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.
Tennis brats being tennis brats.
A long time ago, I was lucky enough to take a creative writing class from the late David Foster Wallace; back when he was still living in Bloomington, before warm weather and dump trucks full of cash were used to induce him to head West. I distinguished myself in the class in two ways: I had the strangest hair (bright purple for much of the semester), and I dated the only genuinely talented student in the seminar. I was also, as it turned out, the only kid there who shared some of DFW's enthusiasm for tennis.
DFW had been a minor tennis prodigy himself and had also made a few bucks writing some behind-the-scenes pieces about professional tennis invitationals for some swanky magazines. He wrote a famously bitchy description of Andre Agassi in one of the essays collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the only other celebrity to get such harsh treatment in the book was Balthazar Getty for his conduct on the set of Lost Highway). I asked him once if he could expand upon his description at all, and even though Wallace was too tactful to tell tales out of school, he vaguely responded that Agassi was probably not a bad guy but that he tended to compulsively needle people around him. Needling people is not an uncommon trait for super-competitive alpha male types, but it was the first comment I thought of when I saw the first of many stories this morning on the Sampras/Agassi exchange at the charity tourney down in Indian Wells.
Agassi called Sampras out in his memoirs for being a skinflint and a terrible tipper, and told an anecdote in which Sampras (who was born rich and went on to make insane amounts of money playing tennis) tipped a valet at an exclusive restaurant "one dollar." It was one of my favorite parts of the book.
So last night, Sampras and Agassi were bantering and Agassi did an "impression" of Sampras by turning his pockets inside out and commenting "I don't have any money. Oh, I have a dollar." Sampras was apparently Sincerely and Deeply offended by this vulgar display. There are only two reasonable explanations for Sampras's histrionic overreaction--either Agassi has spent literally years needling his quiet American rival and this was a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back-type-deal, or Sampras is the most hysterical ninny in professional sports.
One spoiled, mega-rich tennis brat makes fun of another spoiled, mega-rich tennis brat in front of a stadium full of spoiled, upper middle class Californians for being a bad tipper and the general reaction on television, sports blogs, and the numerous tennis message boards I read (shut up) seems to be: Pistols at Weehawken come dawn. Choose your seconds, gentlemen.
Please allow me to add, speaking as someone who has waited tables at a couple of ritzy places, if Sampras is indeed a bad tipper, screw him. Screw bad tippers, especially rich guys who are bad tippers. Huzzah to Agassi. If his silly, lighthearted little clowning made even one of the entitled, well-scrubbed tennis fans in the stands that night slip their valets and waiters an extra couple of bucks lest they, too, feel like cheapskates then he performed an invaluable service.
Also, w/r/t Sampras, what kind of pompous little tyrant gets Seriously Offended by a not particularly offensive, playful, and apparently true jibe at a charity event? I don't use the "c" word lightly, but I'm tempted, my friend. I'm tempted.
DFW had been a minor tennis prodigy himself and had also made a few bucks writing some behind-the-scenes pieces about professional tennis invitationals for some swanky magazines. He wrote a famously bitchy description of Andre Agassi in one of the essays collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the only other celebrity to get such harsh treatment in the book was Balthazar Getty for his conduct on the set of Lost Highway). I asked him once if he could expand upon his description at all, and even though Wallace was too tactful to tell tales out of school, he vaguely responded that Agassi was probably not a bad guy but that he tended to compulsively needle people around him. Needling people is not an uncommon trait for super-competitive alpha male types, but it was the first comment I thought of when I saw the first of many stories this morning on the Sampras/Agassi exchange at the charity tourney down in Indian Wells.
Agassi called Sampras out in his memoirs for being a skinflint and a terrible tipper, and told an anecdote in which Sampras (who was born rich and went on to make insane amounts of money playing tennis) tipped a valet at an exclusive restaurant "one dollar." It was one of my favorite parts of the book.
So last night, Sampras and Agassi were bantering and Agassi did an "impression" of Sampras by turning his pockets inside out and commenting "I don't have any money. Oh, I have a dollar." Sampras was apparently Sincerely and Deeply offended by this vulgar display. There are only two reasonable explanations for Sampras's histrionic overreaction--either Agassi has spent literally years needling his quiet American rival and this was a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back-type-deal, or Sampras is the most hysterical ninny in professional sports.
One spoiled, mega-rich tennis brat makes fun of another spoiled, mega-rich tennis brat in front of a stadium full of spoiled, upper middle class Californians for being a bad tipper and the general reaction on television, sports blogs, and the numerous tennis message boards I read (shut up) seems to be: Pistols at Weehawken come dawn. Choose your seconds, gentlemen.
