Perhaps the reason I enjoy TMZ so much is that I'm so oblivious to most American pop culture. In an average episode, I can probably recognize half of the celebrities they camera-hassle by sight, and am familiar with maybe half of the remaining half by name.* So to me, most episodes quickly descend into a true theatre d'absurd type-deal-thing where it's just one schmuck chasing around another schmuck with a camera for literally no reason that I can discern. The only thing that could make it more enjoyable would be if hunter and prey arbitrarily changed roles halfway through and like the stubbly guy from those date movies just yanked the camera out of someone's hands and started pursuing Harvey Levin through the achingly lambent lighting of the pink, green, and gaudily banana wall-papered Polo Lounge shouting questions about Harv's splashy little incident driving while, as the Europeans might say, he was "colourfully intoxicated."
=================
*This feels like a Zeno's Paradox situation where I get halfway to halfway to halfway to halfway to knowing what a Hannah Montana is but, blissfully, never quite get there.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Blind date with a chancer/We had oysters and dry lancers/And the cheque when it arrived we went Dutch, Dutch, Dutch (Date Night, pre-review)
I'm less enthusiastic than I should be about a movie about a date between Michael Scott and Liz Lemon.
First of all, if you're going to produce what is pretty transparently a 90 minute The Office/30 Rock crossover episode, Michael and Liz are not the characters who should be going out on a date. Why not Kelly Kapoor and Alec Baldwin? So many polka dots! So much slicked back hair! Why not a buddy movie, starring Ryan the Temp version 3.1 and Jack's sycophantic executive assistant? Better still, bring back Jan's old assistant Hunter, team him up with Jack's assistant, and let them fight crime together. Seriously, hasn't anyone been reading my fan fic?
When it comes down to brass tacks, I'm just afraid the movie is going to be more schticky than witty, trapped in that super-awkward interregnum between slapstick and romantic comedy in which nothing, and I mean nothing, ever seems to thrive.
It goes without saying that I love both Carell and Fey individually. Collectively? In the words of Dwight Schrute, "I think they could both do better."
First of all, if you're going to produce what is pretty transparently a 90 minute The Office/30 Rock crossover episode, Michael and Liz are not the characters who should be going out on a date. Why not Kelly Kapoor and Alec Baldwin? So many polka dots! So much slicked back hair! Why not a buddy movie, starring Ryan the Temp version 3.1 and Jack's sycophantic executive assistant? Better still, bring back Jan's old assistant Hunter, team him up with Jack's assistant, and let them fight crime together. Seriously, hasn't anyone been reading my fan fic?
When it comes down to brass tacks, I'm just afraid the movie is going to be more schticky than witty, trapped in that super-awkward interregnum between slapstick and romantic comedy in which nothing, and I mean nothing, ever seems to thrive.
It goes without saying that I love both Carell and Fey individually. Collectively? In the words of Dwight Schrute, "I think they could both do better."
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Wallace Stevens Friday (early on Saturday morning)
The first time I read this poem, I was about 14 years old. We were on a family vacation at Hilton Head. I'd spent much of the day playing tennis with an older girl (she'd just graduated Sweet Briar, heading for Old Dominion) who was a much better player than me. I was exhausted, and I remember sitting on the deck of the house we'd rented for the vacay (it was dominated by green and beige, I remember) drinking an Arnold Palmer, swatting mosquitoes, and trying to focus on this particular poem. It felt crucial, though I couldn't explain just why. There's still an emotional urgency to it that not much else has ever managed to agitate in my nerves.
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there was never a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there was never a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Intruder
The opening credits to Intruder feature what is almost certainly the longest, stillest shot of a full moon in cinematic history. Like the film itself, the effect is cheap, cheesy, and strangely charming.
Intruder is widely regarded as the last great slasher film of the 1980s. The set and setting are pretty perfect for a horror film set in G.H.W. Bush's America. It opens with doomed shoppers milling mostly aimlessly around a doomed supermarket in some small doomed town, staffed by a number of listless, equally doomed, employees. Like all great slasher films, on a meta-level, we get to see doomed actors giving doomed performances in an ill-fated, last ditch effort to stave off having to finally suck it up and get real jobs.
Just before closing time at the Supermarket of the Damned, the psychotic ex-boyfriend of one of the cashiers shows up and starts hassling her. He becomes violent, there is a mild scuffle (roughly on par with the epic Spader v Cryer battle in Pretty in Pink except everyone involved is wearing a cheap shirt), then he disappears into the deep, dark recesses of the store. The employees (how a supermarket the size of a Piggly Wiggly can employ roughly 74 people is perhaps the film's biggest mystery) spend the next several minutes tracking him down and kicking him out.
