying, and had a real vulnerability in the famous broken glass scene -- but here he is an indestructible superhero. But to me, this makes sense. The first film, almost 20 years ago, is legendary. McClane can only be a superhuman legend now. The second complaint I heard coming out of the theater follows the same logic -- that Semi-Rig vs Jet fighter was just too much. But it should be too much -- the stakes have to be raised, and the audacity has to go though the roof: you are going to have to do something genuinely ridiculous toward the end of your forth installment. Yeah, its a little dumb, but it is Bruce Willis and I am watching Die Hard, so knock it off.

Also Mary Elizabeth Winstead -- the cheerleader from Death Proof, and the villain in Sky High -- is lovely, and spunky and fun.

Lifetime Movies on Today

[Less people read this blog on the weekend so I have decided to use weekend posts for more silly stuff. Feel free to let me know if you think this is an awful idea.]

I have written two books in front of the television, mostly the Lifetime Movie Network and similar fare. Made for TV thrillers are just perfectly trashy, and almost always unintentionally hilarious. Also you can write in front of them because it is very easy to follow without paying much attention -- someone always comes in and recaps the whole film at some point, often right before the climax.

Today's selection on the Lifetime Movie Network:

4:26-6:13. On the Edge of Innocence. 1997. Teens flee psychiatric ward with a hostage. Starring Kellie Martin and James Marsden [CYCLOPS!].

6:13-8:00. Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear. 1998. A woman hires assassins to kill her nanny. Starring Josie Bissett.

8:00-9:45. Between Truth and Lies. 2006. A psychiatrist tries to protect her daughter from an obsessive psychopath. Starring Mariel Hemingway. [I love Mariel Hemingway, I do not care what anyone says.]

9:45-11:30. The Babysitter's Seduction. 1996. A police detective probes a case in which a baby sitter is implicated in the murder of a man's wife. Starring Stephen Collins, Keri Russell [Felicity!] and Phylicia Rashad [the mom from The Cosby Show!].

My favorite part about Lifetime Movies? That you can just interchange half the titles: You could easily switch "Baby Monitor: The Sound of Fear" with "The Babysitter's Seduction" and you could change "On the Edge of Innocence" with "Between Truth and Lies" and no one would notice.

Also, one little thing Sara noticed about Lifetime -- their new movies are called "Lifetime Movie Network Original Premieres." How many people think the sequence of starting letters "L-M-N-O-P" is intentional?

Music and Lyrics -- yeah, the movie

I recently saw the film Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Sara and I wanted something without teeth, after Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth.

The movie, which is bad of course and we did not expect otherwise, is an interesting case study of why conflict is necessary for a good film. One of my in-laws, who has children, complained that Finding Nemo was awful because it was far to intense -- every scene is some major conflict. She wanted to know why there had to be so much. Maybe there could have been less, or at least a pause, but given that all screenwriting books emphasize the need for conflict you can understand why movie-makers err on the side of terror. Go the other direction, and you end up with something like Music and Lyrics.

Hugh Grant plays a has-been 80s pop star -- basically the other guy in WHAM -- who is hired to write a song for a new pop star, basically Britany {edit -- this was spelled wrong the first time I posted}; he needs someone to write lyrics and finds Drew Barrymore, the girl watering his plants. They fall in love.

The main problem with the film is that Hugh Grant is such a great guy: he is kind, tries to make his old fans happy, has accepted that he will never be a superstar, plays Dance Dance Revolution with Barrymore's niece and nephew. He has NO problems as a result of his previous stardom. The whole movie I kept expecting the barrier to his relationship with Barrymore -- this is a romantic comedy after all -- will be that he wants to date women half his age, or was afraid of commitment, or cheats. But the film does not introduce its main conflict until well into the third act -- it turns out at the end that his character arc is that he needs to learn to be ambitious, he needs to stop accepting his has-been status. The romance is secondary -- she cannot accept him until he tries to be more than a has-been. The problem is that his has-been status is not a problem for him -- show him humiliated on a show where he has to box Dustin Diamond (he turns down the chance to be on a show like that actually), something. Otherwise you spend the whole film watching two nice looking people meeting, writing a popular song together, having sex, falling in love and then retroactively learn there was a conflict in the film moments before it was solved. This would be like a murder mystery that just showed people getting along for the first hour and a half and then suddenly they find a dead body and figure out who killed him moments later.

