The story starts in 1980 with the murder of Katharina Brow in Ayer, Massachusetts. Local police officer Nancy Taylor (Melissa Leo) makes up her mind that the culprit is the town's cut-up, Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell). Although there's not enough evidence to take him to trial in 1980, the testimony of several eyewitnesses, which doesn't come to light until 1983, proves to be damning. With Kenny wrongfully imprisoned, his sister, Betty Anne (Hilary Swank), decides to go through all the schooling necessary to take the Bar and become a lawyer. Nearly 16 years later, after having lost her husband and her children (who are now living with their dad), Betty Anne achieves her goal. Aided by Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) from the Innocence Project and her friend Abra Rice (Minnie Driver), she attempts to locate the evidence from the trial so she can have DNA testing performed on the blood.

The difficulty for a film like Conviction is to make the journey worthwhile when the ending is known. It's a matter of the historical record that Kenny was released from prison after DNA tests (unavailable in 1983) exonerated him. His case is not unique - this has happened more than 200 times - but other feel-good aspects of the story (the fact that Massachusetts doesn't have a death penalty so he wasn't executed, his sister's crusade) make it more cinema-worthy than others. To a degree, Conviction achieves the aim of keeping the viewer involved in the story as it unfolds, but its pedestrian telling of the tale limits our investment in the characters. Subplots remain half revealed and there are several jarring jumps ahead in time that create a momentary sense of disorientation. The filmmakers surely made Conviction with the best of intentions, but the result is only moderately successful.

The strongest, most consistent performance is provided by Sam Rockwell, who displays a wide and convincing range of emotions. He also doesn't play Kenny like a choir boy wrongfully convicted. Kenny is a hard drinking, short tempered lout whose contributions to society are minimal. Hilary Swank, on the other hand, is surprisingly uneven as Betty Anne. Considering some of Swank's remarkable past acting (parts that have earned her two Oscars), it's disappointing to see such a by-the-numbers portrayal of this character. Betty Anne comes across as earnestness personified: a straightforward individual with little internal complexity, although that could be as much a fault of the script as of Swank's performance. Nevertheless, there's nothing about Betty Anne that grabs us, shakes us, and makes us want to root for this women with all of our energy. That's what Conviction needs, but the movie proves unable to provide it.

It's easy to damn a movie for what it doesn't do, but the problem with Conviction is that too much of what it accomplishes is done in a manner that's unremarkable. When I attend a movie billed as a feel-good true story about a sister's crusade to save her brother, I expect to leave the theater uplifted, not conflicted. As disposable entertainment, Conviction can make a case, but nothing in the story or its telling elevates it above that which has already been provided in other, better motion pictures.

Which TV Viewers Should Count? Posted by James Poniewozik Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 9:29 am 16 Comments • Related Topics: advertising, biz news, ratings, , blue bloods

Watching Fringe online? You may as well be watching in a parallel universe. / FOX

It's a common and understandable myth that TV shows stay on the air by getting as many viewers as possible. They don't. In commercial television, shows stay on the air by making money, something that relates to, but does not correlate directly to, getting as many viewers as possible. If you're a network that airs commercials, you make money chiefly by getting as many viewers that advertisers are willing to pay to reach as possible.

Figuring out how those viewers are, and how to count them, is probably the biggest challenge networks have today in keeping your shows on the air. If you're over 50, do you matter? (Probably not where advertising is concerned.) If you watch on Tivo and skip the ads? (I am part of the problem.) If you watch TV online? And does anyone even know you're watching?

New York magazine's Joe Adalian has an interesting story looking at the conundrum for networks, advertisers and Nielsen: it's not so easy anymore to even say how many people are watching a show. The more people time-shift and watch shows online, the harder it is to say the next morning whether a show is a hit, since people may watch the program at any point over the coming week, or later.

As Adalian points out, nowadays the live airing of an episode, especially one with a tech-adopting audience, may garner well less than half of its eventual audience. Yet it's that morning-after number that still creates much of the perception of whether a show is a hit, and creates the lasting impression of the size of series' respective audiences. (One eye-popping stat: over the week and on various platforms, Mad Men's audience rises from under three million to over six million.) Nielsen, he writes, is trying to catch up to Hulu and company by measuring how many people watch shows online, which it will start tracking in the spring.

But counting viewers is one thing; valuing them is another. As it is, we have access to "live plus seven ratings"—the number of viewers who watch live plus the number who watch on DVR up to a week later—though these figures take weeks to arrive. But should we pay attention to them? Maybe when it comes to assessing a show's cultural reach. When it comes to selling ads, though—and thus, to a show's odds of staying on air—advertisers have been willing to pay for only live plus three days. (The thinking, in part, is that some ads have a shorter shelf life—and come on, how many ads do you think I'm watching on Tivo?)

And online? Anyone's guess—and you could argue that online ads can theoretically be better targeted and more engaging than TV ones—but for now, advertisers pay much less for them, and there are fewer of them. So if you watch Fringe on Hulu, you may love the show as much as a live viewer, but you're not doing it as much good. (Though more than if you missed it altogether.)

Bottom line: we now have much different metrics for whether a show is a "hit" (in terms of reach and influence among an audience) and whether its a "hit" (in terms of paying for itself and staying on air). It's something I'll increasingly have to think about as a critic. In practical terms, it's important for me to know whether a show can survive. But if I'm assessing its cultural influence and clout, why should I care how much the show is worth to Procter and Gamble?

Blue Bloods: lots of viewers, but not the kind advertisers want. / CBS

Of course, we've had different metrics for audience vs. financial hits for a while now, the most famous of which is demographics, especially age. Advertisers pay most for audiences aged 18 to 49, so that rating is what determines whether a show makes it. As Brian Lowry notes in Variety, though, the average viewer ages of most big networks is now older than that demographic. Blue Bloods is a big new hit in terms of eyeballs, but it's relatively anemic in terms of ad demos—it's average fan is over 60 years old. (Tom Selleck is the new Andy Griffith!)

So should networks value their older viewers more? Well, maybe in a moral sense. But the problem is, they can't simply will advertisers to pay more for an older audience.

Now, advertisers' reasons for targeting younger viewers may or may not be wrongheaded. I'd say it's a little of both. It's logical, if not exactly fair, to pay more to reach viewers (like the youngest adults) who watch relatively less TV; if a 60-year-old watches twice as much TV as a 25-year-old, it's easier for me to find a cheaper program (say, the nightly news) to reach him on, whereas I have limited options for Junior. The notion that younger adults develop hardwired brand preferences seems more like pseudoscience (yes, a younger consumer has more years to live if you hook them early, but I suspect consumers at every age are more fickle than this old Madison Avenue belief assumes). But until and unless TV networks can persuade advertisers otherwise, they can only make money off what someone will pay for.

This all creates an interesting dilemma for those of us who write about TV: do we judge hits on the basis of the criteria advertisers should use, or on the criteria advertisers actually do use? As for you, the viewer, for now here's the best way to keep your favorite show on the air: be a young person, and watch TV like an old person—live, with all the commercials.

O'Reilly, View Hosts Throw Down on Set Posted by James Poniewozik Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 2:22 pm 9 Comments • Related Topics: news media , bill o'reilly, the view

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly was a guest on The View today, and brought up the subject of, as he referred to it, "the mosque down here on 9/11." As you might have guessed, he, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar had a reasonable and good-natured discussion about sensitivity and civil liberties an angry, bleeped-out shouting match that resulted in Goldberg and Behar storming off the set:

On the way to the conflagration, the author of Pinheads and Patriots charmingly interrupted Behar with, "Hold it! Listen to me, because you'll learn," cited a poll saying that 70% of Americans oppose the building of the Islamic center and said they were right, because "Muslims killed us on 9/11," whereupon Goldberg let loose with a stream of bleepables. Is it naive to hope that at least 70% of Americans would like these folks to calm the hell down?

Perhaps not the viewers of O'Reilly and Behar's primetime cable-news shows, which will probably not suffer from the publicity.

How Fast Can a Viewer Decide? via Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog by Alex Epstein on 10/14/10

20% of online viewers ditch an online video within 10 seconds.

I mention this only to make the point that people can make choices ridiculously fast. When I say development people give your query letter less than ten seconds to grab them, I'm not exaggerating for effect. Once you've grabbed people, you've got some time to make your point, but start with the grabby.

That doesn't mean something has to blow up. That means something compelling has to happen.

Acting Out via Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog by Alex Epstein on 10/17/10 Q. Should there be visible act outs in a feature script? No. Only TV scripts have actual act outs. TV has real acts, broken up by commercials. Features only have nominal acts -- they're something for writers and development executives to talk about, but where the act ends is often arguable. Moreover "three act" screenplays often really have four acts, some screenplays seem to have seven or more, and many perfectly good movies don't really have meaningful acts.

Often when people talk about three act screenplays, they are talking about a 120 page beast where the first quarter is act one, the last quarter is act three, and the middle is about 60 pages. But of course there is some sort of turning point or flex point in the middle of act two. So arguably that is four act structure, except that messes up the nice correlation of act one with "beginning," act two with "middle" and act three with "end."

Meanwhile a movie like THE INCREDIBLES really breaks down much more neatly into seven acts than three. And you could probably find stories that really work in five acts. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about THE DARK KNIGHT in terms of three acts; there are clearly more than four identifiable sections.

And what about HARD DAYS NIGHT? And FORREST GUMP? What is even the point of talking about these movies in terms of three acts? Sure, you can make claims for the acts starting at various points, but how does that help you understand them?

How many acts does MEMENTO have? Isn't each progressive flashback essentially an act?

This is why I don't really hold with three act structure. I think it's more important to tell your story out loud and get rid of any parts that are boring. While TV really does need to have a certain number of acts -- ask your broadcaster how many -- movies don't.

Audience via Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog by Alex Epstein on 10/16/10 Q. I recently pitched a pilot about a father and son serving inside an American humanitarian rescue & relief team. The son is more right-wing than his father, and resents his dad for pulling strings to get him transferred out of the Army and onto the team against his will.

People bumped on that. But don’t almost all leads in one-hour dramas find themselves in transition / in a situation they no longer want to be in? Whether it’s the onset of cancer (Breaking Bad, the Big C), being under investigation (The Shield), or a Marshall being transferred out of sexy Miami to backwoods county Tennessee ( Justified), isn’t it the whole point to start off with your character in a place that he doesn’t want to be? Sure. The problem isn't the son's not wanting to be there. The problem is he doesn't want to be doing something we consider a Good Thing. That makes him a bit of a prick. (Most of us don't devote our lives to other people, but TV is more sentimental.)

On pay cable, your main character can be a prick (CALL ME FITZ, SOPRANOS) or a psychopath (DEXTER, arguably BREAKING BAD). But on broadcast, he can only pretend to be a bastard (LIE TO ME, HOUSE) but is really secretly A Good Guy.

Broadcast can show horrible things. But the good guys have to be Good Guys, and we have to want to wholeheartedly root for them. So you can have torture porn shows like CRIMINAL MINDS, but the cops are pure and good. Meanwhile on pay cable your main character has to be messed up in some way, and preferably despicable.

Needless to say the moral compartmentalization of the TV market is unfortunate for writers and viewers alike, because pay cable is also the natural home of serial narrative. I've got a bunch of serial narrative ideas, but unfortunately their protagonists have some good qualities. Meanwhile when I come up with procedurals, the main character is sometimes a bit of a prick. Neither of these combinations seems to work. It's either despicable people in serial narrative, or pure people in procedurals.

I'm exaggerating to make a point, of course. But not as much as you might think.

Insert Your Own "But" Joke Here via Paul Tevis by Paul on 10/17/10

I am very attuned to my use of the word "but." I took a class last year that pointed out to me that when we heard the word "but" in the middle of a sentence, we throw away whatever came before that. When someone says:

"Your story is very good, but there are a few changes I'd like to make."

what we hear is:

"There are few changes I'd like to make."

Strangely enough, just leaving out the "but" helps.

"Your story is very good. There are a few changes I'd like to make."1

So it's in this context that two weeks ago, my friend Jerry asked if I saw a difference between "yes, and" and "yes, but" in gaming. The reason he asked is that he was considering a design where die rolls give you these possible results: No Yes, but Yes, and Yes

So, I told him, yes, I do see a difference. And, I said that because "but" blunts any statement it comes after, I would change "yes, but" to "no, but."2

As I thought about it later, I realized there's a deeper issue. What designs like this are really trying to do is answer two questions: Do you get what you want? What are the consequences of your actions?

This turns into a 2×3 matrix: You don't get it, and there are additional negative consequences for trying. You don't get it, and there are no additional consequences for trying. You don't get it, and there are positive consequences. You do it get it, and there are negative consequences for trying. You do it get it, and there are no additional consequences for trying. You do get it, and there are additional positive consequences.

If this is what you want, there are plenty of good ways to build it into your system. And if I were doing it, I'd leave "but" out of it.

1 The advanced move is "Your story is very good. Would you considered making these changes?..." Naomi Karten has some great tips for using this technique at work.

2 And yes, this is point where I started thinking about a design where all you have is "yes, and" and "no, but."

What do you mean by a miracle? via Roger Ebert's Journal by Roger Ebert on 10/15/10

I'm not a miracle. And neither are the Chilean miners. We are all alive today for perfectly rational reasons. Yet there is a common compulsion to describe unlikely outcomes as miraculous -- if they are happy, of course. If sad, they are simply reported on, or among the believing described as "the will of God." Some disasters are so horrible they don't qualify as the will of God, but as the work of Satan playing for the other team. The 9/11 tragedy, for example, was described by very few as the will of God, although many blamed it on Satan, and Pat Robertson briefly believed it was God's way of punishing us for our sins. Within Al Qaeda circles, of course, it was seen as the Will of Allah, and, given the competence of the first-time jet pilots, perhaps qualified as miraculous.

Like so many of us, I watched with joy as the miners emerged from their tomb, one after another. In a year of sadness, it was a blessed moment. One can sympathize with those who called it a miracle, but actually it was the result of perfectly understandable engineering techniques. The construction of the mine itself, so deep in the earth, was a much more impressive feat, but no one thought to describe that as a miracle. &nbsp

How much better to describe the rescue as the result of the fortitude of the miners and the skill of the good-willed people on the surface who reached them in what was, after all, a very short time. How much better to say the outcome in Chile was the result of intelligence and good will. But there seems to be a narrative in these matters that requires the citing of divinity. Newscasters, victims and their families alike praise the powers above. This reassures us -- of what? That everybody knows the script.

In my case, I was perilously close to death after my carotid artery ruptured. I have written before about how my surgery was completed, the reconstruction was a success, and I was all packed and ready to go home. Some of my doctors and nurses had gathered in the room to wish me well. I had my iPod, and played them a song I loved to play to Chaz: "I'm your Man," by Leonard Cohen. It's a long song, and a good thing it was, because while it was playing my artery ruptured, and right there in the room were the very people needed to fight for my survival. If I'd forgotten the Leonard Cohen song, Chaz sometimes reflects, we would have already been on Lake Shore Drive, and I would surely have bled to death.

So, was that a miracle? Or do I owe thanks to Leonard Cohen? Or should I thank myself for being such a goofy romantic that I wanted to crank up the volume on the iPod speakers and play the song? Or should I thank Chaz for inspiring "I'm Your Man" feelings in my heart? If I was saved through a miracle, how should I describe the vascular accident that nearly killed me?

Here's how I think of it: Those events are the ones that happened. One can easily imagine a different series of events. Indeed, we are alive at this moment, me writing, you reading, because of a series of unlikely events reaching back to the dawn of life. The odds against any of us being here at this moment are staggering. Imagine that a refrigerator falls out of a window and misses us by 10 feet, sparing our life. Now imagine that refrigerator as any cause of death, and realize that it missed every single one of our ancestors back to the beginning, including the time the refrigerator looked like a carnivorous reptile and we looked like a tasty sloth.

Although miracles are recognized by most faiths, the term itself comes down to us through the Roman Catholic line of descent, which is largely responsible for most of the content of all Christian denominations. A miracle, in the Catholic notion, is not just any old unlikely and happy event. It must be "inexplicable by natural or scientific laws," and therefore can be assumed to be the work of the divine. The footnote here is that we are learning more about natural and scientific laws all the time.

The Old Testament reports such miraculous events as the parting of the Red Sea. It was not Moses, however, who caused the waters to part, despite various Hestonian memories we may share. Exodus ascribes the parting to God. It is not really until the New Testament that you have a man performing miracles -- and then only one man, Jesus. The question occurs, if he could raise one man from the dead or heal one leper, why stop there? The explanation, as I recall from my catechism, is that death is part of God's Plan, and that Jesus performed miracles only for the purpose of demonstrating that he was the son of God and therefore had supernatural powers. In Catholic theology, a miracle must be "above, contrary to, or outside nature." Therefore, theologically, the lives of the miners were not preserved by a miracle, but Lazarus was.

It is important to observe that the effects of the sacraments, for example, are not miracles. It is not a miracle that the body of Jesus is present in the communion wafer, for God so ordered that result at the Last Supper, which we reproduce when we celebrate the Mass. Therefore, the divine presence is in the natural order of God's law. When events occur that stand outside both nature and God's law, then they are miracles, and their purpose is not the immediate one -- raising Lazarus, for example -- but the larger one of revealing and demonstrating the glory of God.

This is why the Church takes such pains to test miracles. It is a good thing, the Church believes, for a false miracle to be disproved, because Truth is therefore served. Since God can do nothing deceitful, playful or misleading, such events cannot be his work. &nbsp

It's well known that the Church requires three miracles to be attributed to a person before he can be declared a saint -- that is, a person who is now definitely in heaven with God. These miracles are not lightly attributed, and a so-called Devil's Advocate is appointed to argue against sainthood, and to examine reported miracles for evidence of error, fraud, mistaken perception, and so on. The Church is active in seeking people to serve as a Devil's Advocate. It is well known, for example, that Christopher Hitchens considers Mother Theresa a fraud. Not so well known is that the Church actually solicited his testimony in considered her claim to sainthood.

A saint having been determined to be in heaven is assumed to be enveloped in the presence of God. Catholics pray to saints in the hope they will "intercede" with God to bring about a desired result. Thus it is mistaken to claim Catholics pray to statues or relics; their prayers are directed through the saints represented, and can only be answered by God himself.

Why do I focus on Roman Catholic theology? It is the basis of all Christian theology, and from the days of Aquinas has tried admirably to build on logical reasoning. Much modern Protestant theology proceeds from and builds on similar reasoning; fundamentalism is considered to be outside this tradition, and is essentially a new theology. I prefer formal Catholic theology and its modern Protestant refinements because it is based on reason and not simply unquestioning blind faith -- although of course you must begin with the faith that there is a God at all.

Such theology is a help is clarifying what we're really talking about. When we casually describe good outcomes as "miracles," it would be useful to define what we mean by a miracle, and be able to defend our "miracle" in those terms. That is why precision in language is useful. Einstein observed, "Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters."

That puts me in mind of all the arguments against evolution that depend on a complete ignorance of the definition of a scientific theory. But let's not go there today. Returning to the subject, what has all this to do with my carotid artery, or the Chilean miners? I argue that few people have a good idea of what a miracle actually is. It's not like entering the lottery. God doesn't perform miracles for a few lucky winners. They take place for one purpose only, and that is not to spare lives, cure disease, heal limbs or prevent a bus from falling off a mountain. Their only purpose is to demonstrate the glory of God. They're sort of wake-up calls: "Hey, people, this is Me up here on the mountain top, hurling these lightning bolts."

Do I believe in miracles? No. I believe any event we observe can be explained by natural or scientific laws. Seemingly miraculous events in history might have been explained at the time, if there had been better knowledge. And at this moment, our knowledge is very far from complete, but I believe it is growing.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It is also true that an apparent miracle can be explained because our knowledge of its natural cause is inadequate. For the Church to declare anyone a saint, I presume, is possible because the Devil's Advocate (that is, mankind) does not yet possess sufficient knowledge. &nbsp &nbsp

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The storyteller and the stallion via Roger Ebert's Journal by Roger Ebert on 10/17/10

Bill Nack is a born story-teller. The author of the biography Secretariat has enveloped me time and again in the fascination of his tales. That process began nearly 50 years ago at the University of Illinois, when we were both working on The Daily Illini. I was the editor, he was the sports editor, and then the following year he was the editor. He was also a natural writer -- and, perhaps more significantly, a natural reader. His taste was persuasive.

He approached literature like a gourmet. He relished it, savored it, inhaled it, and after memorizing it rolled it on his tongue and spoke it aloud. It was Nack who already knew in the early 1960s, when he was a very young man, that Nabokov was perhaps the supreme stylist of modern novelists. He recited to me from Lolita, and from Speak, Memory and Pnin. I was spellbound. He knew by heart "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." We went together to hear Robert Frost read his poems in the University Auditorium, and he still does his impression of Frost being just a wee bit snarky about Carl Sandburg.