Please allow me to add, speaking as someone who has waited tables at a couple of ritzy places, if Sampras is indeed a bad tipper, screw him. Screw bad tippers, especially rich guys who are bad tippers. Huzzah to Agassi. If his silly, lighthearted little clowning made even one of the entitled, well-scrubbed tennis fans in the stands that night slip their valets and waiters an extra couple of bucks lest they, too, feel like cheapskates then he performed an invaluable service.
Also, w/r/t Sampras, what kind of pompous little tyrant gets Seriously Offended by a not particularly offensive, playful, and apparently true jibe at a charity event? I don't use the "c" word lightly, but I'm tempted, my friend. I'm tempted.
Like a dry gin's twist
Ennui and angst in the heartland. I remember many and many a year ago (in a kingdom by some cornfields) a philosophy professor named Lenny who was arguably the hippest and smartest of a wave of hip, smart, young profs who hit campus at roughly the same time. Lenny had curly hair and a penchant for Wittgenstein and East Coast punk bands of the late 70s. He always used to tell me "Exertion fights depression. When I'm feeling angsty, I lift weights." One summer he went back to Boston to work on his novel and apparently, while there, had some Troubles (presumably with a woman--Lenny's problems always revolved around women or logical positivism). When he hit campus again a week or so before classes started, he had arms like a young Marlon Brando. I stared at him for a second and said "Rough summer?" He answered "Sport, you have no idea."
My own solution for a stress-filled past week was to eat some cactus fruit sorbet with a dear friend and watch a Bollywood remake of Death Takes a Holiday called Yamagola, starring the always stunning Jayaprada.
A few notes:
Like any good Bollywood "remake", Yamagola (1974 or 75 I think) bears roughly the same relationship to Death Takes a Holiday that The Beverly Hillbillies bears to The Diamond as Big as the Ritz*. In the original 1930something Hollywood drama, death, quite literally, takes a holiday. As in death is this dashingly handsome man who gets sick of being death and decides to walk the earth as a normal dude for a little while. Naturally, he falls in love and complications ensue. Meet Joe Black, of course, featuring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins (and highlighting the full glory of their hair plastered back with some kind of nuclear strength pomade), is the "truest" (read: most derivative) remake of the film.
Yamagola, on the other hand, is a film about a boy and a girl who are in love. Naturally, the girl's father (who is wealthy and corrupt), has the boy killed. The boy goes to heaven where there are some gods and goddesses and lots of singing and dancing and he seems pretty happy. But then he goes to hell (I still don't know why) where he's also pretty happy. Not at first, but later, you see, after he teaches the other denizens of hell about communism and workers' rights. Having effectively unionized hell, he finds himself banned from both heaven and hell so he assembles an army of his old friends in hell (where the security is roughly as lax as Willard Old Timey Aeroport on a Sunday afternoon, apparently). Then he goes back to earth and messes around with his old girlfriend's father.
So, there are literally no similarities between Yamagola and the movie it purports to "remake", which is actually fine because, even though the sap in me loved Death Takes a Holiday, I also happen to be a guy who loves garish costumes, rhythmic chanting, seemingly random intervals of fervent dancing, and millions and millions of gods and demons and vintage Bollywood actresses.
And cactus fruit sorbet. And port. Lots of port. I can't emphasize enough how much more sense the all singing all dancing version of Hell made after the third or fifth glass.
================================
* In Fitzgerald's charming fairytale, a man is shooting at a squirrel for dinner and accidentally discovers a mountain that is, in fact, one large, completely flawless, diamond. In The Beverly Hillbillies, a man named Jed (a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed) is shootin' at some food (again, a squirrel) and up from the ground come a bubblin' crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea.
I'm always stupefied more people haven't made this connection.
My own solution for a stress-filled past week was to eat some cactus fruit sorbet with a dear friend and watch a Bollywood remake of Death Takes a Holiday called Yamagola, starring the always stunning Jayaprada.
A few notes:
Like any good Bollywood "remake", Yamagola (1974 or 75 I think) bears roughly the same relationship to Death Takes a Holiday that The Beverly Hillbillies bears to The Diamond as Big as the Ritz*. In the original 1930something Hollywood drama, death, quite literally, takes a holiday. As in death is this dashingly handsome man who gets sick of being death and decides to walk the earth as a normal dude for a little while. Naturally, he falls in love and complications ensue. Meet Joe Black, of course, featuring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins (and highlighting the full glory of their hair plastered back with some kind of nuclear strength pomade), is the "truest" (read: most derivative) remake of the film.