Or as a friend of mine put it about Good Will Hunting: "I am not paying money to watch the story of a boyishly good looking super-genius and his supportive girlfriend and teacher."

Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men (Major Spoilers)

[I missed both of these films in the theaters, heard all the buzz around them, and just now got around to watching them. I can understand the excitement over both, but wanted to write about why they both bothered me.]

Children of Men is a science fiction film close to Soderbergh's underrated Solaris, in terms of keeping both the world realistic and believable, and focusing on characters, rather than philosophical ideas and special effects, a welcome relief. It is also exquisitely directed -- the single long take for the attack on the car in the woods is the showcase, and deservedly so. Pan's Labyrinth creates a unique tone, expertly moving between a weird fairy world and fascist Spain in 1944; the character design is a major point of praise, again deservedly so.

Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro and Children of Men director Alphonse Cuaron -- both Mexican -- have directed mainstream American sci-fi and fantasy films: del Toro did Hellboy and Cuaron was responsible for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Uzbekistan (Azkaban, whatever). Both Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth gain power from the same source -- they take traditionally escapist genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- and ground them in as real a world as can be thought up.

It is how both Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men link the real world to escapist genres that leads me to the conclusion that they are both overrated. Both films are rooted in a deeply pessimistic world view -- most people in both films are sell-outs, brutalizers, and ideologues. Importantly, after two hours of almost uninterrupted unpleasantness, both films have happy endings (in both an infant is ostensibly saved) that are undercut by all of the previous scenes. The boat arrives to save the first human born in 18 years -- but haven't we seen in the course of the film that most people are monsters? How much hope do we have that the people on the boat at the end of Children of Men will be better human beings than everyone we have left behind? Ofelia is reunited with her parents in a beatific fairy heaven where she is a princess at the end of Pan's Labyrinth -- but she has died horribly, possibly believing in some kind of delusion. The guerrilla's will raise her half brother -- but do we really think they are better people than the regime they have just toppled? As adults they are as cut off from the child's ability to perceive magic as surely as Ofelia's mother was (it is not just Nazis that cannot see magic). And of course Franco died peacefully in his sleep long after the film takes place -- this war is nowhere near over. The film does not address this point directly either, but fairy worlds, if you believe the fairy world is real (and I think that is best) are usually very bad for children -- as in Labyrinth with David Bowie, the girl is supposed to save her brother from the fairly creatures of the Labyrinth (as Ofelia does), but it is no place for a little girl to live. An old woman in the film -- and old women in these films always know what is really going on -- even says that fauns are not to be trusted; and the faun does not seem at all trustworthy. You could argue whether the end of either Pan's Labyrinth or Children of Men is supposed to be ironic but to me the endings feel very much like the end of Kafka: The Musical, a spoof in an episode of the television show Home Movies -- as Kafka is raised to heaven a booming voice declares, in a super-friendly but faux-stately voice "Hello Franz Kafka! My name is God! I think you are going to like it here!"