Having such a memory is invaluable for him as a sports writer. He knows the names of all the horses and all the boxers and their important races and fights. He has been honored with the most important awards by his colleagues among turf writers and boxing writers; the latter gave him their A. J. Liebling Award, which isn't given just any old year.

It was a puzzle to me that he became a sports writer. I remember one night I was at dinner at his house out on Long Island with his children, his first wife Mary (my Urbana High School classmate) and Mike McGrady, the film critic of his newspaper, Newsday. I told him he was destined to be a novelist or short story writer, but lacking that, he should have stayed with his original beat at the paper, politics.

"I told the editor I was tired of writing about politicians," he explained. "I wanted to write about the whole horse."

Write he did. For nearly 25 years he wrote for Sports Illustrated, most of them as Senior Writer. It's fair to say that his articles transcended the genre and often qualified as literature -- just as the writings of his heroes Mencken, Liebling and Orwell did. I sat at a reading in the Boulder Book Store once, and he read his article about a filly who broke her leg during a race, and several of his listeners wept. I refer not to a few tears and a sniffle, but to weeping.

The book he read from was his collection My Turf. In it you will find not the day-to-day, game-to-game, statistic-to-statistic coverage typical of so much sportswriting, but stories of human beings and, of course, horses. Bill is a long-form writer, concerned not with who won the game but what it meant in the lives of those involved -- how the game reflected on their dreams, frailties and friendships, and on the lives of others who invested it with importance. Bill is not star-fixated; he has a loving eye for the people around an athlete, all with their own agendas.

He has a gift for finding a great story in an obvious place where no one saw a story before. I remember him years ago on the phone, wanting to get in touch with Studs Terkel. He had set himself the task of writing a story about the famous Long Count in the rematch between heavyweight champ Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey on Sept. 22, 1927, in Soldier Field in Chicago. The details involving the count and the rules of that match remain controversial to this day.

Bill's idea was to interview every living person he could find who had actually been in Soldier Field to witness that fight. He guessed that Studs might have been there, or knew people who were. My guess was that Bill wasn't interested in the Long Count so much as in the witnesses.

Films existed of the fight which, analyzed in Zapruderian detail, had more or less resolved the question. But what did it feel like that day to a person in Soldier Field? How did the memory of the fight linger? What happened to such defining moments as they were marinated by time? The ability to see that there was a story there helps explain why Nack is a great writer.

We saw each other over the years, or talked on the phone, and Nack would tell me about the horse named Secretariat. He published the first edition of his book. It was hard for me to deal with because, well, who would want to read a book about a horse? And why would Bill Nack, the connoisseur of Nabokov, want to write it? It is to Nack's credit that he sensed my reservations and remained my friend and confidant. And gradually I came to see that Secretariat was more than a horse, just as the Long Count had little to do with the numbers between one and ten.

He called thrilled that his book about Secretariat was being made into a movie. He called to ask me what I thought about the casting of Diane Lane (above) as Penny Chenery, the horse's owner. I said I knew little about Chenery but having met Diane Lane at 18 and followed her career through the years, her casting had to be good news for the movie. I got reports of Bill on location, and knew him well enough to guess that the combination of horses and movies would be elating for him. A movie shoot is like the training period for a horse. You have the money people, the owners, the director as the trainer, the star as the horse, and then on opening night you have the Derby.

We never spoke about the finished film. I went to see it, and I loved it. Did I have a conflict of interest in writing my review? Of course I did. Bill would be the first to agree. Was that going to prevent me from writing my review? No way in hell. I declared our friendship in the second paragraph, and got on with it. It's a damn fine movie. It delivers what it promises to deliver. Audiences know how the races turned out but applaud all the same. There was a bizarre review plundering it for hidden meanings, but nothing in this movie was hidden.

I heard at second hand a comment by Penny Chenery (below) This did not come from Bill. It came from a man standing in line at the parking ticket machines at the multiplex where I saw the film. He said he knew Mrs. Tweedy because he -- well, he knew her. She loved the film He asked her how closely it followed the facts in terms of her family and so on. She explained: "It's a Disney movie."

A few years ago I dreamed up a new occupation for Nack. He would give readings from the literature he loved. I knew a few places that were naturals. I proposed him as a speaker at Rancho la Puerta in Tecate, Mexico, which is a spa and yet so much more than a spa, more of an affirmation of life. I had come to know Carolyne Starek, Bill's lovable second wife, and suspected she would enjoy a week at a spa, but that Bill would probably envision spandex spa bunnies and woo-woo. Rancho is possibly the only spa where a boxing writer would feel at home. The evening talks at Rancho are about real topics, by real people.

I came up with a title, "A Concert in Words," and proposed it to Rancho. In the soft late twilight of a summer night, Bill stood in front of the lectern and performed some of his favorite readings, and a spell was cast. He has been back several times, a great favorite. I also proposed him to the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is beloved after a decade not only for his readings but for his participation on panels on all sorts of subjects, because at CWA you don't lecture on your specialty but have conversations, ad lib, about ideas. That format sheds light on the beauty and complexity of Bill's mind.

He is a gentleman and a romantic. He is the only sportswriter I have never heard tell a dirty joke. He is poised always at the edge of the water, his eyes on the green light at the end of Daisy's pier, which for him symbolizes not a woman but Truth, Beauty and Grace. One day the light reached out to him, and Bill and Carolyne (above) found each other, and seem blissful together. She was a star elementary school principal for nearly 20 years---later a consulting principal who mentored rookie principals and those whose schools were underperforming---for the Montgomery County School District in Maryland. My wife Chaz told Carolyne the other day that Bill needed a principal. She was kidding, but Bill agreed: "I needed Carolyne to calm me down and provide some direction. Before I met her, I was a crazy man. Well, not crazy -- but spinning everywhere, like a Frisbee."

Bill and Carolyne visited us last week, and I asked him to sit down and simply talk to me about Secretariat. This was not an interview. It was story telling. And then we walked over to the Lily Pond in Lincoln Park, and sat in its little shelter, and Bill performed for me yet once again the closing words of The Great Gatsby. He looked out over the water. There isn't a lot of water. It's just a lily pond with lily pads and a few intent ducks and a little waterfall. But as he spoke, I imagined that in his eyes I could see his vision of the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning --

ReelThoughts: October 15, 2010 "Just a Little Crush" Commentary by James Berardinelli

Time to have a little fun...

One of the defining characteristics of young romance is the crush. I'd venture to say that 99.9% of those reading this have experienced at least one crush and, if you're like me, the number is much higher. My view of a crush is that it's an innocent thing, mostly devoid of a sexual connotation. My earliest crushes occurred before I understood anything about sex and the objects of my post-puberty crushes were usually not the girls/women about whom I had sexual fantasies. Your mileage may vary, of course. (In fact, one of my high school friends slept with a girl he had a long-term crush on, so there's no universality to my perspective.) Also, at least to my way of thinking, there's an unrequited element to a crush. For me, crushes were secret things, shared only with a few close friends and carefully guarded so no one outside the privileged circle would find out. Even to this day, I wonder if any of the girls ever knew (or cared to know). At the time, I didn't think so but, looking back on it, I may not have appeared as indifferent as I tried to seem. Attraction is difficult to hide, and a forced nonchalance is typically transparent.

But this column isn't really about the girls who passed through my life between first grade and high school. (The last time I experienced what I would consider to be a crush was when I was 16.) It's not about Sharon, the Blackwell Ave. girl who sat across the aisle from me on my elementary school bus. It's not about Linda, who sat in front of me in geometry class and exuded a maturity that intimidated me at the time. It's not about Judy, the literal "girl next door," who was nice enough but interacted with me the way one might expect from a poised young woman with an awkward, younger neighbor. And it's not about any of the other girls whose names I have forgotten but whose faces occasionally tease from the depths of my memories. Instead, it's about the women of TV and movies, whose names will be more familiar than "Sharon" or "Linda" or "Judy."

The first crush I can recall experiencing occurred when I was four years old. At that age, it's impossible to differentiate between an actress and the character she plays. At the time, I knew her merely as "Nanny." Later, I discovered the name of the actress was Juliet Mills. She was the star of the TV series Nanny and the Professor, which ran for a couple of seasons on ABC (1970-71). The show was on right around my bedtime (which, at that age, was 8:00), but my parents occasionally allowed me to stay up until 8:30 to watch it. All these years later, I can't recall much about the show except that the thing to captivate me about Mills/Nanny was her British accent.

Next on my celebrity crush list was Carol Wayne, the prototypical dumb blonde - an image she carefully cultivated. To this day, I don't know how much of it was real. She died under mysterious circumstances in 1985 but, by then, she was off my radar. The period of my infatuation with her was in 1975, when I watched her daily that summer on the game show Celebrity Sweepstakes. She had two notable attributes: her relentlessly cheerful disposition and her large chest. Being only seven years old at the time, the former was more interesting to me than the latter. I'm sure that had I encountered Ms. Wayne three or four years later, I would have had a different impression. This crush didn't last; once September arrived and I returned to school (and was therefore unable to watch daytime TV), I quickly forgot about Ms. Wayne until I heard the news report of her death ten years later.

Crushes come in two categories: fleeting and those that stick. Lindsey Wagner lingered. I first noticed her, as did most people, when she guest-starred on The Six Million Dollar Man in March 1975. Although her character was "killed" at the end of the initial two-parter, that didn't prevent the producers from bringing her back in the fall then giving her a spin-off series that arrived as a mid-season replacement in January 1976. Wagner was the only reason I watched The Bionic Woman - I never liked the show as much as its big brother, The Six Million Dollar Man. I rarely missed a week, even after the frequent crossovers stopped (an occurrence made necessary by The Bionic Woman's switch to another TV network). Once the bionic dog came along, even Wagner couldn't keep me interested, however. Still, after all these years, I remember the anticipation with which I greeted every Wednesday night, since the 8:00 hour represented 60 minutes to spend in the company of who was surely the prettiest actress on television. (An assessment that may have been correct, at least for a time.)

My other 1976 crush hit harder but didn't last as long, and it was definitely a case of falling for the character rather than the actress who "portrayed" her. The reason for the quotation marks is that Jessica Lange's acting debut as King Kong's leading lady was among the most widely panned of any performance in the '70s. Had the Razzies existed in 1977, she surely would have been awarded one. The irony is that Lange grew to become one of Hollywood's most versatile and respected actresses. She has never disowned King Kong but, whenever an interviewer raises the subject, he gets a dismissive laugh. Still, to a nine-year old boy experiencing his first indoor motion picture, Lange's Dwan was as magical as the effects that transformed Rick Baker into a big ape. Undoubtedly, there must have been something subliminally sexual in my attraction to Lange - after all, she spent a good portion of the movie half-naked. But I became as fixated upon her as upon Kong and the World Trade Center over the course of the last month of 1976 and the first few months of 1977. Then life intruded, my father got transferred, and we moved. After the re-location, I never quite reconnected with Lange the way I had in my old home. Then Star Wars arrived and King Kong was quickly forgotten.

The next name on my list will require readers to consult IMDb.com: Carol Baxter. Baxter was never a household name, even when she was working constantly but, during the late '70s and early '80s, she was a familiar face, having appeared in episodes of many popular TV shows. (She retired from acting in the mid-'80s.) For me, however, she will always be Mary Gibbons, the female lead of "The Curse of Dracula." All these years later, I can't claim to remember much more about her, except that she captured my attention for a few months in 1979. "The Curse of Dracula" was one of three serials to comprise the short-lived weekly TV show, Cliffhangers. The other two, for those who are trivia-minded, were "Stop Susan Williams" and "The Secret Empire." Of the three, "The Curse of Dracula" was by far the most popular so, when Cliffhangers was canceled, the final episode or two bundled the remaining segments of "The Curse of Dracula" so the story could be completed. The undesirable consequence was that "Stop Susan Williams" and "The Secret Empire" never reached a conclusion. I wasn't bothered by that because the only reason I watched Cliffhangers was "The Curse of Dracula," and the only reason I watched "The Curse of Dracula" was Carol Baxter. (Although I suppose Michael Nouri was a charismatic enough Count.)

Olivia Newton-John was next. My dalliance with the singer/actress occurred around the time of Xanadu and had dissipated before the release of "Physical." Strangely, as infatuated as I was with the 30-ish country-turned-pop queen during the summer of 1980, the only album of hers I purchased was "Xanadu" (and that was as much for ELO as it was for Newton-John). A friend of mine had almost every album she recorded and I spent the better part of a weekend at his house, making cassette dubs of the records. Although the quality was suspect, it was good enough for my purposes. Part of Olivia's appeal for me was the fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door appeal. Once she started singing about getting animal and cut her hair short, I lost interest. My strange preference for blondes when I was a kid required that the blonde have long hair.

My final identifiable crush on an actress came shortly after I dumped Olivia. In 1981, I briefly latched onto Karen Allen, who made as big an impression upon me in Raiders of the Lost Ark as did Harrison Ford. This was one of the clear instances in which I was attracted to the actress, not merely the character she played. Even though the phase of my crush on Allen didn't survive my entrance into high school, I continued to follow her in movies from Starman to The Sandlot. And I was thrilled to learn that Spielberg and Lucas had decided to bring her back for the fourth Indiana Jones movie. (Too bad it was such a tepid reunion...)

All the crushes I experienced after the summer of 1981 featured real-life girls. My time of being star struck had ended. In retrospect, there were some notable actresses I never developed crushes on, unlike seemingly every one of my male friends. Three names come to mind: Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Lynda Carter, and Carrie Fisher. I didn't own the famous poster of Farrah (although my next door neighbor did, so I saw it several times a week), failed to develop a Wonder Woman fetish, and wasn't overwhelmed by the concept of a chain-link bikini. Also, perhaps strangely, there was never a Star Trek or Doctor Who woman who captured my fancy. Then again, neither show was a hotbed of attractive women.

Crushes on movie/television actresses (or actors) is nothing new. And, unlike an attraction for a classmate or the girl next door, it's perfectly safe. The chances that I, as a boy of about nine, would encounter Lindsey Wagner, Jessica Lange, or Olivia Newton-John was infinitesimal, so I could manage the attraction as I saw fit, which usually meant cutting out pictures of the woman in question then discarding them when I lost interest in her. Admittedly, there are isolated instances in which crushes can get creepy, especially in an age when the Internet enables stalkers and in which there are paparazzi behind seemingly every bush. In general, however, I view the practice as harmless, assuming that the "crush" doesn't become a consuming obsession. All things in moderation, including mooning over attractive women who may be more appealing as idealized cinematic icons than as their real-life counterparts. That's the great irony about most such crushes - getting to know the person would likely kill the infatuation. The image we're attracted to, after all, is a mixture of marketing and fantasy, and exists solely in our minds. So the Jessica Lange for whom I carried a torch may or may not have been like the Jessica Lange who captured the imagination of thousands of other King Kong-loving boys in 1976. And she bore little or no resemblance to the actress who played the role then went on to appear in different parts in other movies with minimal appeal to those who had stared wide-eyed at her in the giant ape's paw.

ReelThoughts: October 18, 2010 "Winning through Losing" Commentary by James Berardinelli

Hopefully, this entire column won't be about sports (or, rather, one sport in particular). There is a larger message in here somewhere; I only hope I'm able to bring it out.

I started watching baseball on television in 1973 during the summer between first and second grades. My team of choice was based on geography and radio/television availability. Since I lived in the New York market, I had two options: the Mets or the Yankees. I chose the Mets, in part because we got better reception of channel 9 (which aired Mets games) than channel 11 (Yankees). (This was a few years before it was fashionable to purchase cable to improve reception.) Upon such trivial things is fandom based at an early age. I followed the sport with all the enthusiasm of a kid, meaning I watched the games on TV and extended that passion to playing Little League ball. Although I couldn't hit to save my life, I had such a small strike zone that I was always drawing bases on balls. So, even though my average struggled to stay on the Interstate, my on base percentage was ridiculously high. That happens when you're six inches shorter than everyone else.

At any rate, my enthusiasm for baseball waned around the time I developed an interest in monster movies. Saturday afternoons on the diamond were incompatible with Creature Double Feature and I'm not the best multi-tasker; there's only enough room in my life for one obsession. By the time we moved out of the New York market and into the Philadelphia one (May 1977), I was disinterested in baseball (even to the point of having carelessly disposed of all my baseball cards - a big mistake). I recall having an argument with my father over television domination the first Saturday we were in the new house. He wanted to watch the Mets/Phillies game. I wanted to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (this was back when silent films were occasionally shown on television, albeit PBS). I ended up watching the movie on a small b&w set in the kitchen. Kids never win those arguments.

The Philadelphia Phillies' "glory decade" ran from 1974 through 1983. During that period, they were in contention every year, made the playoffs six times, captured the pennant twice, and won a world championship. Until the current era, it was the best epoch of Phillies baseball in history. So, of course, I started following the team in 1984, the year after it ended. I don't have a clear recollection of the precise reason I began watching baseball games during the summer of 1984. It was probably a casual thing - something I did one evening to kill some time. I found that I liked it and did it again. By August, I was a die-hard, taking a radio with me if I wasn't going to be near a TV. I remember one evening early in the month when the family was at the Jersey shore for two weeks. There was a TV in the house but it was reserved for the Olympics. Reception of the Phillies radio station was terrible, but that didn't stop me from lying on my bed and listening to the voices of Harry Kalas and Rich "Whitey" Ashburn through the din of white noise and in between bursts of more violent static. The next night, I couldn't hear anything because there were thunderstorms in the area.

I attended my first Phillies game in person in 1985 then went to a few games each year during my college period, 1986-1989. In 1990 and 1991, I was a season ticketholder with a partial plan (16 games in 1990; 32 games in 1991). In 1992, I took the plunge and bought a full season plan (all 81 home games). I kept that until 1995 - the year baseball returned after The Big Strike. With my enthusiasm dampened by said strike, I dropped back to a 13-game Sunday plan, and there I have been since, through the transition from the ominous, cavernous Vet to the crowded, cozier Citizens Bank Park. But a strange thing happened along the way: the Phillies, perennial losers, started to win. From 1984 through 2000, they exceeded the .500 mark exactly twice - in 1986, when they finished in second place 21 games behind the Mets, and in 1993, when they captured lightning in a bottle with a bunch of old, scrappy players having career seasons. All those years of losing taught me the proper mindset for being a Philadelphia baseball fan. You care not so much about winning, and certainly not about the standings, but about the game.

An entire generation of Phillies' fans bore the scars of 1964, and therein lay the origins of some deeply rooted cynicism - a cynicism that not even the Glory Decade had wiped away. I did not experience 1964 (not having been born yet) and for that I am grateful. It's the kind of thing that would have driven me away from baseball for good. The Phillies led the division by 6.5 games with 12 to play. One ten-game losing streak later and they were in second place. A last-day shot at a three-way tie for first fizzled when the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Mets to take the pennant outright. Until 2007, this was viewed as the most devastating collapse ever in the sport. It probably still is, although the Mets deserve honorable mention for losing a seven game lead with 17 to go.

The Phillies began winning consistently in 2001. Since the turn of the century, they have finished under .500 only once (2002), and that was with a record of 80-81. After multiple near-misses (2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006), they finally returned to the playoffs in 2007 after a 14 year absence. That began a four-year reign of National League East dominance. It's almost hard to remember the lean years when the Phillies were loveable losers. For many not forged by seasons of bad baseball and meaningless Septembers, it's not even a matter of memory but of history.

For someone born no earlier than the mid-1990s (that would encompass children up to and including those now in their mid-teens), the Phillies have always been "winners." True, the team danced with 100 losses in the late '90s, but those future fans were still in their playpens and cribs during those lean years. By the time they were old enough to begin to understand what it meant to appreciate the sport, the obstacle of scaling Mount .500 was a thing of the past. The team was no longer a perennial laughingstock. It's safe to say that the young Phillies fan has never suffered adversity. They're used to winning. They expect winning. They feel they are entitled to it. Woe be unto the Phillies when the inevitable happens and they are unable to provide the avalanche of victories and annual postseason trysts. Baseball is cyclical. Those at the top today will eventually tumble down the mountain into the valley. Some teams do this more slowly and with greater grace than others (the Yankees, for example). Others flat-out collapse and can't seem to find the path back to the top (the Pirates, the Royals). For the Phillies, who are stocked with aging players, the downward spiral looms as the front office struggles to keep the contention window open. And, when the team falls from grace, it's a certainty that fans unused to losing seasons will abandon it. Citizens Bank Park will become a half-full reminder of better days (at least until those days come again).

When did sports become all about winning and losing? When did the proverb "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" become an outdated cliché? Yes, winning has always been better than losing but, at the end of the day, it's all a dim memory. Where's the value if winning is the only thing that matters? Is it impossible to enjoy a game if one's chosen team loses? In 1992, the year I became a full-season ticket holder for the first time, the Phillies were coming off a bad season and headed for a worse one. Of course, I hoped they would win more than they lost, but the logic centers of my brain recognized that would not happen. It didn't matter. Today, there's a waiting list for Phillies season tickets. Watch that evaporate after a year or two of not making the playoffs.