Yamagola, on the other hand, is a film about a boy and a girl who are in love. Naturally, the girl's father (who is wealthy and corrupt), has the boy killed. The boy goes to heaven where there are some gods and goddesses and lots of singing and dancing and he seems pretty happy. But then he goes to hell (I still don't know why) where he's also pretty happy. Not at first, but later, you see, after he teaches the other denizens of hell about communism and workers' rights. Having effectively unionized hell, he finds himself banned from both heaven and hell so he assembles an army of his old friends in hell (where the security is roughly as lax as Willard Old Timey Aeroport on a Sunday afternoon, apparently). Then he goes back to earth and messes around with his old girlfriend's father.
So, there are literally no similarities between Yamagola and the movie it purports to "remake", which is actually fine because, even though the sap in me loved Death Takes a Holiday, I also happen to be a guy who loves garish costumes, rhythmic chanting, seemingly random intervals of fervent dancing, and millions and millions of gods and demons and vintage Bollywood actresses.
And cactus fruit sorbet. And port. Lots of port. I can't emphasize enough how much more sense the all singing all dancing version of Hell made after the third or fifth glass.
================================
* In Fitzgerald's charming fairytale, a man is shooting at a squirrel for dinner and accidentally discovers a mountain that is, in fact, one large, completely flawless, diamond. In The Beverly Hillbillies, a man named Jed (a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed) is shootin' at some food (again, a squirrel) and up from the ground come a bubblin' crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea.
I'm always stupefied more people haven't made this connection.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (the hideous but insufficiently brief film version)
Look. I like John Krasinksi. I like him as Jim Halpert. I'm intrigued by the idea of him as Captain America. The other day, while we were watching the good/not great, too-clever-to-condescend-to-be-funny, Mamet film State and Main; when Krasinski (who was still a student at the time) made his brief appearance as a member of a film producer's entourage, I smiled because even in his early 20s Krasinksi already had the Halpert mystique (gangly but handsome, confused but smirking, awkward but slightly supercilious) down to an art or a science.
One thing I like about Krasinski the guy is that we both love the writing of David Foster Wallace. That's why I'm befuddled as to why Krasinski didn't move heaven and earth to have his big screen directorial debut, a film based on DFW's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, labeled an "Alan Smithee" film.
This travesty of an adaptation comes out on DVD later in the week, but several friends and I made it a point to see it during its brief, hideous theater run and it was a complete and total mess. The book can't have been an easy one to adapt to film (though it's the only work in DFW's oeuvre that is even vaguely filmable) but even given our low expectations, we still all walked away severely bummed out, experiencing what DFW might have called cases of the howling fantods, on an epic level.
It was poorly paced, poorly structured, poorly acted, poorly directed (sorry, Halpert), poorly cast (Christopher Meloni? really?), and, above all, except for the parts literally culled directly from the book it was exceptionally poorly written. If you loved the book, avoid this film, which will only make you sad and angry. If you have never read the book, avoid this film, which will still make you sad and angry. If you hated the book, and just wanted to see how badly it could be debased, then by all means, add this to your Netflix queue.
This was the worst adaptation of a very good book since Less Than Zero, and that is not a statement I make lightly.
One thing I like about Krasinski the guy is that we both love the writing of David Foster Wallace. That's why I'm befuddled as to why Krasinski didn't move heaven and earth to have his big screen directorial debut, a film based on DFW's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, labeled an "Alan Smithee" film.
This travesty of an adaptation comes out on DVD later in the week, but several friends and I made it a point to see it during its brief, hideous theater run and it was a complete and total mess. The book can't have been an easy one to adapt to film (though it's the only work in DFW's oeuvre that is even vaguely filmable) but even given our low expectations, we still all walked away severely bummed out, experiencing what DFW might have called cases of the howling fantods, on an epic level.
It was poorly paced, poorly structured, poorly acted, poorly directed (sorry, Halpert), poorly cast (Christopher Meloni? really?), and, above all, except for the parts literally culled directly from the book it was exceptionally poorly written. If you loved the book, avoid this film, which will only make you sad and angry. If you have never read the book, avoid this film, which will still make you sad and angry. If you hated the book, and just wanted to see how badly it could be debased, then by all means, add this to your Netflix queue.
This was the worst adaptation of a very good book since Less Than Zero, and that is not a statement I make lightly.