As it turns out, the supermarket apparently can't successfully employ so many shiftless slackers, because shortly after the night crew manages to kick out the psycho ex-boyfriend, the owners hold a meeting in which they announce that the store will be closing its doors soon and everybody is going to be out of a job. Worse still, the crew is expected to dig their own graves or, in this case, spend the rest of the night marking down every item in the store to half price for a totally awesome "Going out of Business" sale.
It's sort of hard to tell the characters apart, or even be sure how many there are. Even though grunge hadn't hit the mainstream yet, bad hygiene and dirty hair were definitely de rigeur at Walnut Lake Market. There's one kid who looks and talks a little like a trailer park James Spader and who I think is supposed to be stoned all the time. There are only two girls, so they're pretty easy to tell apart since one is wearing khakis and one is wearing black jeans. Actually, the girl who doesn't have the psycho ex is Renee Estevez of Sleepaway Camp II fame, but she's changed her hair so it's hard to tell. The psycho ex is the only one in a leather jacket and there is an old dude (the minority owner) who tries creepily hard to be friends with his teenage employees. Sam Raimi has a supporting role. Bruce Campbell makes an appearance, but he wisely chooses to arrive in the film near the end and get out as quickly as he can. But most of the other male supermarket kids are pretty much interchangeable. It doesn't matter, since you can be fairly certain they're all going to die gruesomely.
The film plays out literally exactly the way you would expect. Okay bodycount. Respectably creative kills. Some fairly amusing grossouts. The OMG surprise twist at the end that you could see coming roughly 17 minutes into the film.
I liked it, but I knew that I would. Just say to yourself "I'm about to watch a slasher film set in the late 80s." If a little voice inside your head says "Hooray," you will like this film. If you hear no such little voice, you will not like this film.
My complaints:
There were an insufficient number of hideous, geometric pattern shirts and zero (0) rope belt sightings. There were also no Ray Bans (granted the whole film was took place in the middle of the night, but still, since when was fluorescent lighting not an excuse to put on a pair of Wayfarers?), no Swatches, and nobody was wearing any Roos.
There was not a single cheesy upright arcade game anywhere in the supermarket. How can you make a film in a supermarket in the late 80s and not include an arcade game and also, while you're at it, a gumball machine?
No Muzak versions of Phil Collins or Kate Bush playing endlessly on the store's sound system.
Also, nobody was wearing a denim jacket with little band and/or slogan pins on it.
So what it comes down to is, Intruder effectively executes the formulae of the era, but fails to capture any of the zeitgeist.
The working title Night Crew--The Final Checkout would also have been much cooler.
Intruder is widely regarded as the last great slasher film of the 1980s. The set and setting are pretty perfect for a horror film set in G.H.W. Bush's America. It opens with doomed shoppers milling mostly aimlessly around a doomed supermarket in some small doomed town, staffed by a number of listless, equally doomed, employees. Like all great slasher films, on a meta-level, we get to see doomed actors giving doomed performances in an ill-fated, last ditch effort to stave off having to finally suck it up and get real jobs.
Just before closing time at the Supermarket of the Damned, the psychotic ex-boyfriend of one of the cashiers shows up and starts hassling her. He becomes violent, there is a mild scuffle (roughly on par with the epic Spader v Cryer battle in Pretty in Pink except everyone involved is wearing a cheap shirt), then he disappears into the deep, dark recesses of the store. The employees (how a supermarket the size of a Piggly Wiggly can employ roughly 74 people is perhaps the film's biggest mystery) spend the next several minutes tracking him down and kicking him out.
As it turns out, the supermarket apparently can't successfully employ so many shiftless slackers, because shortly after the night crew manages to kick out the psycho ex-boyfriend, the owners hold a meeting in which they announce that the store will be closing its doors soon and everybody is going to be out of a job. Worse still, the crew is expected to dig their own graves or, in this case, spend the rest of the night marking down every item in the store to half price for a totally awesome "Going out of Business" sale.
It's sort of hard to tell the characters apart, or even be sure how many there are. Even though grunge hadn't hit the mainstream yet, bad hygiene and dirty hair were definitely de rigeur at Walnut Lake Market. There's one kid who looks and talks a little like a trailer park James Spader and who I think is supposed to be stoned all the time. There are only two girls, so they're pretty easy to tell apart since one is wearing khakis and one is wearing black jeans. Actually, the girl who doesn't have the psycho ex is Renee Estevez of Sleepaway Camp II fame, but she's changed her hair so it's hard to tell. The psycho ex is the only one in a leather jacket and there is an old dude (the minority owner) who tries creepily hard to be friends with his teenage employees. Sam Raimi has a supporting role. Bruce Campbell makes an appearance, but he wisely chooses to arrive in the film near the end and get out as quickly as he can. But most of the other male supermarket kids are pretty much interchangeable. It doesn't matter, since you can be fairly certain they're all going to die gruesomely.