Here's a curious thing about winning it all. In 2008, the Phillies triumphed in the World Series. I was, of course, ecstatic at the moment it happened. I celebrated by having a small glass of Bailey's and talking excitedly with a friend on the phone for about an hour. I watched some of the post-World Series analysis shows on TV. Then I went to bed. The afterglow was brief. A few days later, with the baseball season fading in the rearview mirror, I moved on to other things. For a fan, the aura of winning has a frustratingly short duration. Those who watch sports only to see victories are chasing an elusive quarry that, even when cornered, will escape. Those who watch sports for the enjoyment of the game (in addition to the hope of winning) will find far more steady and lasting satisfaction.

The rabid desire for victories in sports is little more than a reflection of a societal malaise - one that brands anything other than a decisive triumph as without value. Through the media and by example, we are taught not only to win, but to dominate. It isn't good enough to be better than the "opponent"; it's necessary to obliterate them. Politics has always been a dirty arena but now even the thin veneer of civility has been stripped away. It seems to me that the level of intolerance in all areas of life is higher than I can remember at any time during my life. And the culture isn't just about winning but about an entitlement to win. When we lose - as must happen to everyone at one time or another - do we accept the defeat with grace? Do we acknowledge that someone else did a better job on this occasion? Usually not. We whine. We cry "foul!" We blame everyone else except ourselves. Of course, there aren't many gracious winners, either. Rarely does the victor stop to acknowledge the vanquished with more than a hollow platitude. Too many winners sneer and preen. Poor sportsmanship for the losers is mirrored by the winners.

As I write this, the Phillies are embroiled in a National League Championship duel with the San Francisco Giants - one they may lose. If the Phillies fall to the Giants, the local hand-wringing will begin. I'll be bummed out for a day or two but, hey, what's the value in winning if you don't lose from time-to-time? It's like the weather. The blast-furnace heat of summer is all the sweeter once you've gone through a long and brutal winter. That's why, even though I detest the cold, I Iive in the Northeast instead of Florida or Southern California. For me, the weather (like night and day) is all about contrast. And so is winning in sports. Winning breeds apathy. Remember those 14 straight NL East championships in Atlanta? By the end of the streak, the Braves were having trouble drawing crowds for regular season games. Until playoff time, the fans didn't care. Losing, on the other hand, generates an insatiable hunger for victory. The thirsty man values a sip of water far more than someone who is sated. Consider that the next time you think about the relative value of winning and losing and whether, in a society where winning has become everything, it might not be better to occasionally lose.

What does 'pro-business' mean?

What makes a policy or a politician pro business? Some would tell you it includes: Lower or eliminate the minimum wage Eviscerate OSHA and other safety and pollution inspections Make it difficult for workers to easily switch jobs from one company or another Educate the public just enough for them to be compliant cogs in the factory system Fight transparency to employees, the public and investors Cut corporate taxes

I think these are certainly pro-factory policies. All of them make it easier for the factory to be more efficient, to have more power over workers and to generate short-term profits.

But “business” is no longer the same as “factory”. (Aside: Factories don't have to make stuff... they're any business that focuses on doing what it did yesterday, but cheaper and faster.) It turns out that factory thinking is part of a race to the bottom, to be the cheapest, the easiest place to pollute, the workforce that will take what it can get.

It's not surprising that there's tension here. If you are working hard to cut prices and improve productivity, you might view labor as a cost, not an asset, and you might want as little hindrance as possible in the impact you have on the community. On the other hand, a business based on connection and innovation and flexibility may very well have a different take on it.

I grew up not too far from the Love Canal. It’s a world famous toxic waste dump. While it helped the short tem profits of Hooker, the chemical company that dumped there, it’s not clear that looking the other way was a pro-business strategy. At some point, a healthy and fairly paid community is essential if you want to sell them something.

The oil sands project in Alberta Canada is a factory-friendly effort. So was the lead excavation in Picher, OK. Creating systems that leverage the factory can often lead to financial success (in the short run). The problem is that the future doesn’t belong to efficient factories, because as we train people to look for the cheap, we race to the bottom--and someone else, somewhere else, will win that race.

Perhaps we could see pro-business strategies looking more like this: Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems, so they can work at just about any job. Maintaining infrastructure, safety and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there. Reward and celebrate the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity and a stable path to the future. Spend community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.

Once you’ve seen how difficult it is to start a thriving business in a place without clean water, fast internet connections and a stable government of rational laws, it’s a lot harder to take what we’ve built for granted.

Capital is selfish and it often seeks the highest possible short-term results. But capital isn’t driving our economy any longer, innovation by unique people is. And people aren’t so predictable.

Linchpins are scarce. They can live where they choose, hire whom they want and build organizations filled with other linchpins. The race to the top will belong to communities that figure out how to avoid being the dumping ground for the organizational, social and physical pollution that factories create.

Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 3

What the Other Guy Does

I said earlier that there are many, many ways of collaborating, and there are.

There’s taking what somebody else knows all about but has no writing skills; you get him to talk about whatever it is or give you a rough draft of what he has to say and you make it good. (I did something like that for Ian Ballantine with a couple of early novels that had originally been written by someone else, Turn the Tigers Loose and The God of Channel One.)

There’s the kind where one partner is thought to have the better ideas so he writes a sort of outline of the story and the other fellow fleshes it out. (Which I did for a number of not very good stories with Cyril Kornbluth and for two, not that much better, with Isaac Asimov — those two are still available for anyone who really, really wants to read them in Isaac’s book The Early Asimov.)

Actually, I rather like taking someone else’s draft and making it publishable. The nine or so books that I wrote with Jack Williamson were done more or less that way. The first of them, Undersea Fleet, he gave to me as a jumble of notes and scenes. He had worked over the material a dozen different ways without ever having it jell into a novel, so he turned it over to me to get a fresh view on it.

The other eight books we did were mostly written on purpose as collaborations, bearing in mind that Jack lived in New Mexico and I in either New Jersey or Illinois. Although we traveled together now and then, we rarely sat down to write together. What we did was to exchange letters over a period of, usually, some months, talking about something we’d like to see in the book — perhaps a new scientific theory (we got a lot of mileage out of the steady-state hypothesis until it was proved wrong). And when we’d thought up all the complications and implications we could Jack, bless his soul, would sit down and write a complete first draft and mail it to me. Then I would do a lot of work on it and we’d give it to the publisher.

The absolute best collaboration technique I’ve come across was the one I used when writing with Cyril Kornbluth, and we discovered it by accident. The way it worked, Cyril would come out to our house on the river in Red Bank, New Jersey, where we kept a room for him on the third floor with his own bath, bed and typewriter. Then he and I would have dinner, and he would have a drink or two while I had coffee, and we’d chat about what we’d like to see in the new book — characters, situations, settings, whatever interested one of us. When we thought we had enough to start writing we’d flip a coin. The loser would go upstairs to his typewriter and write the first four pages. Then he’d come down and say, “You’re on!” And the other guy would go up and write the next four, and so on, turn and about, until we got to the page that said “The End.”

At this point we had a whole book, though not a truly finished product. Somebody, usually me, had to go over that manuscript and fix errors, incongruities and infelicities, maybe add some explanations and transitions and stuff and do a little polish, and then we’d give it to the publisher.

There was only one thing wrong with this system. It worked fine with Cyril, and not at all with any other writer in the world. I know this because I tried with several, including several really good ones, and that sort of telepathy that kept the two of us on message without ever explicating exactly what the message was never materialized.

Except with one writer whom I had never thought of.

After we’d completed one of our books — I think it may have been A Town is Drowning, which isn’t science fiction and you’ve probably never seen it — Cyril went home, and I was working on some book of my own and having a tough time.

“Oh, hell,” I complained to my typewriter, “I’ve done four pages and I’m tired out. If Cyril were here I’d tell him it was his shift and I’d go downstairs and watch the Mets game.”

And that seemed like such an attractive idea that I turned off the typewriter and the light and went downstairs and watched the game. Then I had dinner and helped put the kids to bed and watched a little more TV. Then I went to bed myself. And when I woke up the next morning, I made myself some coffee and took it up to the third floor and turned the typewriter on again and reread those last four despairing pages.

I noticed something I hadn’t expected. I still had no good idea of exactly how I wanted to end the story or what I wanted to happen in the story in order to get there. But I could see what the next page or two needed to be, and I even had some clues about what should come immediately after them.

So I wrote those pages, and then I sat back with my hands clasped over my abdomen, grinning in pleasure at the window and the trees in my back yard, because I could feel a wonderful new idea being born in my belly and spreading its warmth throughout my body.

I already possessed an always available collaborator! It was me!

I would write four pages each and every day, and I would stop after the fourth page and do other things — write letters I owed or pay bills ditto or mow the lawn or pick a pail of mulberries or go into New York and bother editors or clean the swimming pool or whatever struck me as worth while. And then the next day I would read those four pages and write four more, und so weiter to the end of time.

And basically that’s what I did, every day of my life, for the next thirty or forty years.

If you decide you’d like to try the four-pages-a-day, collaborate-with-yourself system for yourself, there are a couple of things I think you will want to watch out for.

First, if you decide to do it every day, then you have to do it every day. Don’t let yourself off because you’ve got a toothache or you’re getting married that afternoon or your favorite cat died. Do those four pages no matter what.

There is no rule that says that those pages have to be any good. If you’re really pressed for time you’re allowed to type very rough draft as fast as your fingers will move. (And you’ll be surprised to see how often that copy turns out not to be hopelessly bad after all.)

Second, if you really want to give yourself a vacation — say the first two weeks in June — I personally wouldn’t do it, but you may if you wish. But you should decide on that ahead of time, say no later than maybe the middle of May.

These are of course my rules. You can make up your own. The important thing to do is, once they are made, stick to them

And good luck to you and your collaborator!

Wednesday, October 13, 2010 The Critical Audience Much of what I think of as tactics come out of pushing little plastic and metal figures across a series of squares, where it's all about the relative position of things. After some excellent conversation on twitter, it struck me that the same could be applied to criticism.

Now, I do not pretend to speak to big C Criticism, where there are decades, even centuries of academic tradition, schools of thought and Deep, Meaningful Understanding. Instead, I'm talking about one fellow getting on the Internet and talking about a game he liked or didn't like, and how that's received.

This is on my mind of late because I've been bombarded by examples of how badly our hobby handles thoughtful but negative criticism. This is frustrating to me because well thought out criticism from someone unhappy with a product is incredibly valuable and useful in my eyes. It is a terrible shame that the expectation is that such a review is basically an invitation for an internet ass-whuppin.

So as I got to thinking about this, it struck me that there's a large potential for disconnect when you consider the audience. Put simply, is the criticism written for the artist, or for the audience for his work?[1] It's not a hard question, and either answer suggests some specific things, that are easy to address. If the review is clearly directed at the artist, it is not unreasonable for the artist to respond in a personal fashion, perhaps even taking umbrage (because the reviewer has opened the door to dialog - more on that in a bit), but if the artist takes a similar response to a review that is very clearly for the public, then it's the artist who is picking a fight.

And there's the rub - if the answer is not clear, then right out the door you have an invitation for disaster as appropriate responses on one end become inappropriate responses on the other.

Now, it would be easy to suggest that the answer is to just assume all reviews are public facing, and consider communications directed to the artist to be directed to her. Sadly, things rarely work that way (especially on forums), and there is a natural bias for the artist to think they're being addressed directly, even if that is not the intent.

This leads to a lot of seeds of unproductive discourse, so I want to talk about each kind of criticism and its role.

Criticism directed at the artist has its place, and is in fact a critical part of many creative processes. These critics carry other names, like editors, alpha readers or trusted friends, but their job is that of the critic, to speak to the work. However, it is critical to note that most of these contributors speak to the artist before the work is finished, and most of them would not presume to continue the criticism after completion. Once the art is completed, the number of people who the author is willing to listen to directly is limited by the bounds of her trust. Whatever element of the work goes out into the world, there is always some part of it that exists only between the artist and her work. To presume on that is to invite a strongly negative emotional response.

Yet that is exactly what a critic does when addressing his criticism to the artist rather than the audience. Even assuming the best of intentions - that he wants to help the artist's next work be better and that he's looking to foster a dialog - it is a vast presumption. The author is not obliged to enter into a dialog with a critic any more than the critic is obliged to think well of her work.

Now, this is not an incomprehensible instinct on the critic's part. He wants to help and he wants to make a connection. Both of these are normal, human instincts. But he's doing so in a manner comparable to the man who wishes to ingratiate himself by telling you about your mate's flaws on the presumption that you do not know them and that clearly you're looking to upgrade.

If, in contrast, criticism is directed to the audience, then there is no presumption. The critic is speaking to the subject at hand and, assuming good faith on the part of all parties[2], he's on solid footing to do so. The artist's personal relationship with her work is not being challenges, and the artist is free to take the criticism or leave it, as best suits her own judgment or taste. This criticism might ultimately be useful to the artist, but only if the artist chooses to make it so.

All of which is to say, there's a lot to be gained from making it clear who you're speaking to when you want to talk about someone's game.

Now, I've put a lot on the critic's head here, but there's another side of the equation. If the critic is taking steps to keep the criticism from being personal, the artist needs to not take it as such. Yes, they may hate the thing you love, but that does not change it (or you), and you need to decide if striking them down with thunderous fury is worth everything you lose in squelching discussion.

But it's not that simple is it? Most artists I know develop thick enough skins to handle the criticism, or have other ways to deal with it. They know that a critic who thoughtfully hates their work is still a thousand times more invested in it than someone who's never heard of it and doesn't care. But it's not just about the artists, it's about the people who love them.

And that's the hard thing. You see someone says bad things about a book you love and who's creator you consider a friend - the instinct is to kick someone's ass. Even if the creator is chill about it all, her self-appointed defenders are quick to step up.

Yes, some very cynical folks exploit this phenomena, allowing them to keep their hands clean while their supporters run around like angry vikings, but I think they're in the minority. In most cases the artist might not agree with the actions taken, but also appreciate the underlying sentiment, and thus won't rein it in. Not that they really could.

The thing is that the friends and defenders need to realize that criticism, even negative criticism, is valuable to the artist. Squelching bad reviews is a Nile perch solution. It looks like it helps in the short term, but in the long run it makes things worse for the artist as fewer and fewer readers are willing to start the kinds of conversations that really bring a game to life.

If you want to do the best thing you can for your friends, then use these reviews as the basis for interesting discussion. Speaking as a creator, praise is nice, criticism is useful, but nothing is quite as amazing as knowing your ideas have helped push people to find other awesome ideas. Being criticized is far, far, far less important than being talked about.

Anyway, that's just my take on it - obviously there's no one true way to review or respond, but as someone who wants the world to be as full of as much robust discussion of the things I love as possible, I present my perspective.

1 - As an aside, it is kind of fascinating to me that this question can be asked at all. Before the internet, you had to be in a very particular time and place if you wished to direct your criticism to the artist directly. Nowadays, if both the artist and the critic are on the internet, anything goes.

2 - And no, you can't always assume good faith, but if the problem is that the critic's being a jerk, that is usually self evident. If it not so clear that as to be irrefutable, they're probably just being snarky and it's equally likely you're just being oversensitive. Posted by Rob Donoghue at 10:00 AM Labels: Social

The City that Ended Hunger A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger. Document Actions Share Send this Print this RSS Feed by Frances Moore Lappé posted Feb 13, 2009

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.” CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget. Above, fresh passion fruit juice and salad as part of a school lunch. Photo by Leah Rimkus

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city of Belo Horizonte puts “Direct From the Country” farmer produce stands throughout busy downtown areas. Photo by Leah Rimkus

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.

ABC bulk produce markets stock the items that the city determines will be sold at a fixed price, about 13 cents per pound. Photo by Leah Rimkus

“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

The line for one of three “People’s Restaurants” a half hour before opening time. Meals cost about 50 cents; diners come from all socio-economic groups. Photo by Leah Rimkus

No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

“We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.”

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

The result of these and other related innovations?

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us. Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, and a YES! contributing editor.

Dead Tree Alert: Uncommon Law Wife Posted by James Poniewozik Friday, October 15, 2010 at 9:34 am 4 Comments • Related Topics: dead tree alert , the good wife

CBS

I've been writing a lot in this space lately about the disappointing fall broadcast lineup, and how the networks have all but given up launching challenging shows (particularly dramas), turning that job over to cable. (It's worth noting, by the way, that however badly Lone Star flamed out, even the most successful of the network's unambitious new shows, like Hawaii Five-0, have done modestly in the ratings at best, and most have done pretty badly. So boringness is no guarantee of success either.)

In the print TIME this week, I look at the flip side of that: is it possible, within the audience constraints of network TV, to make a drama that's morally complex, adult and successful? It is, and Exhibit A is CBS's The Good Wife. The Julianna Margulies drama has evolved from a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about a wronged political spouse into a legal-political-family drama in which no one is entirely ethically pure. But it pulls in a regular and sizeable (if a bit old, ad-demo wise) audience, in part by being a terrifically written case-of-the-week legal show as well.

The piece is not online yet, but it's at your newsstands, so I shouldn't give away the store here. Go buy a print TIME magazine! And other fine paper products! Paper towels really are more absorbent than your computer screen!

Winnebago Man

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

Cast & Credits A documentary about Jack Rebney

Kino International presents a film directed by Ben Steinbauer. Screenplay by Malcolm Pullinger and Steunbauer. Running time: 85 minutes. No MPAA rating; language.

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There is a video on YouTube that has had millions and millions of hits and made its subject, a man named Jack Rebney, internationally known as "Winnebago Man." He is perhaps even as famous as Trololo Man, and that's famous.

Rebney first attracted attention when an old VHS tape surfaced featuring the out-takes of a 1989 session when he was trying without much success to star in a promotional film for Winnebagos. Things were not going well. In take after take, Rebney blew lines, forgot lines, thought lines were stupid, was distracted by crew members moving around, was annoyed by stray sounds, was mad at himself for even doing the damn thing.

Every time the filming breaks down or Rebney calls a halt, he explodes in remarkable verbal fireworks. The only reason "Winnebago Man" doesn't consist of wall-to-wall f-words is that he separates them with other four-letter words. Once it made it onto You Tube, the video was found hilarious by countless viewers. But what were they laughing at really, and who was the real Winnebago Man?

A documentary maker named Ben Steinbauer decided to find out. He was curious about the reasons we like footage of real people subjecting themselves (usually unwillingly) to ridicule. Are we laughing at them, with them, or simply in relief that we aren't them? How does their viral fame affect them?

Jack Rebney seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Using methods he shows in his film, Steinbauer finally tracks him down in Northern California, where he lives alone in the woods, calls himself a hermit, and wants nothing to do with nobody -- never. That's not because of the YouTube video, which he doesn't give a $#!+ about. It's because of the way he is.

Now around 80, he works as a caretaker for a fishing resort that, it must be said, is never very evident in the film. He has an unlisted phone number, uses post office boxes, and his dog is all the company he wants. He does have a computer; I imagine figures like this feeding the endless comment streams on blogs.

Steinbauer visits him, chats with him, gets first one impression and then another. Rebney more or less agrees to be filmed. His YouTube fame is meaningless to him, but he figures it might be useful if he could parlay it into a way to air his views. Rebney, as you might suspect, has a great many views, including a roster of national figures he believes should be tried as war criminals.

Although we find out a lot about this virtual hermit and develop an admiration for his cantankerous principles, the movie leaves some questions unanswered. We learn that Rebney is threatened with blindness. We wonder how he will get along, at his age, living in a cabin in the woods. We might like to know a little more about Rebney as a young man. We suspect, but can't be sure, that much of his anger is not uncontrolled, but is aimed consciously at what he considers a stupid and corrupt world. He is not a comic character; he's dead serious.

Rebney is not touchy-feely. He is a hardened realist, whose only soft spot may be for his dog. He keeps up with events, feels the nation is going down the drain, and isn't sure why he was so angry while making the Winnebago promotional film. The crew he was cussing out were not good sports, and the outtakes made their way to Winnebago, which fired him. Then it went wide on You Tube.

Steinbauer takes Rebney wider still -- all the way to the Jay Leno show, and to a fascinating personal appearance at a Found Film Festival, where he regards himself on the screen and then goes out to speak and proves himself the master of the situation. Steinbauer even sets him up with a Twitter account, but, typically, Rebney loathed it. His most recent Tweet, on March 28, 2009, was: "UP YOUR FERN."

tone

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

Cast & Credits Jack Mabry Robert De Niro Gerald Creeson Edward Norton Lucetta Milla Jovovich Madylyn Frances Conroy Young Jack Enver Gjokaj Young Madylyn Pepper Binkley

Overture Films presents a film directed by John Curran. Written by Angus MacLachlan. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexuality and violence, and pervasive language).