Friday, March 12, 2010
...when we reach the city.
It's been an abominable day from beginning to end. From end to beginning? From night to day and back to night, that's for sure. Working graveyard shifts creates distortions, makes everything turvy topsy. Like Merlin the Magician--born living backwards in time.
I've been dreary, bleary, angsty and just, generally speaking, at sixes and sevens. Those haunting words from Vonnegut at the end of Cat's Cradle have been going through my head all day:
I hope that's accurate, I'm going from memory, shooting from the hip Judd Nelson-style.
A week or so ago, I was speaking with a co-worker about books that had meant something to us during our younger and more vulnerable years. She's brighter than me, and more organized, and her list made way more sense (mine was predictably scattershot "Oh, Gatsby to be sure, and I think Richard III, and there were some Calvin and Hobbes strips and oh Cat's Cradle and....). One book she mentioned was Bradbury's Farenheit 451, which I hadn't thought about in years. Like Cat's Cradle, it is a kind of chronicle of the brutality of banality (to invert Arendt). It ends somewhat more hopefully, with a kind of rugged, wary optimism. The ending I can't quote from memory, but is worth quoting:
I've been dreary, bleary, angsty and just, generally speaking, at sixes and sevens. Those haunting words from Vonnegut at the end of Cat's Cradle have been going through my head all day:
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
I hope that's accurate, I'm going from memory, shooting from the hip Judd Nelson-style.
A week or so ago, I was speaking with a co-worker about books that had meant something to us during our younger and more vulnerable years. She's brighter than me, and more organized, and her list made way more sense (mine was predictably scattershot "Oh, Gatsby to be sure, and I think Richard III, and there were some Calvin and Hobbes strips and oh Cat's Cradle and....). One book she mentioned was Bradbury's Farenheit 451, which I hadn't thought about in years. Like Cat's Cradle, it is a kind of chronicle of the brutality of banality (to invert Arendt). It ends somewhat more hopefully, with a kind of rugged, wary optimism. The ending I can't quote from memory, but is worth quoting:
Granger looked into the fire. "Phoenix."
"What?"
"There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation."
He took the pan off the fire and let the bacon cool and they ate it, slowly, thoughtfully.
"Now, let's get on upstream," said Granger. "And hold on to one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them."
They finished eating and put out the fire. The day was brightening all about them as if a pink lamp had been given more wick. In the trees, the birds that had flown away now came back and settled down.
Montag began walking and after a moment found that the others had fallen in behind him, going north. He was surprised, and moved aside to let Granger pass, but Granger looked at him and nodded him on. Montag went ahead. He looked at the river and the sky and the rusting track going back down to where the farms lay, where the barns stood full of hay, where a lot of people had walked by in the night on their way from the city. Later, in a month or six months, and certainly not more than a year, he would walk along here again, alone, and keep right on going until he caught up with the people.
But now there was a long morning's walk until noon, and if the men were silent it was because there was everything to think about and much to remember. Perhaps later in the morning, when the sun was up and had warmed them, they would begin to talk, or just say the things they remembered, to be sure they were there, to be absolutely certain that things were safe in them. Montag felt the slow stir of words, the slow simmer. And when it came to his turn, what could he say, what could he offer on a day like this, to make the trip a little easier? To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something . . .
And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
Yes, thought Montag, that's the one I'll save for noon. For noon...
When we reach the city.
Wallace Stevens Appreciation Friday
I've arbitrarily decided Friday will be Wallace Stevens appreciation day here at A Supposedly Fun Thing. I'm a fan of declaring tradition by fiat--in school we had "Gay Sweater Thursday", "Pu Pu Platter Tuesday", and "Dress Like It's 1986" parties at the end of every month, for instance.
As for Wallace Stevens in particular? I picked up a couple of vintage editions of his poetry at Myopic Books in Wicker Park (the land of silver spoons and paper plates) recently and remembered how much I love his work. It's like in His Girl Friday when the grizzled old newspaper man picks up a column tossed off by the film's heroine, reads it admiringly, shakes his head, and says "It'll do until something else comes along." Stevens, too, will do until something else comes along.
Here's a poem my father used to read to me when I was a kid. I knew all the words long before I knew what all the words meant, and knew what all the words meant long before I knew what the poem meant, but I always knew how the poem made me feel--thrilled, unsettled, melancholy and faintly maudlin. I'm not sure what there is about which to feel maudlin when you're 8, but part of the genius of Stevens was in his ability to evoke feelings the reader may or may not have had any right to feel (and feelings Stevens himself may never have felt in his whole life).