Both Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth have their story to tell -- the hero's journey to learn to love again, to care about a cause again, and to get a child to safety; the little girl who saves her brother and makes her way to her proper destiny as a fairy princess. But both Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth are disingenuous. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his commentary on the DVD, the hero's journey in Children of Men appears to be the point, and the world he travels in secondary, but it is the other way around: what Cuaron is really interested in is holding a glass up to nature, as it were, and showing us our own ugly face in the "background" -- the world -- of the film; the hero's journey is merely an excuse. This is why his story is so dully told -- the story structure of Children of Men has an obstacle-1-obstacle-2-obstacle-3-and-so-on structure; it could be much shorter, or much longer, which is not the right way to tell a story. Similarly it is the depiction of fascist Spain that is delToro's aim in Pan's Labyrinth -- the fantasy elements of Ofelia's story serve only to bring home the brutality of Spain under Franco more starkly than a fully realistic film could -- these monsters are not just killing children, they are killing the very spirit of imagination itself. This is why, if you have seen DVD box, or a commercial for the film, you have seen all the amazing character designs -- there are only two.

I was disappointed to discover in each film a pedestrian design, a subordination of the imagination and storytelling to a crummy point about a world that is ugly, and a people that are sad.

That monster with the eyes in his hands sure was cool though, and Children of Men had a hell of a tracking shot.

Ocean's Thirteen Review (minor spoilers)

Ocean's 13 is a very good movie, but not a great movie -- it is the weakest of the three films, but not by much. It has some excellent sequences and scenes, but some of the pop and magic from 11 and 12 are missing, leaving you with the feeling that the whole thing is a little phoned in. Phoned in by geniuses, and so still pretty damn good, but phoned in nonetheless.

There is a sub-plot about a revolution at a Mexican factory that makes dice, infiltrated by one of our gang to rig the dice, that is quite fun. Ruben has a nice arc in which he rediscovers his old self -- with giant glasses and a ridiculous tux. Al Pachino is fun, and Elen Barken is an interesting addition; a single economical scene of her firing an employee over weight is all that is needed to establish her as someone who needs to be punished. There is a brilliant bit with Oprah that makes the whole film for me. The CGI building is a marvel, and a scene in which we quickly see shots of the inside of the building goes by too fast to take in, but the rooms are stunning. The overall plan to ruin Pachino by letting all the patrons win is a nice differentiation from the earlier two films. David Holmes's score is great, as it was for the first two films -- the score is a good percentage about what makes these films work, what really sells all the ridiculousness.

But some important aspects of 11 and 12 are missing. Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, for one thing. The cameos for another: earlier films had Topher Grace (easily the best scene in 12, and a great moment in 11), Bruce Willis, and Eddie Izzard. Here Izzard is promoted to a bigger role; he was only ever funny because he was playing himself. In this film he has more lines -- and this is completely absurd -- than Pitt does, most of them early on, when the audience needs to be sucked in, not thrown back on themselves; the fact that Izzard is a ham and a bad actor works for 12, which short circuits actors and characters; it works much less well in 13. The banter Casey Affleck and James Caan's son (I cannot remember his name and Sara keeps calling him Kahn Jr) was great in 11 and 12; there is only one good exchange between the two in this movie, and I wanted more. 12 had great meta-dialogue about, for example, Clooney's age; the meta dialogue about Clooney's weight and Pitt's kids seems forced at the end of this film. There are some jokes that revolve around the word "Wang" that are less than great. The third time around, you can feel the twists coming.

While the weakest of the Soderbergh Ocean's films, Ocean's 13 is part of a series of summer blockbuster films that are the third in a series -- Spiderman, Pirates, Schreck, Bourne. I have an inchoate feeling that Ocean's 13 is playing games with its position as a blockbuster (something Slate wrote about). It is a less that perfect Ocean's film, but a great summer movie.

Ocean's Twelve (reprint)

Back in April of 2006 I wrote a short piece for the Oxford Student Newspaper on why Ocean's Twelve is my favorite movie. That is no longer part of their archives online, so I will reprint it today, before reviewing Ocean's 13 tomorrow.

People I know cannot reconcile my usually excellent taste in movies with the fact that my favourite film is Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve. But it is. And this is why.

I love genres. I wrote a book on superhero comics and Harold Bloom, and my doctoral dissertation at Balliol argues for the existence of an unrecognized genre of poetry. Genres are fun because we get to watch clever writers squirm to invent variations on well-worn themes that must appear, but appear differently to for us to care.