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"Stone" has Robert De Niro and Edward Norton playing against type and at the top of their forms in a psychological duel between a parole officer and a tricky prisoner who has his number. Norton plays Gerald Creeson, imprisoned for his role in a crime that resulted in the murder of his grandparents and the burning of their house. De Niro is Jack Mabry, who plays everything by the book to protect himself from a dark inner nature.

De Niro is an old hand at playing inner demons. In "Raging Bull," his classic weakness was jealousy. Here it is anger, which perhaps leads to lust. The film opens with a younger Jack Mabry enacting a terrifying scene with his young wife and infant. Years later, they are still married, in a loveless gridlock based on passive aggression. He does nothing "wrong." It is his duty to stay married. His wife, Madylyn (Frances Conroy), seems to be hunched against blows that never come. He mechanically sips whiskey and stares at the TV, the wall, anything.

It's time for his retirement. He could pass his case load on to his successor, but no: He will do his duty to the last detail. That includes handling a parole plea by Creeson, who is very smart, an emotional manipulator, whose wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), is such a woman that such a man might use and be used by. Creeson senses that Mabry, the duty-bound straight arrow, might be vulnerable to temptation. Lucetta is smart enough to try, not a bold seduction, but a mental game in which Mabry essentially seduces himself.

This is a process which cannot be dispatched in a neat prison caper. It involves plotting about personalities. Lucetta has a key role in finding and exploiting an avenue through Mabry's defenses. What does Creeson think about the possibility she will have sex with Mabry? What does he think about her sex life in general? Is her promiscuity useful to him? Does she know it? Apart from whatever she does, she loves her husband without reserve, which is peculiar because he doesn't seem to deserve it, but then you never know.

"Stone" could have been some sort of a procedural, a straightforward crime movie, but it's too complex for that. It is actually interested in the minds of these characters, and how they react to a dangerous situation. De Niro is so good at playing a man who has essentially emasculated himself because of fear of his anger, so that sex and anger may be leashed in precisely the opposite way, as in "Raging Bull." And Norton, the puppetmaster — it may not even be freedom he requires, but simply the pleasure of controlling others to obtain it.

Last Train Home (Unrated) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Last Train Home

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

Cast & Credits Zeitgeist Films presents a film directed and written by Lixin Fan. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 87 minutes. No MPAA rating.

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This is inevitable: Painful social conflict will arise between those Chinese citizens who produce consumer goods for the world, and those Chinese who want to consume them. “Last Train Home,” an extraordinary documentary, watches that conflict play out over a period of three years in one family. It's one of those extraordinary films, like “Hoop Dreams,” that tells a story the makers could not possibly have anticipated in advance. It works like stunning, grieving fiction.

The film opens like a big-picture documentary, showing us a huge crowd being directed by police as it grinds its way forward. We are informed that these are some of the 130 million Chinese citizens who make an annual train journey from urban centers to their provincial villages — “the largest human migration in the world.” Umbrellas of every description protect them. They carry enormous bundles — gifts, perhaps, or food for the journey. They're headed home for the Chinese New Year.

We gradually center on Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, a married couple. Years ago, they left their home in the Szechuan province to take low-paying jobs in a textile factory in Guangzhou, which is the huge industrial city on the mainland next to Hong Kong. Here, in row after row, they work bent over sewing machines, assembling perhaps the jeans I'm wearing right now. They live in dormitories — married adults, with next to no privacy.

They save every yuan they can to send home. They left their children behind to be raised by a grandmother. Their dream is that by 15 years of this toil, they will pay for the children to finish school and live better lives. For that dream, they have sacrificed the life of parenthood, and are like strangers at home to children who know them as voices on the telephone, seen on the annual visit.

This is a reality Dickens could hardly have imagined. The fruit of their toil has contributed to China's emergence as a global economic power. But their lives are a grim contrast to the glittering Beijing of the Olympics, the towers of Shanghai, the affluent new business class. And here is the part you may sense coming: Are their children grateful for what amounts to the sacrifice of two lifetimes?

The filmmaker, Lixin Fan, follows this family for three years, in the city and in the village. We hear much about how Chinese parents pressure their children to study hard and excel. Overseas, they frequently do succeed. But China is a huge nation, so large that a generation may not be long enough to rise from poverty.

Their daughter, Zhang Qin, is in high school, and comes to regard her parents as distant strangers — and nags. She's had enough of it. But what she does is beyond heartbreaking. She moves to Guangzhou and gets a factory job. She does the math. If she keeps her wages instead of sending them home, she'll have them to spend on herself. Does it occur to her to suggest her parents move back home with her brother, while she helps support and repay them? Not a chance.

There is so much to say about this great film. You sense the dedication of Lixin Fan and his team. (He did much of the cinematography and editing himself.) You see once again the alchemy by which a constantly present camera eventually becomes almost unnoticed, as people live their lives before it. You know the generations almost better than they know themselves, because the camera can be in two places and they are usually in one or the other.

There is a quiet moment in a mall. On their day off, Zhang Qin and her friends go shopping. They like a pair of jeans: “Are these made in our factory?” No, in another. Of course they want them. Of course their generation wants them. But their generation doesn't want to work years leaning over a sewing machine and sleeping in a dorm.

We read about the suicides in Apple's plants in China. Seeing this film, you suspect there are many suicides among workers in factories whose brands are less famous than Apple. Chinese peasants no longer live without television and a vision of another world. They no longer live in a country without consumer luxuries. “Last Train Home” suggests that the times they are a-changin'. The rulers of China may someday regret that they distributed the works of Marx so generously.

RED (PG-13) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

RED

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

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This would have been a hell of a cast when we were all younger. “RED” plays like a movie made for my Aunt Mary, who was always complaining, “Honey, I don't like the pictures anymore because I don't know who any of the actors are.” If the name Ernest Borgnine sounds familiar, here's the movie for you.

Borgnine at 93 is still active and has a project “in development,” I learn from IMDb, even if it's ominously titled “Death Keeps Coming.” Says here it's a supernatural Western being produced by Tarantino. Borgnine himself is a heck of a guy. I flew out of Cartagena with him one morning with a terrible hangover, and we got stranded in some forgotten Colombian airport where he fed me aspirin crushed in milk. An actor like that is a role model.

Bruce Willis stars in “RED,” which refers to his alert level (“retired: extremely dangerous”) and not his hair. He's a former CIA agent, a black operative, who discovers bad guys want to kill him. So he summons the members of his old killing squad, and they prepare a defense. The team includes Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), Victoria (Helen Mirren) and Ivan (Brian Cox).

Some notes: Victoria requires no second name because she is a woman in a thriller; Ivan is a Russian, because the Russian in every thriller is named Ivan; Malkovich may have taken the role because he is never considered for characters named Boggs, and Freeman reveals early that he is dying of liver cancer. We know that as the black member of the team he must die first, “because that's how he would have wanted it.”

So once again poor Morgan Freeman is hung out to dry. He'd rather play the villain. As he once explained to me: “The villain is usually the most interesting character in the movie, and one thing you know is, he'll still be around for the last scene.”

In addition to his old comrades, Bruce takes along Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), a telephone operator at the agency that oversees his retirement plan. He's fallen in love with her voice. He explains she has to go on the run with him because her life is in danger. Like any federal employee, she finds this reasonable. Her life will be much safer with a man who is the target of thousands of rounds of automatic weapon fire. The villains in thrillers are such bad shots they'd suck at video games.

The bad guys are in the upper reaches of the CIA, and the conspiracy reaches all the way to a vice president with connections to a huge private defense contractor. This man is played by Richard Dreyfuss, who subtly signals to us, “You only think this is my Dick Cheney imitation, but if the studio let me loose, I could nail this role.” Are sinister Dick Cheney roles growing uncommonly frequent? Hollywood is always fearful of running out of villains and, having run through Russians, Chinese, Nazis and Mongols, seems to have fallen upon poor Cheney with relief.

“RED” is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting. I guess the movie's moral is, these old people are still tougher than the young ones. You want tough? I'll show you tough. In one scene, Helen Mirren is gut-shot and a blood stain spreads on her white dress. In a closing scene not a day later, she's perfectly chipper and has had time to send the dress out to the cleaners.

Nowhere Boy

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

Cast & Credits John Aaron Johnson Mimi Kristin Scott Thomas Julia Anne-Marie Duff Uncle George David Threlfall Paul Thomas Brodie Sangster

The Weinstein Company presents a film directed by Sam Taylor-Wood. Written by Matt Greenhalgh, based on a memoir by Julia Baird. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R.

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John Lennon wrote the song “Julia” about his mother, and it is a strangely objective love song, as if about a real girlfriend and not a mom. Perhaps that's how he thought of her. When he was very young, he came under the care of his Aunt Mimi, whom he regarded as his mother, and in the telling of “Nowhere Boy,” he didn't see Julia again until the day of his uncle's funeral. The film is co-written by Julia Baird, his half-sister, who must be presumed to have good information.

“Julia” is a song of longing and regret, written some years after Julia's sudden death. Their relationship was close and did not have the time to grow old. There's a video online of Sean Lennon singing it, in front of back-projected photographs of his father and Julia, and also of his mother, Yoko Ono. “This song is for my mother,” he says, and as he sings it, he sounds eerily like his father, in intonation, arrangement, emotion. Perhaps it is for both his parents. He was young when he lost John, and John was young when he lost Julia. Both memories are of interrupted love.

The young Lennon (Aaron Johnson) in “Nowhere Boy” is cocky and vulnerable. He was raised in an ordinary lower-working-class home, not far from Strawberry Fields in Liverpool, by an aunt (Kristin Scott Thomas) who loved him but was reserved and cool. She and her husband had taken the child in after her younger, prettier sister proved incapable of caring for him; John learns the details of his adoption late in the film. He knew Mimi was not his mother, but had no idea that all during his childhood, Julia lived only a few blocks away.

She must have seen him often, if he had only known it. Did she stay away out of respect for Mimi? He glimpses her at the funeral of his uncle and instinctively knows who she is. When he discovers where she lives, he knocks on her door, and she greets him with instant, embracing love; we get the sense that she was a woman quick to love, impulsive, more spontaneous than the responsible Mimi. Because John and Julia are essentially strangers, their relationship has elements of unrealized romance. There is the tension between joy and sadness we often feel in Lennon's songs, and perhaps we see some of the origins of his place in the flow of British Romanticism.

“Nowhere Boy” is deliberately not about the future John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, nor about the birth of the Beatles. The cataclysm of their future global fame is nowhere on the horizon. It is about a not remarkable childhood and youth in Liverpool, marred by the sudden death of his Uncle George (David Threlfall), also warm and playful, more spontaneous than Mimi. The two males must have formed a club of their own in the Mimi-ordered household.

There are times when I would have liked a little more detail about the gestation of the future musicians. The only actual Beatles note in the film is its opening chord, from the distinctive first sound of “A Hard Day's Night.” We see John meeting Paul, and through Paul, George, in the ways that teenage boys meet. No heartfelt conversations, no elaborate daydreams; music seems to have been a natural way of expression for them.

The seminal Beatles moment in the film may be when John goes to the cinema and sees Elvis Presley singing in a newsreel. Later generations can hardly comprehend how, or perhaps even why, Elvis represented a moment of decisive social change.

What do we really learn from “Nowhere Boy”? We don't really learn much about the actual early days of the Beatles as a band. Of course there is no Ringo Starr, who may deserve his own film. What we do learn is that it could be said of the teenage John Lennon that he:

Doesn't have a point of view, Knows not where he's going to, Isn't he a bit like you and me?

I think we also learn something more important. We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics. We learn why there's so often in his music the top level of what seems clear, and then, below, echoes of ... something else. We feel elation and sadness as simultaneous possibilities. We arrive at the possibility that if Julia had always been there for him, he might not have been there for us. We reflect that even if all you need is love, that isn't always all you get.

Conviction (R) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell.

Conviction

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

Cast & Credits Betty Anne Waters Hilary Swank Kenny Waters Sam Rockwell Abra Rice Minnie Driver Nancy Taylor Melissa Leo Barry Scheck Peter Gallagher Mandy Marsh Ari Graynor Roseanna Juliette Lewis

Fox Searchlight presents a film directed by Tony Goldwyn. Written by Pamela Gray. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for language and some violent images).

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Kenny Waters might not have been a very nice man, but he was an innocent one. By considering his innocence and not his personality, “Conviction” puts the focus where it belongs: on the sister who reshaped her entire life to win his freedom. Her determination is fierce, her rebirth is inspiring, and in Hilary Swank, the film finds the right actress to embody gritty tenacity.

You can hardly imagine anyone else playing Betty Anne Waters. She's a working-class woman from a hard childhood. She and her brother, Kenny (Sam Rockwell), had an absent father and a mother who might as well have been absent, and were shuffled through a series of dismal foster homes. But they stuck together and helped each other, almost as Dickensian survivors. Her gratitude to him is boundless.

(Spoilers ahead:) The movie doesn't avoid that Kenny gets wild when he gets drunk. He displays the personality changes of an alcoholic. He can be mean, and everybody knows it. In many circles, this is seen as a trait and not a symptom. A local woman is murdered, he's arrested on suspicion and makes the mistake of behaving insultingly to a cop (Melissa Leo, from “Frozen River”). He will pay for that. A few local women, including a ditzy witness (Juliette Lewis) sorta are kinda sure they musta seen him at the crime scene, and the vengeful cop railroads him into jail.

Waters dedicates her life to proving her brother's innocence. This involves reinventing herself. She gets a high school diploma, a college degree and enrolls in law school. One cost of this is her marriage. It's an intriguing possibility, untouched by the movie, that after a certain point in her re-education, she simply outgrew her earlier life and carried on for her own sake as well as her brother's. In law school, she bonds with another student named Abra (Minnie Driver), who also dedicates her life to the case. The movie never really explains why; is it just the goodness of her heart? Driver is very good, in any event, and the two women involve us in their investigation.

Courtroom scenes just about always work for me. It must be built into the situation. “Conviction” has good ones, especially when the Juliette Lewis character comes back into play. It is good to see Melissa Leo again, not so good that her vengeful cop has one dimension, but effective at how well she evokes it.

This is all based on a true story, including the lucky break when DNA testing is introduced and is used to prove Kenny innocent. The story generates that kind of urgency we feel when a character is obviously right and is up against stupidity and meanness. It delivers.

What “Conviction” doesn't reveal during the “where are they now?” crawl at the end is that six months after his release, according to the Associated Press, Kenny was killed when he “fractured his skull when he fell from a 15-foot wall while taking a shortcut to his brother's house after a dinner with his mother.” Tragic. But Betty Anne Waters is still working for wrongfully convicted prisoners.

Inside Job (Unrated) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Kristin Davis, madam to Wall Street.

Inside Job

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2010

Cast & Credits Sony Pictures Classics presents a documentary directed and written by Charles Ferguson. Narrated by Matt Damon. Running time: 108 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some drug and sex-related material).

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I don't fully understand the working of the derivatives and credit swaps we've heard so much about. But I'm learning. These are ingenious, computer-driven schemes in which good money can be earn-ed from bad debt, and Wall Street's Masters of the Universe pocket untold millions while they bankrupt their investors and their companies.

This process is explained in Charles Ferguson's “Inside Job,” an angry, well-argued documentary about how the American financial industry set out deliberately to defraud the ordinary American investor. The crucial error was to allow financial institutions to trade on their own behalf. Today, many large trading banks are betting against their own customers.

In the real estate market, banks aggressively promoted mortgages to people who could not afford them. These were assembled in packages. They were carried on the books as tangible assets when they were worthless. The institutions assembling them hedged their loans by betting against them. When the mortgages failed, profits were made despite and because of their failure. This process has been targeted by financial reform measures that many in both parties oppose because — well, lobbyists have persuaded them. There is no moral justification for how Wall Street functions today.

A Chicago group named Magnetar was particularly successful in creating such poisoned instruments for the sole purpose of hedging against them. Most of the big Wall Street players knew exactly what the “Magnetar Trade” was and welcomed it. The more mortgages failed, the more money they made. They actually continued to sell the bad mortgages to their clients as good investments. There was a famous exchange on C-SPAN as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) grilled Daniel Sparks, head of the Goldman Sachs mortgages department, on why the company aggressively sold investments its own traders described to one another as “shitty.” It was entertaining to watch Sparks maintain a facade of studious probity as Levin socked him with the word “shitty” again and again.

This Wall Street climate helps to explain one session of Senate testimony I have been fascinated by for almost two years: How Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, was able to defend the $484 million bonus he received after leading his firm into bankruptcy. Lawrence MacDonald, who wrote a book on Lehman's collapse, said on “PBS NewsHour”: “Fuld's driver would call Lehman Brothers, and one of the elevators in the building would become frozen. A security guard would come over and hold it until Mr. Fuld arrived in the back door. There's only 15 feet where King Richard Fuld is exposed to the rabble, I guess you'd call us.”

Some may say, well, he was the boss. I say, who the hell did he think he was? I've waited for elevators with my bosses, who have included Marshall Field and Rupert Murdoch. They seemed content enough that there was an elevator.

One of the most fascinating aspects of “Inside Job” involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis, a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves. She says it was an accepted part of the corporate culture that hookers at $1,000 an hour and up were kept on retainer, that cocaine was the fuel and that she and her girls didn't understand how some traders could even function on the trading floor after most nights.

That leads me to the matter of financial reform. We need it. We need to return to an era of transparency. We need to restore a market of investments that are what they seem to be. We need to deprive investment banks of the right to trade on behalf of their own accounts. We need to require them to work on behalf of their customers. In the days before deregulation, it was hard to get a mortgage from a bank that didn't believe you could make the payments. It recent years, it was hard not to get one.

The bad mortgages were sliced and diced into so many derivatives that the banks themselves had no idea what paper they were holding. In one of the more refreshing moments during the housing meltdown, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) advised her constituents: “If a bank forecloses on you, don't move and demand they produce a copy of your mortgage. In many cases, they can't.” She was prophetic; banks are now halting foreclosures all over the country.

Gene Siskel, who was a wise man, gave me the best investment advice I've ever received. “You can never outsmart the market, if that's what you're trying to do,” he said. “Find something you love, for reasons you understand, that not everyone agrees with you about, and put your money in it.” The stocks I thought of were Apple, Google and Steak 'n Shake. I bought some shares. That was a long time ago. Reader, if I had invested every penny I had on Gene's advice, today I would be a Master of the Universe.

Revised from my Cannes 2010 blog entry.

Review: 'Jackass 3D' stands with the best of the series By Drew McWeeny - New toys seem to have inspired the boys to new heights of lunacy

Friday, Oct 15, 2010 12:50 AM

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Something very bad is about to happen in this scene from 'Jackass 3D,' which is the reason I can't take my eyes off the screen. Credit: Paramount Pictures/Dickhouse

At this point, I suspect you already know if you're a fan of "Jackass" or not.

After all, this is the tenth year they've been working together. When I say "they," I'm referring to the strange conglomeration of personalities that, taken as a whole, constitutes what we know as "Jackass." That includes Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, "Danger" Ehren, Preston Lacy, Jason "Wee Man" Acuna, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave Englund, Spike Jonze, and Jeff Tremaine, although it's not limited to them. It's hard to believe that they've gotten a full decade of media life out of stunts that basically consist of either hitting each other, making each other do things that will make them throw up, or putting life and limb in harm's way. Add some boners and poop, and that's pretty much it.

And yet they had their premiere this week at the Museum Of Modern Art.

Why is that? What is it about "Jackass" that transcends the description of the most basic nature of their work? This third film reinvigorates the cast and the creative team in a number of ways, and understanding what it was that happened that made the film work in a way that puts it on par with the best episodes of the original show is key to understanding their appeal and importance overall.

"Jackass" is all about unleashed id, and there is a sense of liberation that underscores the biggest laughs because it's hard to believe anyone ever pointed a camera at this thing that's making you howl. The addition of two new technical tools to their bag of tricks, as well as the new-found sobriety of Steve-O and, by extension, the rest of the cast means there's an energy this time out that makes the whole enterprise feel fresh. Obviously, the title "Jackass 3D" explains the focus this time, which is playing with the new 3D technology in a number of stomach-churning sketches, but just as impressive is the way Tremaine incorporated the Phantom camera, a slow-motion rig that shoots 1000 frames per second, allowing for the absolute clearest slow-motion footage of all time. Combine the two, and you're seeing things no one has ever seen before… things I'm not sure anyone ever needed to see… and that sense of pure experimentation is a sort of a buzz.

But the sobriety thing plays into it, too, because when you're watching these guys throw themselves into a stunt with reckless abandon, knowing that they're terrified because they're going to feel every single thing that happens and there won't be anything to numb them… that's funny. I feel horrible confessing that, but it's true. The more it hurts, or the more terrifying something is, the funnier the payoff. And there are some gags they've devised this time that I can't imagine being part of. "The Beehive Tetherball" or "The Invisible Man" or "Electric Avenue" work as well as they do because of the inherent pucker factor to each of them. Even one of the laziest gags in the movie, playing off Bam Margera's fear of snakes, works as well as it does because of Bam's pure animal fear. By the moment we see Steve-O shaking in fear before a sketch, miserably asking the existential question, "Why do I have to be Steve-O?", I think "Jackass 3D" has taken its place as one of the finest moments from the entire series so far.