As for Wallace Stevens in particular? I picked up a couple of vintage editions of his poetry at Myopic Books in Wicker Park (the land of silver spoons and paper plates) recently and remembered how much I love his work. It's like in His Girl Friday when the grizzled old newspaper man picks up a column tossed off by the film's heroine, reads it admiringly, shakes his head, and says "It'll do until something else comes along." Stevens, too, will do until something else comes along.
Here's a poem my father used to read to me when I was a kid. I knew all the words long before I knew what all the words meant, and knew what all the words meant long before I knew what the poem meant, but I always knew how the poem made me feel--thrilled, unsettled, melancholy and faintly maudlin. I'm not sure what there is about which to feel maudlin when you're 8, but part of the genius of Stevens was in his ability to evoke feelings the reader may or may not have had any right to feel (and feelings Stevens himself may never have felt in his whole life).
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Literary Offences of Martin Amis, Esquire.
The very talented Adam Roberts is gleefully, brilliantly brutal in his review of Martin Amis's new novel, The Pregnant Widow over at The Valve:
I haven't read Amis's latest work, but Roberts is usually spot-on, and his assessment of Kingsley's boy's recent output is deadly accurate. As a whole, the review is one of the best recent takedowns of Amis (I'd rank it with Chris Morris's piece a few years ago in The Guardian ).
Personally, I have a sort of sentimental attachment to Amis, mostly fueled by my affection for Money, which I read at a tender age when my Anglophilia was in full bloom. Unlike some of his fellow enfants terribles of the 80s on both sides of the Atlantic (Will Self, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney) Amis never grew as a writer and nor did he ever develop the knack for deliberate self-parody and taking the piss out of himself by mocking his own position as an aging literary brat packer.
In the words of Damon Albarn, "The Likely Lads are pickin' up the uglies."
This novel is not as bad as I expected it to be. It’s bad, certainly; but not that bad. I’d say ‘it’s not as bad as Yellow Dog‘, but that would be redundant. Nothing could be as bad as Yellow Dog. Having Amis personally come to my house to administer a lava enema would hardly be as bad as that novel.
Old Martin Amis’s version of Young Martin Amis (here called ‘Keith Nearing’) spends a summer in 1970 in an Italian chateau (’chateau-a’? Italian was never my strong suit) with his girlfriend, the ordinary Lily, and their mutual friend the enormous-breasted Scheherazade, plus various other posh-nob comers and goers. Now, in the Amisdrome there are only two sorts of men: on the one hand the massive wankers, and on the other a much smaller selection of massive wankers whose massive wankerishness is restrained under a tinfoil-thin veneer of what an eighteenth-century writer would call ‘breeding’, but which Amis thinks of in terms of education, wit, courtesy and so on. Keith Nearing is one of the latter. And actually, to qualify myself; Amis also includes a male character called Whittaker who’s not a massive wanker at all, although that’s because he is gay, do you see? Amis perhaps thinks this is a signal of his Right-On-ness. In fact I suspect it speaks to a blimpish belief that gays are not proper men, don’t you know. But never mind that for a moment.
I haven't read Amis's latest work, but Roberts is usually spot-on, and his assessment of Kingsley's boy's recent output is deadly accurate. As a whole, the review is one of the best recent takedowns of Amis (I'd rank it with Chris Morris's piece a few years ago in The Guardian ).
Personally, I have a sort of sentimental attachment to Amis, mostly fueled by my affection for Money, which I read at a tender age when my Anglophilia was in full bloom. Unlike some of his fellow enfants terribles of the 80s on both sides of the Atlantic (Will Self, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney) Amis never grew as a writer and nor did he ever develop the knack for deliberate self-parody and taking the piss out of himself by mocking his own position as an aging literary brat packer.
In the words of Damon Albarn, "The Likely Lads are pickin' up the uglies."
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The Brutalist Bricks (Matador, March release)
God, how did I get to be so old? The first time I heard Ted Leo was 11 years ago. I was crashing on my friend John's couch just off-campus, and his pink haired Asian girlfriend brought over a copy of tej leo(?), Rx/pharmacists and we all got stoned and listened to it. Shortly after this first record was cut, Leo already had a cult following, but I remember being underwhelmed. I just flat-out didn't get the record. It was sometime the next year, when Treble in Trouble was released that Ted Leo started to make sense to me. Once I could relate to his music better, through the more straight-forward pop punk/indie rock sensibilities of this second record, the appeal of his first release made more sense. Ever since then, I've been unabashedly fond of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.