The film plays out literally exactly the way you would expect. Okay bodycount. Respectably creative kills. Some fairly amusing grossouts. The OMG surprise twist at the end that you could see coming roughly 17 minutes into the film.
I liked it, but I knew that I would. Just say to yourself "I'm about to watch a slasher film set in the late 80s." If a little voice inside your head says "Hooray," you will like this film. If you hear no such little voice, you will not like this film.
My complaints:
There were an insufficient number of hideous, geometric pattern shirts and zero (0) rope belt sightings. There were also no Ray Bans (granted the whole film was took place in the middle of the night, but still, since when was fluorescent lighting not an excuse to put on a pair of Wayfarers?), no Swatches, and nobody was wearing any Roos.
There was not a single cheesy upright arcade game anywhere in the supermarket. How can you make a film in a supermarket in the late 80s and not include an arcade game and also, while you're at it, a gumball machine?
No Muzak versions of Phil Collins or Kate Bush playing endlessly on the store's sound system.
Also, nobody was wearing a denim jacket with little band and/or slogan pins on it.
So what it comes down to is, Intruder effectively executes the formulae of the era, but fails to capture any of the zeitgeist.
The working title Night Crew--The Final Checkout would also have been much cooler.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Chainsaws, Zombies, and Nazis, that's why they call me Mr Happy (Dead Snow, 2009)
There is much to love about this film.
Dead Snow combines classic horror movie tropes (horny students, an ominous warning from a grizzled old man, an isolated cabin, gruesome deaths) with exhilaratingly gorgeous cinematography. The pristine, eerie beauty and silence of an alpine landscape is juxtaposed with an impressive grossout factor that includes Nazi zombies drooling blood, a pretty Scandinavian girl literally stomping a zombie's head into mush, and a student being squeezed by one of the zombies until his brain plops out onto the cabin floor.
The premise is elegant in its simplicity. Several sex-crazed Norwegian students go up to a cabin in the mountains for an Easter break full of debauchery and snow sports. An unstable old man shows up uninvited at their cabin to warn them to get the hell out of there because the area is "Evil." Back in World War II, it seems, the Nazis had established an outpost in the area and there had been a final, climactic showdown between the locals and the occupying forces. In fairness to the kids, who naturally ignore the old man's warning, he neglected to mention that the area is now infested with semi-sentient Nazi zombies from hell commanded by their old leader, Colonel Herzog. The rest of the story is pretty predictable--the zombies show up and pandemonium breaks out. In an obvious nod to Evil Dead II (which the film namechecks earlier) one guy amputates his own arm with a chainsaw.
The characters make abundant American pop-culture references, mostly to horror movies. There is even an allusion, in perfect English, to a line from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ("Fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory") that made me do a doubletake. It's frankly embarrassing that the Norwegians are ahead of Americans in quote mining Indiana Jones sequels. As a bonus, the fat nerdy pop culture junkie actually gets some action from arguably the hottest of the hot girls in the film.*
Visually, the movie is just perfect. The evisceration, immolation, and chainsaw dismemberment scenes have to rank among the best ever filmed. The sense of (fleeting, oh so fleeting) triumph after one particular battle between the kids and the zombies evoked by the image of blood-soaked protagonists against a translucent blue and snow white background is absolutely brilliant. The soundtrack, especially in the combat scenes, complements the action masterfully. Even the nutshelling of plot points is executed with a deadpan sense of humor that's funny even in subtitles (thanks in no small part to the fact that the actors know when to ham it up and when to tone it down).
Oh hey, did I mention the part where a dude is literally pulled apart, like drawn and quartered, by a bunch of zombies? I didn't? Well I should have, because that scene was aaaaaaawesome.
Dead Snow is probably as close as I have ever seen to a perfect zombie film.
===================================
* Though my personal preference was for the kind of nerdy introvert with dreadlocks, because I like nerdy girls with curious hair.
Dead Snow combines classic horror movie tropes (horny students, an ominous warning from a grizzled old man, an isolated cabin, gruesome deaths) with exhilaratingly gorgeous cinematography. The pristine, eerie beauty and silence of an alpine landscape is juxtaposed with an impressive grossout factor that includes Nazi zombies drooling blood, a pretty Scandinavian girl literally stomping a zombie's head into mush, and a student being squeezed by one of the zombies until his brain plops out onto the cabin floor.
The premise is elegant in its simplicity. Several sex-crazed Norwegian students go up to a cabin in the mountains for an Easter break full of debauchery and snow sports. An unstable old man shows up uninvited at their cabin to warn them to get the hell out of there because the area is "Evil." Back in World War II, it seems, the Nazis had established an outpost in the area and there had been a final, climactic showdown between the locals and the occupying forces. In fairness to the kids, who naturally ignore the old man's warning, he neglected to mention that the area is now infested with semi-sentient Nazi zombies from hell commanded by their old leader, Colonel Herzog. The rest of the story is pretty predictable--the zombies show up and pandemonium breaks out. In an obvious nod to Evil Dead II (which the film namechecks earlier) one guy amputates his own arm with a chainsaw.