Although this film is on the far edge of the R-rating, just as the first two were, this one seems less pervasively filthy than the second film. There's a willingness to be silly that has been missing from "Jackass" for a while that is back with a vengeance this time. Another thing that's different is the unity on display. For years now, "Jackass" has been a collection of smaller groups within the main group, which is not uncommon in any large comedy collective like this. Shows like "Viva La Bam" and "WildBoyz" didn't help, as the guys weren't geographically together at all. Here, they seem to spend most of the film together again, giving each guy an audience during the various bits, and it's infectious. It feels like a party again.

I think "Jackass" stands apart from similar shows and imitators because of the particular personalities involved, and because of the surreal sensibility that has always been such a big part of the show. Anyone can do a physical stunt, but these guys always build a context around the joke that takes it two or three steps beyond. And during the closing moments of the film, as they essentially unleash a soundstage apocalypse, leading into a closing credits sequence set to Weezer's "Memories" that features footage from the full decade they've been shooting, there's a poignance I wouldn't have expected from "Jackass." Ever. I think it's because we've watched these guys get older without growing up one little bit, and since we can't all get away with that, there is a freedom and, yes, a beauty to watching someone else pull it off.

Every time the cast of "Jackass" gets kicked in the balls, remember that. They're taking that nut shot for you. And I hope they keep doing it until Knoxville doesn't need old man make-up anymore.

"Jackass 3D" opens everywhere today.

Capone declares that RED would need to be on steroids to even reach Average!!!

Published on: Oct 15, 2010 2:42:14 CDT

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here.

The more I think about it, the more I truly dislike RED (which we're cleverly told stand for "Retired Extremely Dangerous"--ooooooh). I actually got into arguments with people about this movie at Fantastic Fest, a festival that is populated largely by folks who admire creativity and edgy works by remarkable filmmakers, both established and brand spanking new. Those who claimed to like RED seemed to come at me with this: "For what it is, it's pretty good." Okay, that's true... if what the film is boils down to unoriginal action sequences, unfunny jokes, and a paint-by-numbers plot, then yes, for what it is (shit), RED is pretty good (shit). Of course it's fun to see Helen Mirren holding a gun, John Malkovich playing monkey-shit crazy, and a great series of extended cameos from the likes of Ernest Borgnine, Richard Dreyfus, and Brian Cox, but the film consistently fails to bring anything to life with these touches, and the resulting work is almost entirely devoid of sustained fun.

I like the premise and opening of RED. Retired CIA operative Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) lives a serene, quiet existence in which his biggest thrill is getting his government paycheck so he can call and report it missing just so he can talk to his favorite customer service rep Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), with whom he dreams of having a relationship. When he and his former co-workers are framed for an assassination, Frank rounds up his old (as in elderly) partners, including Mirren, an assassin; Malkovich, a weapons expert; and Morgan Freeman, whose expertise beyond dressing up and going undercover escapes me. Frank also thinks it's a good idea to round up Sarah because he's afraid his enemies will figure out that he has feelings for her and try to kill her as well. Karl Urban plays Agent Cooper, who has been assigned the task of finding and eliminating these hooligans. Let the standard-issue, cat-and-mouse game begin.

Part of my problem with RED is that it establishes that the age of these former agents is elevated, but doesn't ever really play with that. Would the second half of this movie have been any different if the one-time operative has been in the mid-40s? I don't see how it would.

"Hey, look. Helen Mirren has a long-range rifle."

"Whoop-dee-frickin'-do! What does she do with it?"

"She shoots it."

"Um, okay. And that's exciting outside of the trailer, why?"

"Well, it's like watching the Queen of England shoot a bazooka."

"Got it. Go fuck yourself."

And the hilarity continues from there. A big part of the problem is that Bruce Willis has the unenviable task of making me believe he gives a shit about being in this movie. He appears to be sleepwalking through 85 percent of this movie, coming alive just long enough to shoot a gun and run around a bit. His eyes are at about half mast for most of RED. Malkovich is probably my favorite part of this film, but I'm pretty sure the quality of his performance was achieved by simply ignoring everything director Robert Schwentke (FLIGHTPLAN, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE) told him to do. Freeman is okay, but he's woefully underused, really only coming to life in a sequence when he gets to punch Dreyfuss in the face. But who among us wouldn't rise to the occasion to do that?

The primary thought racing through my brain as I watched RED was "I'm bored," except for the more optimistic moments watching the film when I thought, "It has to get better eventually." It doesn't. And if your expectations are sufficiently lowered, you may enjoy yourself. No, not every movie can be the best movie of the year, but why do we give a pass to those that don't even try to get past sounding great on paper? And anyone who begins their assessment of any film with the words, "For what it is..." needs to be slapped. It's not your job to make excuses for movies like RED, which squanders a killer cast, as well as a decent idea that's in desperate need of an overhaul. I feel confident that this movie will be the weekend's big box office winner, and that's because it's easy to digest and is in no way challenging. An audience shouldn't have to lower its expectations to enjoy any movie, from the highest-end drama to the lowest-brow comedy. Happy October. Hope you like crap. Why can't all movies try as hard as JACKASS 3D?

-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter

Capone says performances by Swank and Rockwell elevate CONVICTION from good to great!!!

Published on: Oct 15, 2010 1:58:31 CDT

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

Everything about this retelling of the real-life account of Betty Anne Waters (played with a perfect balance of passion and down-to-earth realism by Hilary Swank) screams that it won't work on the big screen. The potential for overdoing the drama and emotion seems to be a foregone conclusion. But in the hands of director Tony Goldwyn (A WALK ON THE MOON) and his exceptional cast, CONVICTION keeps getting nearly everything right in scene after scene, and by the end of this almost-unbelievable story, you're kind of jut knocked back by how effective every aspect of the movie is.

The film opens with a gruesome murder scene in Ayer, Massachusetts circa 1983. The investigation results in the arrest of Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell), whose been in trouble with the law before but nothing to this degree. The investigation is spearheaded by local cop Nancy Taylor (the great Melissa Leo), and the trial features a couple of witnesses (played by Clea DuVall and Juliette Lewis) who pretty much sink Kenny's alibi and condemn him to a life behind bars. Convinced of her brother's innocence, Betty Anne devotes the next 18 years of her life to getting a law degree, passing the bar exam, and becomes her brother's attorney so she can comb through the evidence and get him set free. All the while, she also is raising two children and watching her marriage fall apart under the strain this process is having on her.

Adding an interesting wrinkle in the case: during the time Betty Anne is becoming a lawyer, DNA evidence becomes a more common practice, with groups like The Innocence Project, led by Barry Scheck (played here by Peter Gallagher), spearheading the effort to get wrongfully convicted people released based on such evidence. In a scene that no amateur screenwriter would have the guts to include in a purely fiction film, Betty Anne's search for 16-year-old box containing blood evidence in her brother's trial results in an extraordinary find. But because the moment actually happened pretty much as its presented in CONVICTION (written by Pamela Gray), the power and miraculous nature of that moment is all the more powerful.

In addition to dealing with a molasses-slow legal system, Betty Anne must also deal with her brother's fading hope that he'll ever be released--a process that includes suicidal thoughts and behavior that results in Kenny getting tossed into solitary more than once. Rockwell is so strong in this part, going from the happy-go-lucky man with no troubles to being in a perpetual state of misery and despair. Also great to watch is Minnie Driver as Betty Anne's best friend and fellow law student Abra Rice. Without realizing it, I've missed Minnie Driver's strength as an actress in recent years. In looking over her credits for the last 10 years, there's only one film I can identify as being worth checking out due to her strength as an actor, and it's good to see her with such a gutsy part once again. Also, pay particular attention to the transformative power of Juliette Lewis as one of Kenny's former lovers, whose testimony is especially harmful to his case. When Betty Anne visits her years later to refute her statements, Lewis puts forth a performance that is beyond words to explain. It must be seen to be believed how hideous a person she can become.

CONVICTION is not so much a tale of a mystery uncovered, but instead its strengths lie in its ability to tell convincingly a story about determination that borders on insanity. Betty Anne Waters isn't just a feisty broad with a lot of spirit; she's obsessive to a fault, and she pays many a price for following her passions. And Goldwyn perfectly captures that fine line, rightfully skipping over important personal events in Betty Anne's life (her divorce is barely acknowledged) to focus solely on the events that meant the most to her. CONVICTION is proof that sometimes all you need is a compelling story and great actors to make the best possible movie. Who knew?

-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter

Capone's Art-House Round-Up with John Lennon drama NOWHERE BOY, INSIDE JOB, and LAST TRAIN HOME!!!

Published on: Oct 15, 2010 1:39:20 CDT

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a couple of films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…

NOWHERE BOY With just a push in one direction or another--with just the slightest bit of support or neglect from a parental figure--a 15-year-old boy's life can be drastically different. This may seem obvious, but when you watch the teen years of a lad from Liverpool named John Lennon unfold, it's easy to see how the two guiding women in his life at that time made him the man he turned into. One of the greatest things about director Sam Taylor-Wood's debut feature NOWHERE BOY is the performance by Aaron Johnson (who played the lead in KICK-ASS), who makes two very wise choices: first, he doesn't try to impersonate Lennon; second, the doesn't play Lennon the boy as if he knows what he's going to become. Again, this may seem obvious, but there's a reason the fake music bio pic WALK HARD features many scenes that foretell the career of the artist being profiled. Johnson's version of John Lennon likely doesn't feel he has much of a chance of living to 30, let alone getting out of Liverpool and starting a band--a successful one at that.

But the shapers of Lennon's destiny are his authoritative aunt Mimi (a remarkable performance by Kristen Scott Thomas) and his free-spirited, largely absentee mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff of NOTES ON A SCANDAL and THE LAST STATION), who John reunites with at 15 and find he prefers her more permissive and encouraging ways to Mimi's. But it's clear that Julia has manic-depressive tendencies, and her carefree ways have led her to trouble in life before she had to give John over to Mimi to look after. The battle over John well being between the two sisters is polite but intense, and Duff especially plays the unstable Julia with the perfect mixture of fun and tragic. In a strange way, she treats John like a long-lost lover, barely able to take her eyes off the tall, good-looking boy.

After getting his hands on his first guitar, John quickly pulls together his band The Quarrymen, which eventually adds to its ranks one Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster). The two have little in common, but they know how to pull a song out of the other one, and that's all that counts early on. Johnston does a remarkable job capturing Lennon's youthful humor, which could be equal parts hilarious and cruel. Johnson loses himself completely in the role, and when he must make the decision of where he wants to live, it's clear his love for both women is powerful and the choice is impossible. Lennon's short temper and immaturity show up during a birthday party sequence at Julia's house, during which John gets rip-roaring drunk and insults just about everyone there because he'd had a fight with Mimi. The scene is an exercise in verbal brutality, and Johnson is note perfect in it.

NOWHERE BOY also has a killer late-'50s/early-'60s soundtrack (no Beatles songs here, folks) of music these kids probably would have been listening to at the time, and the film acts as a nice time capsule of great, lesser-known R&B, soul, and early rock classics. I can't imagine any fan of Lennon's work wouldn't be interested in seeing what the birth of inspiration looks like, but that's pretty much what the superb Nowhere Boy give us.

INSIDE JOB The latest documentary from director Charles Ferguson (NO END IN SIGHT) has many of the same stories and lessons that Oliver Stone's WALL STREET sequel feature, only INSIDE JOB doesn't change the names to protect any of the real-life players. Narrated by Matt Damon, the complicated web of deceptions, conflicts of interest, and easy-to-buy politicians that is laid out in the film is almost more than a brain can handle. Yes, it's complex and interweaving, but that's not what I'm talking about. The fact that so much of this went on unchecked for so long, and that the few oversight bodies the banking system and investment firms actually still have were steamrolled so completely, is almost impossible to comprehend.

The film details the trillions of dollars lost, companies that handed out crap loans profiting from foreclosures, and a treasury and Congress all-too eager to bail these institutions out because they convinced us we couldn't live without them. Perhaps the most frustrating revelation the film makes (not that we don't all know this already) is that nobody went to jail for this colossal deception that destroyed millions of lies through lost jobs and lost homes. In many ways, INSIDE JOB details a larger-scale version of the documentary ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, both of which profile greed gone haywire. The investment companies literally invented new ways to make money based on, well, nothing. The entire Treasury Department comes across looking like a fraternity of fat cats who truly don't give a crap about the middle or lower classes.

One of the most chilling moment of the film comes from, of all people, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who implies that the only reason his indiscretions became public was that he was going after these deceptive financial practitioners. He says there's a gentleman's agreement between these corporate heads not to use private behavior against each other...unless somebody steps out of line the way Spitzer did. Inside Job will make you about as angry as you're going to feel in 2010. I've seen a lot of great docs this year, but this one not only tells us about where we've just been but also it lets us know where we still are and where we're going. INSIDE JOB makes you want to go up to a guy in a suit and punch him in the nuts.

LAST TRAIN HOME The narration-free documentary from director Lixin Fan follows one family's role in what has been called the world' largest human migration, which happens every year around the Chinese New Year when 130 migrant workers head home via train, bus, and foot to spend time with a family that is often disconnected. The mother and father (Changhua and Sugin Zhang) in LAST TRAIN HOME have been making this annual journey for nearly 20 years. They have left their son and daughter with a grandmother, and the now-18-year-old daughter Qin has grown incredibly resentful of her parents essentially abandoning her for her entire life. She wants to return with them to the factories and get a job rather than continue with her education, as they would like her to do. What happens to her instead is heartbreaking and probably not uncommon for girls her age in her circumstances. The pressure on these children to do better than their parents is relentless, but it's clear that the parents want to the best for their children.

While the family drama comes to an ugly head at one point when the daughter swears to her father and they come to physical blows over the incident, the film's greatest moments come when we see hundreds of thousands of people attempting to get on a handful of trains at the same time. These workers literally wait for days, often being moved around from holding pen to holding pen by the police, who are clearly just trying (and failing) to keep tempers from erupting. China's antiquated rail system and insufficient number of cars doesn't help the situation. Still, somehow, this couple manages to squeeze onto a train every year.

The power behind LAST TRAIN HOME (produced by the folks behind the great doc UP THE YANGTZE) is its ability to show the toll its emergence in the global economy has had on its people. Never is this more clear then when the filmmaker shows us the empty factories that dominated the industrial landscape when the economy collapsed and goods from China were not nearly as in demand as they once were. Every frame of this movie is devastating and moving beyond words. I'm sure similar films could be made about families in certain Latin America nations or countries in Southeast Asia. But there is something about that journey, that clinging to tradition in the face of untamed and unforgiving progress that makes it impossible for you to shake this film. LAST TRAIN HOME is one of the great documentaries of the year.

-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter

Write About Love

B by Keith Phipps October 12, 2010

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B av club rating B reader rating based on 8 ratings

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It’s been a few years since Belle And Sebastian released The Life Pursuit, one of the Glasgow group’s best albums, but you wouldn’t know it from the first notes of Write About Love. Picking up where its predecessor left off, it continues to add pop muscle to the band’s signature delicacy as if the hiatus never happened. There are, however, signs of what happened in the time between. Frontman Stuart Murdoch spent those years working on God Help The Girl, a girl group side project/proposed film musical that moved the emphasis to female vocals and occasionally strained too hard for hooks. Elements from that project linger on Write About Love—the female singers, and troublingly, the straining.

Norah Jones lends smoky guest assistance to “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John,” making one of Murdoch’s mopier lyrics sound improbably sultry. Elsewhere, actor Carey Mulligan—who tends to play characters who might have stepped out of Belle And Sebastian songs—assists with the fine title track, while other songs bring band member Sarah Martin to the fore. The trouble with the album—one for the good-not-great file—isn’t the rotating cast of lead vocalists (which also includes Stevie Jackson). Nor is it a lack of catchy tracks like “The Ghost Of Rockschool,” or bouncy songs that challenge preconceptions of what the band is supposed to sound like, such as the organ-driven “Come On Sister.” The trouble is that much of Write About Love sounds unexpectedly disengaged, at times more like the work of old pros than a band first embraced for its unforced, unguarded sound. The long break didn’t stall the group’s momentum, but Write About Love suggests Belle And Sebastian may have forgot a trick or two about, well, writing about love.

The Age Of Adz

B

by Noel Murray October 12, 2010

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After 2005’s Illinois and its 2006 companion The Avalanche, Sufjan Stevens took a long break before emerging with last year’s The BQE, a multimedia, orchestral project that edged away from the meticulous, richly melodic music that won him so many fans—and more than a few detractors. Continuing in that direction, earlier this year, Stevens released the hourlong EP All Delighted People, and now the even-longer LP The Age Of Adz. Both feature a few songs in Stevens’ soft, pretty mode, but also test listener patience with lengthy jams, abstract arrangements, and burbling electronics. As an expression of a restless artist trying to stretch his own limits, The Age Of Adz is simultaneously admirable and exhausting. Stevens’ core style hasn’t changed: He still favors short, repetitive melodic patterns that reach upward before retreating, sung in a breathy, angelic voice. This time, though, he’s replaced the layers of symphonic orchestration with more jarring sounds, dripping mud and acid over his own precious self-reflection. More often than not, The Age Of Adz is too melodramatic, excessive, and dyspeptic to get across more than a generalized sense of unease. But songs like the propulsive “I Want To Be Well” and “Too Much” are as epiphanic as they are noisy, and though it’s sure to be divisive, the 25-minute “Impossible Soul” is a bravura summation of the current state of Stevens. It’s by turns ambitious, weird, catchy, goofy, and ecstatic. And it goes on forever.

John Malkovich

by Tasha Robinson October 12, 2010 Article Tools

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John Malkovich needs little introduction; he’s one of the most recognizable names and faces in Hollywood. Even before Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich made him an indie super-darling in 1999, he already had a decades-long, storied career onscreen and onstage, notably as one of the original members of Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf theater. He continues to direct and act in plays, and to work steadily in cinema—he was in eight films in 2008 alone, with starring roles as well as supporting ones. And that’s not even counting his more colorful ventures, like starring in (and earlier this year, touring the world with) an opera about Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger. Most recently, he played the antagonist in Jonah Hex, he co-stars as tempestuous horse-trainer Lucien Laurin in Secretariat, he plays an LSD-addled, paranoid retired spy in Red, and he just finished shooting a role in Transformers 3. The A.V. Club recently sat down with the two-time Oscar-nominated actor-director to discuss his teenage relationship with Secretariat, why people think he’s an affected theater snob, and why films don’t ever give actors enough time to work.

The A.V. Club: In Secretariat’s production notes, you discussed how you have a personal relationship with Secretariat’s story because you lived through it and followed it closely the first time. As a teenager, what did you find interesting about Secretariat’s races?

John Malkovich: You know, it’s hard to say why. It’s something, watching the Triple Crown. It’s something I always did with my parents. At that particular time—it was a year after the McGovern/Nixon election in ’72, and in ’73, it was the year we were pulling out of Vietnam, etc. etc. Maybe it was just something everybody could agree on. Maybe something as simple as that. There wasn’t a lot of debate about him. And something maybe everybody could root for. So probably that. We always watched at least the Derby and the Preakness and the Belmont, but because he had already won Horse Of The Year as a 2-year-old, everyone thought he had a great chance to win the Triple Crown, which hadn’t been done in years and years and years, at that point. In fact, they thought it never would be done again, though it was done after. So that’s probably why.

AVC: Were you aware of Lucien Laurin at the time at all?

JM: No. I mean, a tiny bit. And of course more of Penny Chenery, because I read the articles, etc. etc., especially those by Bill Nack, who was probably the best chronicler of Secretariat’s voyage. But not so much. I mean, I cared about the horse. The things around it… not so much.

AVC: Are you still interested in horse racing, or the racing and breeding scene?

JM: Yeah, I’ll watch it once in a while. I come from a family of gamblers, so I wouldn’t want to watch it too much, because I think the genes may get me. But I like it. I watched all of the Breeder’s Cup last year, which has a lot of great races. It had this spectacular mare [Zenyatta], who won a fantastic race against all the boys. Incredible horse. So I’ll watch occasionally, but for the most part, I’m too busy to do stuff like that. Except for something like that, I don’t even turn on a TV. I just don’t have time.

AVC: Did making this film bring up any specific memories about your teenage years?

JM: Well, you know, I remember where we were, just sitting in our living room, and the incredible worry we had before every race, that he wouldn’t be able to do it, and the exaltation when he did. But this is not so much just through doing Secretariat, but through watching a lot of the coverage of Secretariat that you can find on YouTube now, or going back and reading Bill Nack’s book or other articles, etc. etc. One thing I was really reminded of, it’s very funny when you look at it—how colorfully everyone was dressed. I mean, that was the kind of… 1973 specifically was probably for both the squares and the hipsters, probably the wildest fashion year. Most of it extraordinarily ugly, but quite fun. And even when you watch the broadcasters, they’re dressed like pimps. It’s just incredible.