The Brutalist Bricks, which is Leo's first release on Matador Records, is probably my favorite album of the year so far. Lately I've been missing Elvis Costello's 70s/80s releases so an album that is so redolent of Costello/Joe Jackson influences really hits a sweet spot for me. It's Ted Leo's most polished work to date, and the best indie pop album I've heard in a long time.
Leo has always worn his influences on his sleeve, but at the same time Brutalist Bricks retains a resolute integrity. Which is review-speak for saying that even though he's happy to give credit where credit is due, Ted Leo would still slap the taste out of your mouth if you suggested his work was anything other than singular and intensely personal. Lyrically, the album is clever without being facile, and introspective without being hamfisted.
I get the distinct impression that this is one of those few albums that, in five or ten years, you'll be able to listen to and say "Oh, right. That's what it meant to live through that late, unlamented era." "Even Heroes Have to Die" closes with "Hidden in the writing on the wall/Many are the beauties of the fall."
The Brutalist Bricks, which is Leo's first release on Matador Records, is probably my favorite album of the year so far. Lately I've been missing Elvis Costello's 70s/80s releases so an album that is so redolent of Costello/Joe Jackson influences really hits a sweet spot for me. It's Ted Leo's most polished work to date, and the best indie pop album I've heard in a long time.
Leo has always worn his influences on his sleeve, but at the same time Brutalist Bricks retains a resolute integrity. Which is review-speak for saying that even though he's happy to give credit where credit is due, Ted Leo would still slap the taste out of your mouth if you suggested his work was anything other than singular and intensely personal. Lyrically, the album is clever without being facile, and introspective without being hamfisted.
I get the distinct impression that this is one of those few albums that, in five or ten years, you'll be able to listen to and say "Oh, right. That's what it meant to live through that late, unlamented era." "Even Heroes Have to Die" closes with "Hidden in the writing on the wall/Many are the beauties of the fall."
My Best Friend is a Vampire (1987)
My Best Friend is a Vampire is a criminally underrated 80s teen vampire movie. Wait, is it underrated? I always feel a paranoiac pang when I call something underrated--ever since someone told me she considered A Confederacy of Dunces an "undiscovered gem." It's entirely possible that every other devotee of the cheesy vampire horror oeuvre (d'oeuvre de vampire fromagey, if I remember my French correctly) has long been aware of this film and I'm just so outrageously late to the party that it feels like I'm early.
Whatever.
The film combines vampires, horny teenagers, the Houston skyline, black Wayfarers, creepy vampire hunters, new wave hairstyles, an arctic blue BMW, a killer 80s pop soundtrack (including Blondie and Timbuk 3, how did they afford that?), and delightfully well-intentioned suburban parents who know something is weird about their son lately and so decide he must be gay. Robert Sean Leonard (who went on to play A.E. Housman in Stoppard's brilliant The Invention of Love and is also, I'm told, paying the mortgage by working in some television show about doctors) stars as a dorky high school kid named Jeremy Capello who is seduced by a vampiress. In fact, for an awkward kid with an afterschool job in the supermarket, Jeremy does surprisingly well with women--a super-popular cheerleader is openly lusting for him while the musical prodigy he's been having sex dreams about is slowly warming to his advances.
Once Jeremy is bitten by the vampire, his life complexifies combinatorially. For instance, he begins to crave blood and raw meat. His complexion becomes pallid and he becomes deeply averse to the sun. His rugby shirts become even baggier as his appetite for solid food wanes. Also, Clayton Endicott III shows up to teach him how to adjust to being a vampire while a couple of ruthless vampire hunters, one of whom is named "Professor McCarthy" (dig that subtle salient political commentary) start trying to murder him.
As it turns out, the monster hunters are much worse monsters than the monsters they're hunting (welcome to Reagan's America, kids) while the vampire subculture wants to help Jeremy adjust to his new alternative lifestyle and live as rich and productive a life as possible. Meanwhile, Jeremy still needs to navigate through the high school social scene, deal with his intrusive and bewildered parents, and pass Driver's Ed. Oh, it turns out it's also difficult to shave and style your hair when you don't have a reflection and you can't have garlic on your pizza anymore once you've become one of the aristocrats of the walking dead.
My Best Friend is a Vampire is roughly what would happen if you combined Fright Night with Better Off Dead. It's a rare, perhaps even unique, example of a teen vampire movie that works as both a teen movie and a vampire movie. It's funny, adorable, cheesy, and even, at times, weirdly touching. Ultimately, it's about tolerance, coming of age, and socially responsible ways to satisfy one's bloodlust.