Soderbergh alternates between making popular stuff like Erin Brockovich and experimental stuff like Full Frontal. His Ocean’s Eleven puts charismatic actors in a tightly plotted, fun and likeable movie: it’s a flawless heist film in no need of a sequel. What makes Ocean’s Twelve so tricky is that it is an experimental film meant to follow a popular one.

Ocean’s Twelve, hilariously, destroys its own plot. The heist of Eleven takes up virtually the whole film; the main “heist” of Twelve is a single scene in which our heroes stage a fight so they can switch bags with a guy on a train. At every turn we are directed away from plot, toward watching movie stars on vacation. This is a lot more fun than it should be because Twelve, directed with easy confidence and lazy grace, is floated on a frightening (almost disturbing) level of star charisma from the whole cast, especially Clooney and Pitt.

Big stars don’t give the impression they are playing characters: saying “the George Clooney character” is accurate but emotionally wrong; “George Clooney robs three casinos” is the only description that does Eleven justice. Ocean’s Twelve jacks up this short circuit between big stars and their characters: the first film has Brad Pitt teaching poker to TV actors playing themselves; the sequel makes a “plot” point out of Julia Roberts’s Tess pretending to be Julia Roberts. The plot doesn’t matter because the actors are clearly having fun – debating, for example, whether George Clooney looks his age – and we are invited to have fun with them.

Ocean’s Twelve subversively and paradoxically reinvigorates the heist film by breaking it, by taking the Hollywood maxim that acting is a kind of confidence game to its logical extreme.

When I posted the link on my blog I added a paragraph, so readers here would get more than the readers of the student newspaper:

Because of space limitations I had to pick a scene to stand for a device the film used over and over: I mentioned the silly heist, but there are two more (one by our team, one my a competitor); I mentioned the way actors play themselves, but didn't have space to mention the fantastic Eddie Izzard cameo (where he basically plays himself), or the Bruce Willis one, in which he does play himself (and has to endure Matt Damon saying he figured out the ending of The Sixth Sense); I implied the way the movie puts style over substance, but did not have time to mention the way the meaningless thieves' cant scene, the holographic egg and the Capoiera laser-dance scene stand in for the film as a whole in this respect; and I didn't get to mention the wonderful meta-narrative detail -- not unlike the "actors play themselves" thing -- that the whole "plot" of Twelve is set in motion by an "American businessman" on a boat -- played by Ocean's Twelve producer Jerry Weintraub (who also has a cameo in Eleven).

Ocean's 13 review up tomorrow.

TV Week in Review

In free form comments, Mitch made a good point -- maybe it is unfair of me to stop running my weekly TV in Review post just because the only new show that I watch is done until January. If you want to talk about TV this week -- and let's make it anything you watched this week, including movies and re-runs and DVDs -- do it here. If people use this space, I will keep putting it up; if not, not. Review, recommend, discuss.

For me I watched all of Frisky Dingo on youtube. If you do not know it, it is an Adult Swim cartoon in 15 minutes blocks about a supervillain (Killface) and a superhero (Awesome X) From the people who brought you Sealab, it is a good version of the standard Adult Swim logic in which the plot is driven by more and more surreal diversions, although instead of one-off bytes, there is continuity between episodes -- a girl reporter is introduced in one episode, as are computer keyboards that are also ant farms; later she falls into tanks of radioactive waste used to destroy the keyboards and radioactive ants infect her brain; she becomes an evil ant queen supervillain (Ant-igone), who robs banks; later we just drop this whole plot and the girl reporter gets rid of the ants by eating ant poison.

What really makes the show fun is the jokes on pacing. When Killface gets wounded he spends a good deal of time on a hospital payphone trying to get through to his insurance company -- who re-direct him through New Delhi -- before discovering that the company is owned by his billionaire nemesis, Awesome X.