AVC: That’s one of the most notable things about Lucien, the way he dresses. Although as Secretariat goes forward, his clothes become progressively more subdued and simple. Is that more about a change in his character, or so he wouldn’t be a visual distraction?

JM: I think probably a little bit of both. But it’s really exactly what he wore in those races. So I think they really just went purely historical there.

AVC: As an actor, how much does costuming and makeup matter to you, in terms of building a character?

JM: Depends. None of it’s necessary for a character, but what you really need to build a character is exactly what you don’t have in the movies—time. You know, movies are like a line drawing. You gotta say, “Okay, in real life, Lucien Laurin is probably 5 feet tall, maybe, maybe 5-feet-1. He actually [Curls lips, talks nasally.] talked like this, ’cause he had dentures that didn’t quite fit. Okay. So you decide “Am I doing that or not? What do you think, Randall? No? Okay, fine. Great. All right, do we do this or do we not do this?” And you have to make very quick decisions, which are, in the end instinctive. Or you make a decision to say “Well, maybe I can do that, because… Oh, that could be irritating after a while, or distracting, etc. etc.” Some of it is a matter of time, always. For instance, with this role, I would have vastly appreciated having the deal finished months before, because then I could have gotten the French down—I speak French, but not French-Canadian French. But I’ve had that happen to me many, many times with movies. You sit around jabbering with the studios for four months, and then the film doesn’t happen. Now I’m not going to work until I know, is it happening? Are we finished? Are you done talking? Okay. Then I go to work.

But often, movies have—just using the terms of an artist or painter or drawer, they have that element of line-drawing to them. You just gotta make a decision, and then you have to stick with it, because you can’t go back after you’ve filmed for three weeks and go, “Oh now I realize! Here’s the—he’s left-handed! That’s the problem. I didn’t realize that when I started.” It’s what you do in a play. When I say things like that, people always think that means I don’t like movies, or I’m some kind of affected theater-intello. No, I’m just talking about the actual work. Just like when you do a painting, you may work on it every day for six months. You may go back in after three months, and go, “Oh it’s great, except it’s a portrait of the wrong person, so let’s start again.” You can do that in the theater, and you just can’t do it in the movies. You don’t go back. So with most movies I’ve ever made, my normal feeling is, once I see it, “Oh, that’s what you wanted to make? Oh, great. Okay, let’s make it.” But it’s already finished. You try to think of it sufficiently enough beforehand that you won’t get caught in a trap, basically. But you don’t ever really have the time to fully, fully explore it. So much of what you do as an actor—it’s who’s around you, what’s the environment, where do you fit into this thing. That’s really work that’s impossible to do on your own, at least for me. I find it hard to pre-plan every element of everything I do. It’s not my thing.

AVC: Have you ever had a role that stuck with you past the end of a film’s shooting or play’s run, where you wound up thinking later, “Oh, I should have done it this way!”

JM: Sure. All the time. But less in theater, see, because you look down, you open all those doors in theater, you go down all those hallways. You go down all those blind alleys and one-way streets which you realize don’t lead you anywhere. But then you can get back on the road and keep investigating and pursuing. But yeah, a lot of the time, most of the time with movies, I see the film and think “Oh boy.”

AVC: It’s surprising that so many roles would stick with you, given how busy you are, and given that you’ve said in the past, “What’s done is done, there’s no point thinking about it.”

JM: Yeah, I don’t. But if I hear a film clip, or I happen to see some image from a film—you know, you go to a film festival, and they show some clip of the movies you’ve been in, most of the time I sit there and go, “Oh God, I should have… should have… that was terrible.” But I think that’s a natural part of this work, because really, your work is never over. Of course I can leave it alone and walk off the set and never think about it again when it’s done. But your work is really ongoing all the time. I did an opera last year in Vienna, and then again this summer, and I’ll do it next summer. It’s different every night, because I’m still searching for exactly how I want to shape it on a given night.

AVC: When we last talked to you, it was just after you directed your first film, The Dancer Upstairs. You still direct plays regularly, but you haven’t directed a film since. Is that something you’re interested in doing again?

JM: Yeah, listen. I like to direct movies, but I don’t like to goof around for eight years talking about it. And it’s pretty irritating to get a movie on, and—you get all that irritation already as a producer. So to complicate it by having more irritation as a director, I don’t really need it. And because I direct a great deal still, but in the theater, I kind of get that anyway. Which is not at all to say I would never do it again, or it would never happen again. But I haven’t read any scripts at all where I’ve felt like, “You know what? It’s probably better if I just do this myself.” I could always think, “Well you know, I think so and so should do this.” And then as producer, sometimes I’m able to get that person to do it. We occasionally have a project where I wouldn’t mind saying, “I could be someone that could be considered,” but I would never go any further than that. I just haven’t found the thing that made me want to. And films take too long. There’s too much BS, too much nonsense. You know, if I want to do a play, I just call the theater, whether it’s here, or in Paris or Mexico or Spain or London or whatever, and say, “I want to do this, are you interested?” They’ll answer the next day. With a movie, it’s all, “Oh, I see this film as blah blah blah.” They don’t know what you’re talking about, they don’t care. I loved doing Dancer Upstairs, and I like the film, Dancer Upstairs, but it also is like a waste of seven years of my life.

AVC: You’ve got a couple of action movies coming up: Red is opening, and you were just shooting Transformers 3. You’ve always had a reputation as a very serious actor who puts a lot of work into his roles. How do you relate to action directors?

JM: Well, I haven’t done that many. In The Line Of Fire, which is a kind of action film.

AVC: Con Air.

JM: Con Air, which was a first-time director. I liked all of those. So let’s say if I’ve done four, I guess it is. There may be ones I forget.

AVC: Your scenes in Mutant Chronicles weren’t actiony, but you were working with an action director.

JM: Yeah. Yeah. It really depends. Some of them, I’ve had directors out of their depth. Especially… not only in the notion of dealing with human behavior and if it exists, but even out of their depths in the action takes. Then I’ve dealt with some, like Wolfgang Petersen, who are exquisitely prepared and know exactly what they want to do, etc. etc. But the experiences, I’ve always really liked. You know, I loved doing Con Air because with all the guys in the airplane, most of them weren’t actors, they’re like convicts and boxers and hockey enforcers and professional football players and stuff, and it was just like having a pack of animals in your yard. I thought they were hilarious, and I loved being around them. Quite often—a lot of the work I had done had been extensively with women. Most especially in the theater, but also quite often in the movies. That has its own delights, and maybe pitfalls too. But I never really did something like that with all these guys, many of whom should be in jail. And some of whom had been. And I loved it.

And on Transformers—you always hear these things about Michael Bay, that are obviously not very predisposed to make you want to work with him as an actor, but that’s why I always take that all with a grain of salt. You hear all kinds of stuff about people. When I got there, I found him open, and kind of like a little kid. And I think, the work he does, it’s all in his head. It’s all on him. And he’s not a… he watches the actors, he gives you a lot of freedom, he gives you a lot of suggestions. And I found nearly the opposite of what I’d been told I’d find. And yet others, who I wouldn’t name because I don’t like to say negative things about people, who you think would be super-open and artsy and blah blah blah, are kind of crypto-fascist, really, even if they have an artsy reputation. So you never know, you never know in this life until you go and you do it yourself.

Red, I had met Robert Schwentke years ago in L.A., at just a kind of meet-and-greet. Because he likes to read a lot, and we had a lot of things in common, I really liked Robert, but I had never worked with him. But I love working with him. I mean, I’m getting more than a little long in the tooth to run around with guns and stuff, but it’s fun with a great cast of super-pros, and people I personally like and enjoy. So what’s not to like about it?

AVC: How much is having fun on a movie important to you, as compared to doing a serious in-depth piece of acting that really challenges you?

JM: Well, I like to have fun at work. It’s okay if I don’t. I’ve had that a few times. But generally, I’m someone who has a lot of fun at work, because I like my job. I think it’s a fantastic job, at least that part of it is a fantastic job. And I like to have fun, and I personally feel that whether you’re talking about the cast or the crew or the director or any combination thereof, that when people feel involved and comfortable and they feel like their work is being supported, that’s the best environment to do good work. Other people love chaos and tension. I don’t like it. I mean, I obviously have worked in it. But I never liked that. I don’t think it’s a proper creative environment at all.

Aaron Sorkin is sorry for accurately portraying the women of The Social Network as mindless groupies by Sean O'Neal October 12, 2010

Among the few critiques of the otherwise vaunted The Social Network is that the film completely marginalizes the women of its story, presenting them solely as, to quote one Salon columnist, “gold-diggers, drunken floozies and that ‘bitch’ who got away.” Those accusations of misogyny have certainly not escaped the attention of writer Aaron Sorkin, who recently had even Stephen Colbert asking him why almost all the ladies in his movie were “high or drunk or blowing guys in the bathroom.” There, Sorkin answered that’s because they were “prizes, basically,” adding that it wasn’t an accurate characterization of the entire female population of Harvard, but rather particular to the females who are populating his story. Which, fair enough. When you’re presenting a revenge-of-the-nerd story about a guy driven by his desire to get even with his ex-girlfriend and score chicks, there’s bound to be some misogyny coloring your perspective.

But Sorkin didn’t stop there: He recently took umbrage with something written in the comments section of TV writer Ken Levine’s blog, and instead of just calling that person an idiot and adding a Simpsons quote like most commenters, he offered a very lengthy response that attempts to explain why his script treats women the way it does—namely that the creators of Facebook basically were misogynists and that the women they surrounded themselves with were sort of their willing sex objects, so he’s just reporting the facts like any good student of human nature. Says Sorkin (in part):

It’s not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about…Facebook was born during a night of incredibly [sic] misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who’d most recently broke his heart…and then at the entire female population of Harvard.

More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80’s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)…I didn’t invent the “F—k Truck”, it’s real—and the men (boys) at the final clubs think it’s what they deserve for being who they are…These women—whether it’s the girls who are happy to take their clothes off and dance for the boys or Eduardo’s psycho-girlfriend are real. I mean REALLY real…

So there you have it: the best argument yet for the benefits of an Ivy League education. Right dudes? High five.

October 13, 2010 : Savage Love by Dan Savage October 13, 2010

Illustrations by Misako Rocks!

I was listening to the radio yesterday morning, and I heard an interview with you about your It Gets Better campaign. I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bullying. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage, I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man who took his own life.

If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preference, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man, and I know for a fact that is true of many other people who disagree with your viewpoint.

To that end, to imply that I would somehow encourage my children to mock, hurt, or intimidate another person for any reason is completely unfounded and offensive. Being a follower of Christ is, above all things, a recognition that we are all imperfect, fallible, and in desperate need of a savior. We cannot believe that we are better or more worthy than other people.

Please consider your viewpoint, and please be more careful with your words in the future. L.R.

I’m sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.

No, wait. I’m not. Gay kids are dying. So let’s try to keep things in perspective: Fuck your feelings.

A question: Do you “support” atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All are legal, all go against Christian and/or traditional ideas about marriage, and yet there’s no “Christian” movement to deny marriage rights to atheists or people marrying outside their respective faiths or people divorcing and remarrying.

Why the hell not?

Sorry, L.R., but so long as you support the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, it’s clear that you do believe that some people—straight people—are “better or more worthy” than others.

And—sorry—but you are partly responsible for the bullying and physical violence being visited on vulnerable LGBT children. The kids of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or in your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. And while you can only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, your children have the option of attacking actual gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.

Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not “sinners.” Gay and lesbian children.

Try to keep up: The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from the lips of “faithful Christians,” and the lies about us that vomit out from the pulpits of churches that “faithful Christians” drag their kids to on Sundays, give your children license to verbally abuse, humiliate, and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your children—having listened to Mom and Dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry—feel justified in physically abusing the LGBT children they encounter in their schools. You don’t have to explicitly “encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate” queer kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It’s here, it’s clear, and we’re seeing the fruits of it: dead children.

Oh, and those same dehumanizing bigotries that fill your straight children with hate? They fill your gay children with suicidal despair. And you have the nerve to ask me to be more careful with my words?

Did that hurt to hear? Good. But it couldn’t have hurt nearly as much as what was said and done to Asher Brown and Justin Aaberg and Billy Lucas and Cody Barker and Seth Walsh—day-in, day-out for years—at schools filled with bigoted little monsters created not in the image of a loving God, but in the image of the hateful and false “followers of Christ” they call Mom and Dad.

I am engaged to a man whose sexual orientation is somewhat confusing to me.

A few months ago, I discovered transgender porn on his computer. When I asked him about it, he said he just watches all kinds of porn “just to watch it.” That sounded like total bullshit to me—and it was proved to be total bullshit when I discovered that he watches ONLY this type of porn. I also recently discovered a letter he had composed a few years back to another man asking him to “hook up,” stating that my fiancé had had a one-night stand with another guy and really wanted to do it again. The letter also states that my fiancé had a girlfriend, and since “discretion is very important” to him, he could only hook up when she was out of town.

I can deal with somebody being bisexual. I have bisexual fantasies myself. However, I can’t deal with someone lying to himself and to me, and being unfaithful. Sadly, I can’t really make this guy confess to me that he is bi. When I tried, he simply told me, “You are so blind.” What does that mean?

I really don’t want to dump the guy. I love him. My question is, I guess, what the fuck do I do? I feel like crazy bitch supreme trying to get this out of him, but it’s impossible not to think about. Bitchy Girlfriend

There’s nothing to be confused about: Your fiancé is very clearly bisexual. Gay men just aren’t into chicks-with-dicks porn; that’s a genre that appeals exclusively to straight/straightish/bi male viewers.

So why can he be open about his cocksuckery with a complete stranger—that dude he sent the letter that you “discovered”—but not with you?

It’s a tired cliché, I realize, and I shy away from it for that reason, but in this case the shoe fits: Your fiancé has a bad case of the internalized homophobias. He finds it easier to be open with someone he doesn’t care about and is unlikely to see ever again precisely because he doesn’t care about that person and isn’t going to see him again. If you or the other people in his life he’s close to knew, he fears you would see him as damaged or inferior because that’s how he sees himself.

So, yep, a bad case of the internalized homophobias. He’s not entirely responsible for contracting this malady—our homophobic culture is the disease vector here—but, as an adult, he is responsible for working through it, for overcoming it, for being truthful with himself and the people he claims to love.

If he can’t be honest with you—the snoop he claims to love—about his sexual orientation, and if being cheated on is deal breaker for you (and he will cheat on you), don’t marry him.

I’m a loud fucker, just like the partner of the woman who wrote in recently. With my consent, my partner uses a pillow to dampen my screams, so I don’t have to worry I’ll piss off the neighbors. Lesbians Do Scream

It’s all fun and games—loud fun, ear-splitting games—until someone accidentally asphyxiates a screamer. But thanks for sharing, LDS.

Red

B-

by Tasha Robinson October 14, 2010 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B- av club rating B- reader rating based on 12 ratings Director: Robert Schwentke Cast: Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Karl Urban Rated: PG-13 Running time: 111 minutes

There’s a touch of smirking apathy to everything Bruce Willis does these days, an attitude that reads as “I’ve already won the Hollywood game, but I guess I can keep playing for everyone else’s sake.” It can be a winningly intimate feeling that we’re all just hanging out with the actor himself, like old buddies. It can also be tremendously frustrating: In Red, he barely bothers to change his facial expression or vocal inflection, whether his character is talking about his tender crush on his pension caseworker, Mary-Louise Parker, or killing a room full of cannon-fodder assassins. Why bother to hire a star who doesn’t show up?

Adapting a Warren Ellis-penned comic series, director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, The Time-Traveler’s Wife) brings the same sort of casualness to Red. When a heavily armed kill team attempts to take out laid-back retired CIA black-ops specialist Willis, he kidnaps the terrified Parker to keep her from becoming a target, and seeks out the elderly associates of his spy-adventures heyday, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Brian Cox as a former Russian adversary. While they attempt to puzzle out the conspiracy that led to the kill order, current CIA agent Karl Urban, doing his best ice-faced Terminator impression, tries to track Willis down and finish the job. Many shootouts result, but between action setpieces, the characters engage in the languid, pause-filled conversations of retirees with no commitments or deadlines in sight. This gives the film’s first half-hour a charming, ambling feel, but becomes increasingly awkward as Red continually veers between high energy and low. There’s a restrained cool in pretending that these characters are so capable that they never feel pressure or break a sweat, but if they aren’t challenged, what’s the point?

Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it’s trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material, which has Mirren in a sleek ball gown, capably letting rip with a 50-caliber machine gun, and Malkovich toting around a giant, squeaky stuffed pig. Red is often enjoyable when it’s just observing its cast going through the action-movie motions, but Schwentke never decides whether he’s making this movie for relaxed seniors or hyper, misanthropic, amoral teens.

Carlos

A-

by Scott Tobias October 14, 2010 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

A- av club rating A reader rating based on 3 ratings Director: Olivier Assayas Cast: Édgar Ramírez, Alexander Sheer, Nora von Waldstatten (In multiple languages w/subtitles) Rated: Not Rated Running time: 319 minutes

(Note: The following review is of the full, five-and-a-half hour cut of Carlos, which will be broadcast on Sundance Channel and exhibited in a multi-part “roadshow” edition in theaters. A shorter, 165-minute theatrical cut will be released concurrently and on IFC’s On Demand service.)

If there’s a common thread to many Olivier Assayas films, beyond their general excellence, it’s their forward-thinking cosmopolitanism, born of an interest in how different cultures coalesce and clash in a world of increasingly porous borders. Whether following a Hong Kong actress baffled by the French film industry (Irma Vep) or staging an international corporate thriller with vipers at every port (Demonlover), Assayas is like a man without a country—or at least a director whose interests are far from parochial. For that reason, there’s no more ideal filmmaker to bring the story of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. “Carlos,” a.k.a. “The Jackal”), a Venezuelan terrorist/mercenary whose violence in the 1970s and ’80s on behalf of the Palestinian cause (among other pursuits) made him a global outlaw. Produced for French television, though dazzlingly cinematic, Assayas’ three-part epic Carlos follows Sánchez for about 30 years as he travels the globe, a nomadic revolutionary who’s unmoored from any one person or place—and eventually, from his principles.

Opening in 1973, Carlos begins with the 23-year-old Sánchez eagerly aligning himself with the international revolutionary cause in general and the Popular Front For The Liberation Of Palestine (PFLP) in particular. He enters into a complex relationship with militant leader Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), who appreciates his protégé’s courage and ruthlessness, but grows wary of Sánchez’s narcissism and refusal to follow orders. Nevertheless, he spearheads a number of deadly missions in London, and offers support to brazen terror attacks like the Japanese Red Army’s raid of a French embassy in The Hague and a failed attempt to blow up an El Al airliner with rocket launchers. Vainly fashioning himself as a revolutionary icon in the Ché Guevara mold, Sánchez grabs worldwide headlines for his exploits, but the extra attention feeds his indulgences for women and drink, and calls his true motives in question.

Played with appropriate magnetism by Édgar Ramírez, Sanchez is smart, brave, charismatic, persuasive, seductive, vain, sexist, hypocritical, mercenary, and monstrous, at times galvanizing in his mission to dismantle capitalist and Zionist power and at other times a pathetic, corrupt, recklessly violent thug who’s all too willing to sell out. All of those qualities come together for the film’s bravura hour-long centerpiece, a December 1975 raid of an OPEC conference in Vienna that represents a dramatic tipping point for Sánchez and the trajectory of the movie itself. In a style reminiscent of David Fincher’s Zodiac, Assayas follows the chronology in a straight line, with names, dates, and places meticulously documented. The last third of Sánchez’s life doesn’t quite cooperate; as he drifts into sloth and irrelevance, the movie drifts along with him. But Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.

Nathan Fillion launches Twitter campaign to star in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune by Sean O'Neal October 14, 2010

Even before David O. Russell announced that he one day hoped to walk out on a big-screen adaptation of popular video game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, fans were already noting the protagonist’s resemblance to actor Nathan Fillion, unflappably cool star of Firefly and that new show that is not Firefly. As it turns out, Fillion also sees something of himself in Drake: He’s launched a Twitter campaign to land the lead role in the film, hoping to play the wisecracking, eternally smirking genocidal gunman who slaughters thousands of people then steals their stuff and calls it “treasure hunting.”

As Collider points out, one of the biggest hindrances here may be Fillion’s age. The actor is nearing 40, which is embarrassingly decrepit by Hollywood standards when it comes to launching action franchises. Then again, Harrison Ford was 39 when he first played Indiana Jones, so casting Fillion could be yet another homage to its most obvious inspiration. Another potential stumbling block could be Fillion’s work schedule, which is already monopolized by the many weeks out of the year he spends shooting that show which is not Firefly. However, Fillion is undeterred, asking all “Browncoats” and “Castillions” to “rise up” and do their part to make it happen, which mostly amounts to tweeting this hashtag. Hey, the Twitter campaign to rescue those Chilean miners worked, right?