Whatever.
The film combines vampires, horny teenagers, the Houston skyline, black Wayfarers, creepy vampire hunters, new wave hairstyles, an arctic blue BMW, a killer 80s pop soundtrack (including Blondie and Timbuk 3, how did they afford that?), and delightfully well-intentioned suburban parents who know something is weird about their son lately and so decide he must be gay. Robert Sean Leonard (who went on to play A.E. Housman in Stoppard's brilliant The Invention of Love and is also, I'm told, paying the mortgage by working in some television show about doctors) stars as a dorky high school kid named Jeremy Capello who is seduced by a vampiress. In fact, for an awkward kid with an afterschool job in the supermarket, Jeremy does surprisingly well with women--a super-popular cheerleader is openly lusting for him while the musical prodigy he's been having sex dreams about is slowly warming to his advances.
Once Jeremy is bitten by the vampire, his life complexifies combinatorially. For instance, he begins to crave blood and raw meat. His complexion becomes pallid and he becomes deeply averse to the sun. His rugby shirts become even baggier as his appetite for solid food wanes. Also, Clayton Endicott III shows up to teach him how to adjust to being a vampire while a couple of ruthless vampire hunters, one of whom is named "Professor McCarthy" (dig that subtle salient political commentary) start trying to murder him.
As it turns out, the monster hunters are much worse monsters than the monsters they're hunting (welcome to Reagan's America, kids) while the vampire subculture wants to help Jeremy adjust to his new alternative lifestyle and live as rich and productive a life as possible. Meanwhile, Jeremy still needs to navigate through the high school social scene, deal with his intrusive and bewildered parents, and pass Driver's Ed. Oh, it turns out it's also difficult to shave and style your hair when you don't have a reflection and you can't have garlic on your pizza anymore once you've become one of the aristocrats of the walking dead.
My Best Friend is a Vampire is roughly what would happen if you combined Fright Night with Better Off Dead. It's a rare, perhaps even unique, example of a teen vampire movie that works as both a teen movie and a vampire movie. It's funny, adorable, cheesy, and even, at times, weirdly touching. Ultimately, it's about tolerance, coming of age, and socially responsible ways to satisfy one's bloodlust.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Oh, what the hell. Burn Notice.
Burn Notice is an extremely adequate show that reached a new peak of adequacy with its season finale. I probably wouldn't bother to post about it, except that a re-broadcast of the finale came on as I was finishing up my post on Psych.
My feelings about Burn Notice in a nutshell: It's fine, but the last episode Bruce Campbell is in will be the last episode I am likely to watch.
The finale is about what you'd expect: Some things blow up. Michael is smarmy. Fiona is scantily clad and violent. The mom smokes a lot and is brave. Sam is awesome. It ends on a mega-cliffhanger Buffy the Vampire Slayer style.
What was most important to me about the episode was that I was happy to see Diane Court's old man land on his feet with a nice cushy government sinecure.
My feelings about Burn Notice in a nutshell: It's fine, but the last episode Bruce Campbell is in will be the last episode I am likely to watch.
The finale is about what you'd expect: Some things blow up. Michael is smarmy. Fiona is scantily clad and violent. The mom smokes a lot and is brave. Sam is awesome. It ends on a mega-cliffhanger Buffy the Vampire Slayer style.
What was most important to me about the episode was that I was happy to see Diane Court's old man land on his feet with a nice cushy government sinecure.
Psych Finale ("a thing that recovers the doubt...")
The first post and it's about Psych? Really?
I could try to be coy, and write a little about the staggeringly awesome pair of vintage style Penguin sneakers I bought (just like der Bingle used to wear!), or kvetch about how godawful that Repo Men movie looks; but what it comes down to is this: I really needed the Psych season finale to be excellent. Shawn and Gus have been largely disappointing for the entire second semester of this season. It's felt flat, forced, and unfocused. Too many guest stars of varying quality. For whatever reason, the show kept forgetting to be interesting.
In the season finale, Shawn, Gus, and Mary Lightly revisit the Mr. Yang slayings. This was worrisome to me, because, in all candor, I felt like the Season 3 finale with Mr. Yang was one of the riskiest shows Psych had ever done. There was so much happening and such breakneck vacillation between screwball comedy and high tension that it felt like it could all have fallen apart in the blink of an eye. The entire narrative was flirting with disaster even then, when it felt like Psych was on top of its game. So as soon as I learned the premise of the episode, I had a queasy feeling this could turn into the episode that sunk the series for me.