The characters make abundant American pop-culture references, mostly to horror movies. There is even an allusion, in perfect English, to a line from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ("Fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory") that made me do a doubletake. It's frankly embarrassing that the Norwegians are ahead of Americans in quote mining Indiana Jones sequels. As a bonus, the fat nerdy pop culture junkie actually gets some action from arguably the hottest of the hot girls in the film.*
Visually, the movie is just perfect. The evisceration, immolation, and chainsaw dismemberment scenes have to rank among the best ever filmed. The sense of (fleeting, oh so fleeting) triumph after one particular battle between the kids and the zombies evoked by the image of blood-soaked protagonists against a translucent blue and snow white background is absolutely brilliant. The soundtrack, especially in the combat scenes, complements the action masterfully. Even the nutshelling of plot points is executed with a deadpan sense of humor that's funny even in subtitles (thanks in no small part to the fact that the actors know when to ham it up and when to tone it down).
Oh hey, did I mention the part where a dude is literally pulled apart, like drawn and quartered, by a bunch of zombies? I didn't? Well I should have, because that scene was aaaaaaawesome.
Dead Snow is probably as close as I have ever seen to a perfect zombie film.
===================================
* Though my personal preference was for the kind of nerdy introvert with dreadlocks, because I like nerdy girls with curious hair.
Alex Chilton, RIP
Several people have texted to mention the death of Alex Chilton. All I can really say is, what a king-hell bummer.
Also, Chilton, Jay Reatard, Chesnutt and Linkous in such rapid succession?
Also, Chilton, Jay Reatard, Chesnutt and Linkous in such rapid succession?
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Justified (series premiere, FX)
The new FX original series Justified is based on a character from some Elmore Leonard books I've never read. Given that I'm in no position to justify or falsify the show's fidelity to Leonard's conception of the soft-spoken, brutally righteous lawman Raylan Givens, I'm free from the obligation to fret about whether Graham Yost's television adaptation got this right or that wrong or had Givens in the wrong color of hat or had the mole on the wrong side of his cheek.
In the series premiere, Marshall Raylan Givens (played with a brooding charisma by Timothy Olyphant) gets himself into a peck of trouble in Miami by gunning down a bad guy in the middle of a ritzy hotel restaurant overlooking the ocean in South Beach. In defense of Givens, the restaurant was nearly empty (which beggared belief--I've never seen such a desolate restaurant in South Beach) and he had given the guy 24 hours to get out of town before he gunned him down. Still, there was a bit of fallout over the incident, the end result of which was Givens being shipped back to a district way the hell in Kentucky, a few miles from the town in which Givens grew up. The episode was engaging, well paced, and Walton Goggins was impressive making an appearance as the episode's primary antagonist, a profiteering Nazi sociopath with childhood ties to Givens. Goggins was a pleasant surprise, given how weak The Shield had been in its last two seasons and how often it felt like his only recourse as Shane was to season the scenery to his liking and start chewing.
The premiere of Justified contained the following:
Quiet violence
Black comedy
Scruff and stubble
Cowboy hats
A coquettish Southern femme fatale
A second, more tomboyish, femme fatale police officer
Fat, ugly Nazis
Less fat, but still quite ugly, Nazis
A gorgeous Southern Gothic vibe
A fairly respectable alt-country soundtrack
I'm extremely anxious to watch the 2nd episode.
In the series premiere, Marshall Raylan Givens (played with a brooding charisma by Timothy Olyphant) gets himself into a peck of trouble in Miami by gunning down a bad guy in the middle of a ritzy hotel restaurant overlooking the ocean in South Beach. In defense of Givens, the restaurant was nearly empty (which beggared belief--I've never seen such a desolate restaurant in South Beach) and he had given the guy 24 hours to get out of town before he gunned him down. Still, there was a bit of fallout over the incident, the end result of which was Givens being shipped back to a district way the hell in Kentucky, a few miles from the town in which Givens grew up. The episode was engaging, well paced, and Walton Goggins was impressive making an appearance as the episode's primary antagonist, a profiteering Nazi sociopath with childhood ties to Givens. Goggins was a pleasant surprise, given how weak The Shield had been in its last two seasons and how often it felt like his only recourse as Shane was to season the scenery to his liking and start chewing.
The premiere of Justified contained the following:
Quiet violence
Black comedy
Scruff and stubble
Cowboy hats
A coquettish Southern femme fatale
A second, more tomboyish, femme fatale police officer
Fat, ugly Nazis
Less fat, but still quite ugly, Nazis
A gorgeous Southern Gothic vibe
A fairly respectable alt-country soundtrack
I'm extremely anxious to watch the 2nd episode.
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