AVQ&A First impressions of foreign countries National Lampoon's European Vacation National Lampoon's European Vacation by The A.V. Club Staff October 15, 2010 Article Tools

Email Print Share More AVQ&A Other non-2010 pop culture we discovered in 2010 The best non-2010 music we discovered in 2010 Best fictional parties Bands that have to be seen live Our holiday wishlists

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com.

As a non-American who loves American culture, I have always wondered about how American pop culture presents foreign countries to Americans. What are some of your early memories of seeing foreign countries depicted in America pop culture? Did these depictions make you want to travel or stay home? —Cobus

Tasha Robinson For whatever reason, virtually all my early examples of other countries in the media were also about the past rather than the present; I read a lot of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, both of which are almost guaranteed to make very young readers simultaneously fascinated with Britain (so many dialects, so much history in the land and the buildings), and convinced that even today, it’s an old, crazy place with a long history of apathy and cruelty, particularly toward the poor and disenfranchised. (As opposed to America, where we treat our paupers with dignity and honor, of course.) Between those authors and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden and the Narnia books and Edith Nesbit and The Hundred And One Dalmatians and I don’t know what all else, I’m not sure I realized there was a contemporary, modern UK until I saw Trainspotting. (Now there’s a movie guaranteed to not encourage tourism.) Apart from being stuck in the past, I’m not sure I ever got a romanticized (or exaggeratedly evil) notion of a foreign country in childhood. Oh wait, except for that old Wendy’s ad (“Is next: dayware. Very nice!”) which depicted the USSR as a lightless, choiceless, grim place full of fat ladies in potato-sack dresses and grim party apparatchiks who pretended to like whatever they were told to like. It was fairly funny to recently watch the movie Mao’s Last Dancer and find out that kids in Mao-era schools were taught the same thing about America: that the sun only shines here an hour a day or so because capitalism is such a terrible way to run a country that we all live in grey twilight misery all the time.

Leonard Pierce Like Tasha, most of the cultural signals I picked up about England were from reading English literature from the 19th century—Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, the Lake Poets, as well as Dickens and Kipling—so I was convinced that English history had more or less stopped around the end of World War II. Later in life, when I was old enough to know better, I had become so immersed in the low-life highbrow literature of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and George Bernard Shaw that I imagined the whole of Ireland consisted of endless green hills broken up by the occasional pub, where educated drunks yelled at each other late into the night. I was mildly surprised to learn that they have cell phones and computers and stuff. Slightly more forgivable, I think, just because all I knew about the country came from weird comic books, noise rock, cult films, and American television, was my belief that Japanese culture is completely fucking insane.

Scott Gordon It’s easy to get into the habit of seeing other countries only in terms of their eccentric qualities, and that seems especially true of Australia. The folks down under are so busy documenting adorable marsupials, getting eaten by sharks and stung to death by other sea-born freaks of nature, writing copy for Outback Steakhouse menus, and keeping Paul Hogan in check that they’d hardly have time for building a normal civilization, right? I recently read Bill Bryson’s travel book In A Sunburned Country, and it nearly cured me of my conception of Australia as a wild cauldron of exotic deaths and puzzling idioms. Sure, Bryson spends a lot of time discussing the continent’s abundance of insanely venomous critters, and refers to its vast interior landscape as “murderous” at least a dozen times, but he also reveals an admirable, welcoming society that the rest of the world largely tends to ignore. Apart from that whole matter of the Aborigines (but who are Americans to criticize?) and Australia’s history as a dumping ground for criminals, Bryson generally implies that the country has a lot to offer the rest of the civilized world. In fact, he concludes that its merits are also the reasons people forget about it: “It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t.” What an enticing contrast: a society that’s congenial and as fully formed as any in the Western world, but also seems permanently remote.

Kyle Ryan As a kid, I probably watched National Lampoon’s European Vacation a hundred times, and really, what better way to learn about Europe? Via the Griswolds, I learned that the British are unfailingly polite, the French are condescending assholes, the Germans can turn on you in a second, and the Italians are scheming conmen who will kidnap your wife. Well, all of that can happen if you’re the perpetually blundering Chevy Chase, whose gaffes and general cultural stupidity create all of their problems. The film certainly hit on some time-honored stereotypes, but the Griswolds were really the butt of the jokes. That said, when I found out I’d be hitting all of those countries (and others) on tour in 2001, my fantasy wasn’t all that different from Rusty’s:

Marah Eakin Presumably driven by abysmal elementary-school curricula and the Zoobooks phenomenon, I had a tendency growing up to see the world as more of a series of sets featuring cool animals than as actual environments featuring actual people. Much like Epcot center, countries were stereotypes—Italy had pizza, accents, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In Mexico, everyone wore sombreros and played maracas. Chinese people wore those conical rice-patty hats, and the men had long, skinny braids down their backs. I still believe most people know far more about giraffes and hippos than they do about actual people from Africa. As an adult, I’m absolutely ashamed all these horrible oversights, and in turn I’ve tried to do good deal of reading and traveling to rectify most of those problems, avoiding tourist traps along the route at whatever cost, of course.

Genevieve Koski I know I’ve brought it up in this column before, but as anyone who’s spent a fair amount of time with me can tell you, I will take any opportunity to talk about The Chipmunk Adventure. The 1987 animated feature film was my absolute favorite movie as a kid, and still gives me plenty of nostalgic glee as an adult. (If nothing else, the beautiful animation—courtesy of a bunch of poached Disney artists—holds up great.) It was also my introduction to the world outside of Canton, Michigan, taking 5-year-old me on an Epcot-like journey through several foreign countries with its musical race-around-the-world plot. I learned that all Mexicans wear sombreros and are constantly having fiestas; Egypt is ruled by bratty pre-teen princes who have many brides and use giant snakes to guard their treasures; Antarctica is filled with adorable, jewelry-wearing penguins; and the jungles of South America are home to silly-headdress-wearing natives who make human (er, chipmunk) sacrifices, but also love to rock out to “Wooly Bully.” It also taught me that the Parthenon is the rockingest place in Greece, if not the world, and that couscous is delicious. Obviously, adult me can see the embarrassing clichés and stereotypes at play here, but I don’t think any of that affected how I view these places. (Though I do enjoy couscous.) Rather, I think The Chipmunk Adventure taught me that there are so many colorful, diverse cultures out there waiting to be seen and experienced, provided you have a healthy sense of adventure and a thematically appropriate song to sing while you’re getting out of a jam.

Lindsey Thomas My older brother and I used to watch a short-lived PBS show called Powerhouse about kids at a community center who tackle such after-school-special problems as body-image issues, anti-Semitism, and, if memory serves, racehorse sabotage. The plot was occasionally interrupted by animated or live-action shorts that promoted self-esteem, physical fitness, etc. While I only remember bits and pieces of the show, one cartoon, featuring an American diver competing in the Olympics, stands out. The athlete’s execution is perfect, and the judges reciprocate with high marks across the board—until the camera pans to the Russian judge: “0.5.” This was the mid-’80s, but as a small child, I knew nothing of foreign relations or the Cold War. I did, however, come to think that Russians were snooty and hard to impress.

Vadim Rizov I didn’t have a TV until I was 10, so this one’s tough. I remember seeing The Third Man when I was 13 or thereabouts and thinking Vienna (and Austria) in general looked pretty dingy and beaten-down, but surely things had to have improved since. The more movies I see from there, though, the less I’m sure; Michael Haneke doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in forward motion. A lot of my early impressions of foreign places were generally derived from older movies I was allowed to watch rather than potentially racy new ones, so I always felt behind, like I might as well be watching fictional countries. I mean, I was allowed to watch a healthy number of Jackie Chan movies, but I’m not sure what, if anything, I might’ve learned about Hong Kong from Twin Dragons.

Keith Phipps Can I just say that my conception of Hong Kong (and Australian boarding schools) was shaped by the 1979 movie Felicity, and leave it at that?

Jackass 3-D

B

by Nathan Rabin October 15, 2010 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B av club rating B- reader rating based on 17 ratings Director: Jeff Tremaine Cast: Documentary Rated: R Running time: 94 minutes

3-D probably wasn’t created specifically so that one day, emotionally stunted eternal adolescents could send dildos, vomit, and feces flying at audiences in all three dimensions. And yet there’s a method to the madness of using advanced technology to enhance the experience of, say, a dude getting hit in the nuts with a tee-ball. Much of Jackass’ appeal lies in the literally bruising physicality of its stunts. The franchise aims for empathetic cries of “ouch” as much as laughs, so male viewers would reflexively guard their crotches even if Jackasses were getting hit in the nuts in mere 2-D. In Jackass 3-D, the trendy technology adds a whole new level of impact to the shenanigans, though it’s only a factor in a handful of setpieces.

Johnny Knoxville returns with his merry band of pranksters for a third exuberantly juvenile collection of wacky pranks, blackout gags, gross-out stunts, and people cackling maniacally while their friends endure horrible pain. Jackass 3-D proves every bit as ragingly homoerotic as its predecessors: To the cast and crew, the ways anuses can be used, and more importantly, abused proves a source of endless fascination, as does watching morbidly obese men clad only in jock straps.

Jackass 3-D is powered by a shamelessly regressive but infectious adolescent prankishness. Knoxville holds the whole scatological mess together with his irascible charm and leading-man charisma, though Jackass 3-D is an ensemble film in the truest sense, in that nearly everyone in the sprawling, endlessly game cast endures some manner of damage to their genitals and lives to laugh about it. A few of the bits smartly riff on pop culture; in a particularly inspired stunt, Knoxville sets out to personally disprove Roger Miller’s contention that you can’t roller-skate in a buffalo herd, and pays dearly for his hubris. By this point, the Jackass franchise is nearly as old as its target audience of misbehaving pre-adolescents, and while it isn’t as fresh or novel as it once was, Jackass 3-D retains a winningly anarchic spirit. It’s easily the most painful comedy of the year; in the sadomasochistic world of Knoxville and friends, that isn’t criticism so much as high praise.

Super Scribblenauts

B-

by David Wolinsky October 18, 2010 Platforms: Nintendo DS Price: $29.99 Developer: 5TH Cell Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Rating: E10+ Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B- av club rating Purchase Super Scribblenauts from Amazon

The “super” in Super Scribblenauts serves two purposes: It subliminally reminds players of the Super Nintendo era’s higher bar for sequels to previously established series (hey, it worked for Super Solitaire) and it hammers home the game’s for-real biggest addition: adjectives. Other welcome refinements have been made to this puzzler mashed up with Mad Libs, like correcting the aggravating physics and enabling movement with the D-pad, but the routine is still there, as you hope your vocabulary and the game’s dictionary play nice with the 120-some brainteasers.

Thing is, Super Scribblenauts’ attempt to become more sophisticated than Scribblenauts has dumbed it down, which is good and bad. The original often frustrated because your creativity went unacknowledged, with your creations ignoring each another: Roosters would stare blankly at the sun instead of crowing at it. Throw adjectives into the mix, and you can mandate behavior. You want a murderous bowl of chili to go on a killing spree? Not a problem. Alas, you’re seldom called upon to come up with such childish concoctions. When asked to populate a city with buildings, it doesn’t make a difference whether you dream up a “wet orange post office” when a boring normal one will do just fine.

Perhaps conceding to Scribblenauts’ needlessly segregated level arrangements between “action” and “puzzle,” almost all of Super Scribblenauts is divided between “puzzle” and “adjective.” (Mercifully, a couple of “action” levels are thrown in as bonuses.) The adjective levels are easily Super Scribblenauts’ weakest aspect; they ask you to fill in loose addition and subtraction equations to explain, say, what makes a clown (a funny man and a rainbow wig). They’re fine distractions, but they suffer from the same fuzzy logic that bogged down the original. One such level requires creating something with properties similar to a dwelling and a hairy creature: “furry cave” isn’t acceptable, but “furry house” is.

So once again, players will spend a lot of their time playing wordsmith Whack-A-Mole, praying the game’s sizeable dictionary will cooperate. Its spottiness unintentionally encourages players to play it safe, relying on standbys instead of experimenting. Fortunately, Super Scribblenauts truly excels in more ambitious levels that push you to think of synonyms or loads of items that fall into the same category, like decorating a house, or going through boot camp with the proper gear. This doesn’t feel like a proper sequel, nor is it all that “super,” but Super Scribblenauts is at least a solid step in the right direction.

Equilibrium (2002)

by Tasha Robinson October 18, 2010 Article Tools

Email Print Share More Commentary Tracks Of The Damned Righteous Kill (2008) I'm Still Here (2010) Incubus Big Money Rustlas

Crimes: Stealing its content so extensively from Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, and Logan’s Run, and its look so thoroughly from Blade Runner, The Matrix, and German Expressionist films, that it feels more like a Best Of Dystopian Futures anthology than an original movie Valuing flash over substance, and glossing over it all with a pompous humorlessness that makes the story risible Laying all the groundwork for the writer-director’s subsequent, even more style-obsessed, far more vapid Ultraviolet (also a CTOTD subject)

Defender: Writer-director Kurt Wimmer

Tone of commentary: Calmly but obsessively, endlessly regretful. Wimmer explains that his $20 million flop about how rogue enforcer Christian Bale wakes up and fights his drugged, emotionless society is meant as a fable, not a literal story. (The film brought in $1.2 million in domestic theater release, though it found a cult following on DVD.) He identifies his many German locations, talks about shot choice and lighting and editing, points out costuming and composition details, and discusses how his personal philosophy affected the story. He offers his thoughts on “whipping ass,” and how boring it is when hero/villain fights are protracted or the hero gets hurt, since everyone knows who will win, so the hero should just get it over with quickly and cleanly.

He also tells a cute story about inventing the film’s groundbreaking “gun kata” martial arts in his backyard, after checking to make sure his family wasn’t at home, and the neighbors weren’t looking over the fence: “I remember thinking ‘Am I crazy? Do I actually have the balls to hang a movie on this concept, which may not work at all?” He says the idea for the gun kata came out of his regret that cinematic gunfights stopped evolving after American movies stole Hong Kong action movies’ idea of giving combatants two guns, and Hong Kong movies stole American movies’ idea of having combatants hold those two guns sideways while shooting.

At another point, he explains that studio testing found that women liked Equilibrium “fractionally better” than men, which he considers unheard-of for a science-fiction action-adventure:

“I’ve often wondered why. Sometimes I think it’s because first of all, there are many women out there who would like their boyfriends to look like [protagonist] Christian Bale. But more importantly, I think there are many women out there who would like their boyfriends—who should look like Christian Bale—to go through this journey, what’s essentially an emotional journey of getting in touch with his feelings. And when he starts kicking ass at the end of the movie, he’s doing it in the name of emotion, which is something women can get behind, as opposed to the reasons men usually kick ass in movies.”

But mostly, he points to shot after shot after shot and discusses what he did wrong. He praises the overall look of the film, and he watched his first dailies with tears in his eyes, thinking, “I am making a real movie at last” (after more than a decade as a screenwriter), but he can’t let go of all the things that could have been better.

What went wrong: Hoo boy. Just a sampler:

• “Originally, this scene was supposed to take place on his roof. He was supposed to wake up and be so overcome with emotion that he runs upstairs, bursts out onto his roof, and sees the sun rise. But as usual—and I’ll be flogging this all throughout this commentary, budget-budget-budget—as usual, we didn’t have the time or the money for a separate location or a move.”

• “When I watch these fight scenes, I kind of cringe a bit, because I know we could have done them so much better, but we had so little time to shoot this, and oftentimes we only had one take.” The crowd scenes also make him cringe, because he feels he executed them entirely wrong.

• The camera battery failed twice during a shooting of the burning of the Mona Lisa. Wimmer could only afford two copies of it, “so I didn’t really get any footage of it burning, which was disastrous. The battery failing twice in this circumstance is really the cinematic equivalent of the hangman’s rope breaking twice in a row.”

• He never meant for the Tetragrammaton, the symbol of his Nazi Germany-like totalitarian society, to look like Nazi Germany’s symbol. It looked fine on small props, but when he saw it on a flag toward the end of the film, “I said ‘Oh Christ, it looks like a swastika,’ but I was stuck with it, and I had to go with it.”

• He agonizes for several minutes over how there are too many steps in a character’s office, in an effort to keep the windows out of the background, so he wouldn’t have to pay to design views out of those windows. His set designer argued at length about the proper number of steps, but Wimmer regrettably had to overrule him.

• Lighting entire combat scenes with gunfire was an idea that came from necessity, not style: “We certainly didn’t have the time or the money to film anything that was choreographed.”

• He chose Berettas as the gun of choice for his soldiers entirely because Berettas can be modified for top ejection of spent shells instead of side ejection. He wanted an overhead shot where protagonist Christian Bale shoots someone, and the spent shell pops up and hits the camera lens. But he didn’t have enough time or money to get that shot, and “ultimately, it was a fair amount of work and expense that didn’t pay off in any sense.”

• Two different people play Bale’s wife because the model they hired to play her for one scene “was nowhere to be found” for later shoots, and they couldn’t afford to reshoot the earlier scene.

• Special-effects supervisor Uli Nefzer was told to build a false wall for agents of oppression to take down during one scene. “Being instructed to build a wall, like any good German, he set off to build a wall. And the idea was that these two guys were supposed to be able to go through this wall in about 3.8 seconds. Well, we get there, and they put their crowbars into this wall, and it turned out, 10 minutes later and two bags of film, they were still going at it… We had one of the rare moments of levity, laughing at that on set.”

• A key scene where Bale hears Beethoven for the first time sends Wimmer on five minutes of breast-beating: “I always thought, and I still do, I feel that I failed to a large degree in this scene, that it doesn’t have the power or resonance that it could have, or it should have. I’ve obviously looked at this scene a lot. And there are other scenes in the film that I feel like could have been done better, but all of those scenes, I know how I would have shot them differently, if I could go back. But this is the one scene where I have no idea how I could have made it better. I just know that it could have been better. I just think I just sort of reached the limits of my filmmaking ability in this particular scene.”

• Also in regards to that sequence, he wanted to use Herbert Von Karajan’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic; he used that recording for planning and shooting. In post-production, a producer told him “You have selected the most expensive arrangement of this music in the world—it’ll cost us $75,000 to use the 90 seconds you want.” They had $1,500 for the rights, and Wimmer was “forced to scratch around in the bargain bins” for a cheap version of the Ninth, then re-cut the scene around it. Wimmer apologizes for the inferior version.

• For a combat scene shot in a Berlin municipal building, the setting was perfect, but the floor had to be covered, and the floor coverings had to be mopped between every shot “because they picked up footprints like you wouldn’t believe… it was an incredible time-eater. So keep that in mind, first-time directors: reflective black floors. They look great, but man, they can kill you.”

• One prop photo involved an actor in casual clothes instead of an enforcer uniform, and Wimmer could not decide what to have him wear. He put the decision off until the day the prop had to be produced, and still regrets the choice to dress the actor in flannel: “That picture is an example of the creative bankruptcy at its best.”

• “This was the best we could do, by the way, in terms of our resources, in terms of creating a sumptuous and hypocritical office.”

• “I always wish we would have opened the doors a little longer, and we would have held on that shot, with all those dead guys out there.”

• “I always regret not using a more strident sound cue to introduce Taye [Diggs] there. These are the things you tend to obsess about after the fact, the little things that drive you nuts.”

• “This is one of the few shots that I went back to get again. I generally didn’t have time, even if I wanted to, or there would have been plenty more, I promise you that.”

Comments on the cast: As a perfectionist and a visual stylist, Wimmer has far more to say about his technical crew—many of whom he name-checks in stories—than about his actors. He does say that he was concerned Christian Bale didn’t understand his own character, after Bale suggested a possible interpretation for a scene that went against Wimmer’s intent. To this day, he says he’s unsure whether Bale, in that conversation and others, “was simply testing me, or just fucking with me. We’ll never know. He has a very dark sense of humor, and at this point, in retrospect, I’d say 50-50.” He does, however, praise Bale as “a dead-on athlete” whose skill made it possible to get through one fight scene five times in 30 minutes after Wimmer “ran out of time, as usual.”

He also says that antagonist Taye Diggs was the first person he cast. Since people in Wimmer’s totalitarian society are supposed to be artificially emotionless, some viewers objected to Diggs’ near-perpetual smile, but Wimmer says he cast Diggs specifically for that smile. “I thought that anybody who had a smile that perfect had to be lying about something. I found his smile, as dynamite as it is, to be insincere, and to me, a smile that is passionless, that has nothing behind it, is even more empty than nothing.”

Inevitable dash of pretension: Wimmer keeps referring to himself as “the director.” Because of the budget limitations, he provided character voices himself, used his own hands for close-up shots, and did his own opening narration, but in each case, he says “that’s the director’s voice,” or something similar. In one scene where he appears as an extra, he says, “The unfortunate about to get shot over there is the director. I don’t know why it is, but directors always want to get shot in movies. We really enjoy it.”