Instead, the episode was excellent. The plot was actually appreciably busier, and more complex, than the original Mr. Yang episode with the introduction of a second psychopath and a second damsel in distress as Abigail stopped by long enough to get herself into a life or death predicament. A cleverly campy Hitchcock motif was carried through from start to finish. The writers avoided the temptation to cave in and give Shawn/Juliet any kind of cheap grace. Henry is still underused (this is kind of my mantra w/r/t Psych) but his contribution is memorable and he's set up for a bigger role during the show's return for summer school.
I may post more about this later, but for now I want to avoid any major spoilers. Suffice to say:
1) I still don't care for Abigail. I understand the necessity of an Aigail-type existing, but ever since her memorable appearance in the high school reunion episode it's been entirely too apparent that she's a mere contrivance, a plot device. Various one-off characters have been far more memorable, as characters, than Abigail. The thing is, Rachel Leigh Cook does the best she can with what she's given. I'm not sure why the Abigail character herself just never comes alive for me.
2) The very last scene of the season is a nod to The Royal Tenenbaums! It's actually not just a nod, it's outright theft, but in a fun "this was cute so nobody is going to press charges" senior prank way. This is part of why I still love you, Psych, even when you're not namechecking Night of the Comet enough for my taste.
3) I admire the show's ability to introduce real tension and drama but stay goofy. At this point, all the characters have developed a Spenserian detachment from drama and danger. Except Henry, for whom everything is a matter of life and death and always will be. On a similar note, I admire the show's ability to end the season on a note of emotional tension without giving into the temptation to allow the last episode to turn into an over-the-top cliffhanger the way Burn Notice does every. single. season.
The episode was a necessary return to first principles. Clever. Conceptual. Campy. Funny. Above all, it was fun again.
I could try to be coy, and write a little about the staggeringly awesome pair of vintage style Penguin sneakers I bought (just like der Bingle used to wear!), or kvetch about how godawful that Repo Men movie looks; but what it comes down to is this: I really needed the Psych season finale to be excellent. Shawn and Gus have been largely disappointing for the entire second semester of this season. It's felt flat, forced, and unfocused. Too many guest stars of varying quality. For whatever reason, the show kept forgetting to be interesting.
In the season finale, Shawn, Gus, and Mary Lightly revisit the Mr. Yang slayings. This was worrisome to me, because, in all candor, I felt like the Season 3 finale with Mr. Yang was one of the riskiest shows Psych had ever done. There was so much happening and such breakneck vacillation between screwball comedy and high tension that it felt like it could all have fallen apart in the blink of an eye. The entire narrative was flirting with disaster even then, when it felt like Psych was on top of its game. So as soon as I learned the premise of the episode, I had a queasy feeling this could turn into the episode that sunk the series for me.
Instead, the episode was excellent. The plot was actually appreciably busier, and more complex, than the original Mr. Yang episode with the introduction of a second psychopath and a second damsel in distress as Abigail stopped by long enough to get herself into a life or death predicament. A cleverly campy Hitchcock motif was carried through from start to finish. The writers avoided the temptation to cave in and give Shawn/Juliet any kind of cheap grace. Henry is still underused (this is kind of my mantra w/r/t Psych) but his contribution is memorable and he's set up for a bigger role during the show's return for summer school.
I may post more about this later, but for now I want to avoid any major spoilers. Suffice to say:
1) I still don't care for Abigail. I understand the necessity of an Aigail-type existing, but ever since her memorable appearance in the high school reunion episode it's been entirely too apparent that she's a mere contrivance, a plot device. Various one-off characters have been far more memorable, as characters, than Abigail. The thing is, Rachel Leigh Cook does the best she can with what she's given. I'm not sure why the Abigail character herself just never comes alive for me.
2) The very last scene of the season is a nod to The Royal Tenenbaums! It's actually not just a nod, it's outright theft, but in a fun "this was cute so nobody is going to press charges" senior prank way. This is part of why I still love you, Psych, even when you're not namechecking Night of the Comet enough for my taste.
3) I admire the show's ability to introduce real tension and drama but stay goofy. At this point, all the characters have developed a Spenserian detachment from drama and danger. Except Henry, for whom everything is a matter of life and death and always will be. On a similar note, I admire the show's ability to end the season on a note of emotional tension without giving into the temptation to allow the last episode to turn into an over-the-top cliffhanger the way Burn Notice does every. single. season.
The episode was a necessary return to first principles. Clever. Conceptual. Campy. Funny. Above all, it was fun again.
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