He also explains an early shot of Bale basically staring into the camera: “It never ceases to amaze me how a lot of directors just throw away the introduction of the lead character. I really feel that the audience needs a naked moment, unobserved, to look in the character’s eyes to decide who that person is, and what they think about them, and to decide whether they really like them or not.”

But most of the pretension comes up when Wimmer wanders off into the movie’s philosophy. He acknowledges the debt to the films listed above, plus Alphaville, The Handmaid’s Tale, A Clockwork Orange, Gattica, THX 1138, Judge Dredd, and more, but says none of those films are about socially inflicted numbness the way his film is, or about the “dangerous idea that I see growing daily around me, that some people’s feelings are dangerous and need to be censored.” This leads into a strange lecture about how he’s uncomfortable with hate-crime laws. He worries that “when a government body starts telling people who they can hate, it is… the beginning of telling them who they can love.”

Finally, after 100 minutes of ruthless self-criticism, he ends the commentary with a brief, brittle word for his detractors: “You know, in the final analysis, this film was eviscerated by the critics. It was really vilified in a measure that I’ve usually only seen reserved for established directors who have made a $100 million flop. And I don’t fully understand it. But you know, I believe in chivalry still, and good, bad, and black and white. And I don’t think it’s a movie for cynics. But I’m not a cynic, and so that’s why I’ll hopefully be making movies forever. I’m out.”

Commentary in a nutshell: “For the life of me, I don’t know why I didn’t have Christian run with greater urgency here. It bugs me every time I see it.”

Obama to Appear on Mythbusters, Bolster America's Giant-Mirror Capability Posted by James Poniewozik Monday, October 18, 2010 at 3:47 pm 4 Comments • Related Topics: corporate press release theater , barack obama, discovery channel, mythbusters

President Obama and Discovery Channel announced today that the chief executive will appear on the Dec. 8 episode of Mythbusters. And surprisingly, the myth being busted has nothing to do with either Islam or Kenyan birth certificates.

On the episode, Obama will ask Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to test whether it was possible for the Greek scientist Archimedes, as told in story, to have set fire to an invading fleet using a giant mirror and the reflected rays of the sun. Which forces me to ask: What the hell is the government secretly planning to do with a giant mirror weapon? And does this mean there are no hard feelings between the White House and Discovery Communications for giving Sarah Palin a show?

Tom Bosley, 1927-2010: American Dad Posted by James Poniewozik Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 2:11 pm 1 Comment • Related Topics: obituary , tom bosley

Tom Bosley, a TV fixture as the Cunningham paterfamilias on Happy Days, died today at age 83.

There are two types of TV dads: those who play somebody's dad, and those who make you feel as if they could be—almost, in some way, as if they are—your dad. Bosley was the latter. His Howard Cunningham, hardware-store owner and '50s dad, could be gruff and cranky—especially with his boarder Arthur Fonzarelli—but there was also something inherently fatherly and comforting about his rich voice and rumpled dignity. (Look at how he carries himself, even in a ridiculous hat, in the clip above.) A stage and screen veteran (who won a Tony starring in Fiorello!), he was something of a father to the cast as well, as former costars including Henry Winkler remembered him.

Bosley applied his charm, paternal and otherwise, to other TV roles as well. He played the cleric-sleuth lede in The Father Dowling Mysteries, and the first role I ever saw—or heard—him in was one I didn't know he played until well after the fact: the father in the underappreciated animated sitcom Wait 'Till Your Father Gets Home. Airing in the early '70s—it, like Happy Days, launched from Love, American Style—it was a sort of combination of a cartoon All in the Family and a proto-Family Guy. (And I have no idea why my parents let me watch it when I was four years old.) You can hear that familiar paternal growl in the clip below:

'Chuck,' 'Chase' Get Full Seasons from NBC by Maureen Ryan, posted Oct 19th 2010 2:45PM Filed under: Reality-Free, TV News, Stay Tuned

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'Chuck' fans, breathe easy: The show got a full-season order from NBC today.

It's nice of NBC to realize that 'Chuck' fans get nervous and would no doubt fret about the show until that full-season order came through.

The cherry on top of the 'Chuck' sundae? NBC supersized its order.

There will be a total of 24 'Chuck' episodes in season 4, instead of the usual 22.

'Chuck' hasn't been setting the world on fire with its ratings this year, but NBC recognized, as entertainment president Angela Bromstad noted in a statement, that the show has a "loyal, passionate audience."

No doubt that audience will be very glad to see the very 'Chuck'-esque trio of Morgan Fairchild, Linda Hamilton and Robert Englund in the show's Oct. 25 episode. Hamilton, Ana Gasteyer and Timothy Dalton guest star Nov. 1.

The action drama 'Chase,' which stars Kelli Giddish, also got a full-season order. 'Undercovers,' a much-hyped J.J. Abrams spy drama that has struggled in the ratings, didn't get a pickup but NBC ordered for more scripts for that show.

Yesterday, NBC gave full-season orders to 'The Event,' 'Law & Order: Los Angeles' and, inexplicably, 'Outsourced.' Do not ask me to explain that last one. I cannot.

Of the rest of NBC's freshman class, only 'Outlaw' has been canceled. It joins 'My Generation' and 'Lone Star' on the fall scrap heap.

Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? Part 2: 1991: “What’s so civil about war anyway?”

by Steven Hyden October 19, 2010 Article Tools

Email Print Share More Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? Part 6: 1995: Live, Bush, and Alanis Morissette take the pop path Part 5: 1994: Kurt Cobain is dead! Long live Soundgarden! Part 4: 1993: Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill forsake the underground Part 3: 1992: Pearl Jam, the perils of fame, and the trouble with avoiding it

“The Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like.”—A headline about Nirvana from British music weekly New Musical Express

“His role has been played for years. Ever since the beginning of rock and roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. And it’s just boring. It’s totally boring to me. Why it’s such a fresh and new thing in his eyes is obviously because it’s happening to him personally and he’s such an egotistical person that he thinks that the whole world owes him something.”—Kurt Cobain on Axl Rose, as quoted by Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana

“You’re everything I could’ve been.”—Axl Rose to Kurt Cobain after a Nirvana show in October 1991, as related by Courtney Love in Mick Wall’s W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography Of William Axl Rose

The trickiest part of writing history is putting styles, trends, and social movements in proper perspective. Not everybody spent the ’60s making babies in the mud at Woodstock, or the ’70s doing blow with Bianca Jagger at Studio 54. We dwell on these things because they’re easily recognizable signifiers of their respective eras, but a lot gets overlooked when you use the easy shorthand of Nehru jackets and Bee Gees songs. The spectrum of experiences in any era is simply too wide; it makes me wonder whether the so-called “monoculture” ever really existed, where “everybody agreed on” what was good on the radio and the three TV networks. Maybe we’ve just gotten better about recognizing that even really popular things are irrelevant to significant portions of the population. A band as seemingly all-encompassing as The Beatles were in the ’60s probably didn’t mean much to a black teenager living in inner-city Detroit, a truck driver from rural Texas, or the millions of decent, hard-working, square-as-hell middle Americans who impatiently waited for those tuneless long-hairs to finish their songs on Ed Sullivan so the jugglers and impressionists could come on.

There’s an oft-repeated anecdote about how Nevermind stormed to the top of the Billboard charts in the closing days of 1991 because kids returned their unwanted copies of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous for the Nirvana album they really wanted for Christmas. It’s a story rich with metaphorical significance, pitting the upstart punk-rock band against the gargantuan ’80s pop superstar, and ending with the new guys wresting away the cultural torch by bloody force. In the movie version, you’d see teenagers everywhere suddenly ditch their Day-Glo OP shirts and stone-washed jeans for flannel and Doc Martens, and hear them loudly pontificating about how parents, the school system, and the media were telling the younger generation what to care about, and how these things were complete and utter horseshit. It’s like we all decided to become Christian Slater in Pump Up The Volume, and it started with Nirvana dethroning the King Of Pop.

In reality, Dangerous ended up being arguably more popular than Nevermind, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide and spawning nine singles over the course of two years. The sixth song from Dangerous released to radio, “Heal The World,” would likely be recognized today by more casual music fans than any Nirvana song save possibly “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Dangerous only seems like a failure when compared with the three blockbusters—Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad—Jackson released before it. But there were still a lot of people who loved Dangerous; he might have lost the battle to Nevermind in the eyes of rock historians, but Michael Jackson still did okay in the war.

Nevermind had already been mythologized by the time of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994; afterward, it seemed Nevermind existed only as an historical turning point marking Cobain’s biggest triumph and his doom-laden introduction to the dark side of inescapable fame and adulation. It’s difficult to play Nevermind today without feeling the weight of history, or hearing the crash of foreboding thunder. But Nevermind’s entry into the canon of Important Rock Records did have some lag time. When it was released, it only got three stars and a genial review from Rolling Stone. According to Spin, Nirvana was good but not nearly as good as Teenage Fanclub, whose Bandwagonesque was named album of the year.

(Nevermind did top the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, ranking ahead of Public Enemy, R.E.M., U2, and P.M. Dawn. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” also took No. 1 on the singles list, ranking 19 spots above “Pop Goes The Weasel” by 3rd Bass, which, like Nirvana, was deadly serious about calling out “phony entertainers.”)

Like millions of other kids, I owned a copy of Nevermind by the end of 1991. But I didn’t rush out to buy it as soon as I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I did, however, browbeat my mother into driving me to the mall so I could buy two albums that came out the week before Nevermind. I had waited three years for these records—my whole life as a music-buying consumer. For months, I had been swallowing up the hype promising that this music just might end up being the greatest thing to ever punish my eardrums. Clearly, I had to possess it as soon as it was available.

You know where you are? You’re in the jungle with Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, baby! And by the end of 1991, something that was once vital about the baddest band on the planet was gonna diiie!

1991 might be remembered as the year of Nevermind, but no band was bigger at the time than GN-effin-R, and no rock star had more power than Axl Rose, a man that made wearing a bandana and spandex biker shorts in public credible by sheer force of personality. Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut, Appetite For Destruction, ranked among the best-selling rock albums of all time, and it was the soundtrack for countless coming-of-age moments for teenagers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Kids everywhere were getting laid, drunk, and beat up for the first time to the sounds of “Welcome To The Jungle” and “Paradise City.” By 1991, Axl was so powerful that he was able to essentially coerce his record company, Geffen, into releasing two maniacally ambitious double-albums on the same day—Sept. 17, 1991—rather than a year or two apart, which is what the label wanted to do because it happened to make a lot more sense. The dual release of the Use Your Illusion albums was an act of hubris so brazen in its arrogance and yet strangely admirable in its artistic stubbornness that nobody had been fucking crazy enough to try anything like it before, or attempt to copy it in the nearly two decades since. (Yes, there was Bruce Springsteen’s little-loved Human Touch/Lucky Town experiment the following year, and Nelly’s Sweat/Suit dual-release in 2004, but at least those weren’t double albums.) We can debate about the greatness and importance of Nevermind—I’d rather we didn’t, but go ahead if you want—but there’s no arguing against the Use Your Illusion saga being a unique and historical event in rock history; in terms of excess, it planted a flag at the end of the world.

Grandiose piano-based balladry, queasily personal prog-punk epics, STD-ridden blues laments, “joke” songs about bitches lying dead in ditches, sleazy folk numbers denouncing anonymous and not-so-anonymous exes, surprisingly trenchant anti-war songs, furious (and libelous) attacks on journalists, guest vocals from the Blind Melon guy—Use Your Illusion left it all in. All Geffen could do was hope that Rose didn’t decide to unload even more stifling paranoia and motor-mouthed psycho-babble into additional songs, further delaying the release of these overstuffed, twin wooly mammoths into the wild.

The first taste the world got of Use Your Illusion was “You Could Be Mine,” which was released as a single in June of 1991 in connection with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which just so happened to be the other massively hyped piece of entertainment I was obsessed with that year. GNR was still months away from actually releasing the albums “You Could Be Mine” was intended to tease—it came from Use Your Illusion II, which was probably really confusing if you didn’t know about Use Your Illusion I—but the Arnold Schwarzenegger-assisted video did succeed in making the band a ubiquitous presence on MTV that summer as it toured the country. Not that GNR needed any help getting attention; during a St. Louis show in July, Rose reacted to what he perceived as “lame-ass security” by storming off the stage during a performance of “Rocket Queen,” the band’s 15th song of the night. The audience responded by trashing the place, causing $200,000 in damages; Rose was later arrested for inciting a riot. (He got his revenge by writing, “Fuck you, St. Louis!” in the liner notes of both Use Your Illusion albums.)

The riot suggested that GNR’s image was still gritty enough to convince fans that punching each other in the face was a reasonable response to the band playing for “only” 90-or-so minutes. But Use Your Illusion was the work of a band moving beyond its humble beginnings as heroin-scamming street scamps; soon the world would discover that “You Could Be Mine”—a lean, mean, and roaring rattlesnake shake in the vein of Appetite—had created a set of hard-rockin’ expectations that the albums, whatever their other merits, wouldn’t come close to living up to.

The defining single of GNR’s UYI period instead ended up being “November Rain,” which hit MTV one year after “You Could Be Mine.” Needlessly expensive, fatally overblown, and a clear product of self-destructive tunnel-vision, the video for “November Rain” already seemed laughably dated the first time MTV played it. It was as if Axl was dutifully following a checklist of things you didn’t want to see GNR involved with: opulent weddings, humungous orchestras, heavy-handed symbolism, Stephanie Seymour, and so on. Just five years earlier, GNR presented a much different image in the video for “Welcome To The Jungle,” which for me is the single most powerful thing the band ever did, even more powerful than Appetite as a whole. To this day, Guns N’ Roses as seen in the “Welcome To The Jungle” video is the only rock band to ever truly frighten me. Yes, it helped that I was only 10 at the time, but GNR was unnerving in a way that even the scariest of scary metal bands couldn’t touch. Metal bands were like slasher movies; GNR was like prison rape.

Nirvana is credited with making ’80s hair-metal bands look silly with Nevermind, but GNR had already done that with the “Welcome To The Jungle” video several years earlier. But even if Rose had grander ambitions by ’91, the young turks from Seattle threatening to make him a dinosaur before his time apparently didn’t threaten him. In fact, he was among the first rock stars to hop aboard the Nevermind bandwagon. In September 1991, GNR released the video for the relatively restrained power ballad “Don’t Cry,” which included clips of Rose wearing a Nirvana baseball cap. Rose wore the same cap in the making-of documentary, and apparently was an enthusiastic fan of his Geffen labelmates away from the cameras as well. In October, he dragged Slash to see Nirvana perform in Los Angeles and, according to Mick Wall’s W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose, he even did his little Axl dance while the band played. (Why oh why didn’t iPhones exist in 1991?)

Rose longed to hear Nirvana cover “Welcome To The Jungle”—he wanted it done “their way, however it is”—and put out a request for the band to play his 30th birthday party. Publicly, he reached out for Nirvana to join GNR and Metallica on their massive stadium tour, which would’ve been an incredible boon for any band trying to establish an audience at the time. (When Nirvana said no, Rose instead asked Soundgarden, another Seattle band he praised in the media before most mainstream rock fans had heard of the group.)

Say what you want about Axl Rose, but you can’t accuse him of not putting out the welcome mat for new pledges in the rock-star fraternity. More than anything, the guy just sounds like a fan; I know I would have asked Nirvana to play my birthday party in 1991 if I had the means. Unfortunately, Axl Rose embracing Nirvana seemed to confirm Kurt Cobain’s worst fears about signing with a major label. For Cobain, Axl Rose represented everything horrible about corporate rock. On a personal level, he found Rose to be a despicable human being, the epitome of racist, sexist, homophobic, proudly redneck and macho assholes that his music was intended to irritate and destroy.

That Rose was actually more complicated than that—he was just as much of a misfit as Cobain was growing up, and a fairly sensitive guy considering he once called his mother a “cunt” in the song “Bad Obsession”—was beside the issue. Rose signified old-guard, cock-rock superstardom, and Cobain was never more deliberate in his desire to dismantle that institution than in his outspoken criticism of Guns N’ Roses. Cobain’s aversion to turning into Axl Rose bordered on obsession; he claimed to the press that out of the $1 million he made when he was first flush with Nirvana’s success, a relatively modest $300,000 went toward a house, and only $80,000 was spent on other personal expenses. “That’s definitely not what Axl spends in a year,” Cobain said. (A seemingly contradictory story is found in Charles R. Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography Of Kurt Cobain, where Cobain and Courtney Love spent two months in Fall 1992 at the fancy Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle, ringing up an extravagant $36,000 bill before being kicked out. The name they were staying under was Bill Bailey, also known as the original moniker of one Axl Rose.)

The irony of the Kurt/Axl rivalry is that Cobain—the wimpy feminist who took to wearing layers of sweaters in order to look less scrawny—was the clear aggressor while Rose, who demanded that any and all critics “suck his fucking dick” in “Get In The Ring” and once threatened to fight Vince Neil of Motley Crüe outside of Tower Records in L.A., seemed to shrink away from a man he seemed to have genuinely admired. It’s sort of sad, really, though Rose was not above insulting Cobain; when Nirvana turned down the GNR/Metallica “Get In The Ring” tour, Rose crabbed to Metallix magazine, “They would rather sit at home and shoot heroin with their bitch wives than tour with us.” (Artless wording aside, Rose wasn’t completely wrong.)

Things finally came to a head backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, where Cobain and Rose had a mythic encounter on par with some of the most iconic pop-star tête-à-têtes ever. It was like Bob Dylan smoking pot with The Beatles, or David Bowie singing “Little Drummer Boy” with Bing Crosby, only this time the participants unequivocally hated each other. You could liken it to that scene in Heat where bank robber Robert De Niro has a cup of coffee with rival cop Al Pacino, but Axl and Kurt couldn’t even work up some grudging mutual respect. The details of the meeting are already well known to fans of Nirvana, GNR, and celebrity pissing matches: It started when Courtney Love, who was sitting with Cobain and their baby daughter Frances Bean, called out to Rose and his girlfriend Stephanie Seymour and snarkily asked if Axl would be the godfather of their child. Rather than acknowledge Courtney, Axl instead strode up to Kurt.

“You shut your bitch up, or I’m taking you down to the pavement,” he growled, sounding more menacing in that one moment than at any point over the 150 minutes of the Use Your Illusion albums. (At least that’s how I imagine it.)

Without missing a beat, Cobain turned to his wife, and said sarcastically, “Okay, bitch. Shut up.” Not wanting to miss out on the insult-trading couples competition, Seymour disingenuously asked Love, “Are you a model?”

“No,” she replied. “Are you a brain surgeon?” Game, set, victory for Team Grunge.

If an analogy comes close to describing this hostile summit, it would be the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971 at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Muhammad Ali was commonly seen as representing anti-war liberalism, and Joe Frazier was associated with the conservative establishment. Like Ali and Frazier, Kurt and Axl were bonded by their ability to turn their feelings of aggression, anger, alienation, and hatred into a highly lucrative vocation. But they came from fundamentally different worlds, and bringing them together offered a fascinating case study in what happens when two men who perfectly represent opposing sensibilities act out philosophical differences in the physical world.

Sounds pretty heady for an evening presided over by Dana Carvey, I know. But the way the “Kurt made Axl look dumb at the VMAs” story was gleefully reported and subsequently exaggerated by Cobain and the media says a lot about how Use Your Illusion (even more than Nevermind) had made GNR’s outlaw cool look like empty posturing in the space of a single year. That Nirvana proceeded to pull a memorable “fuck you” rock ’n’ roll move onstage by playing a few bars of “Rape Me” before launching into a perfectly sloppy version of “Lithium”—a devastating contrast with Rose dueting with Elton John on the highly choreographed “November Rain”—apparently wasn’t enough for Cobain, who shared his juicy behind-the-scenes Axl story on MTV, playing up Rose’s pomposity in what was depicted as a classic David and Goliath tale. In the clip below, which appears to have been recorded the day after the confrontation at a benefit show in Portland, Ore., Cobain talks about the “20 bodyguards” that were guarding Rose and how Axl was threatening him when he had “a little helpless child in his arms.” Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic also chimes in about Guns N’ Roses being “the establishment rock ’n’ roll,” and how “they want you to buy their packaged rebellion of sitting on a Harley-Davidson while you play a piano with a 41-piece orchestra, just like Emerson, Lake & Palmer did in 1978.” Nirvana clearly had been reading its own press clippings.

An interesting tangent to this story is Novoselic’s claim that he was threatened later that night by GNR bassist Duff McKagan. Apparently this actually happened; McKagan even made a belated public apology to Novoselic earlier this year. But even if he did challenge Novoselic to a celebrity bassist death match in the midst of a drink and drug-induced fury, McKagan might’ve deserved a little more slack than Nirvana gave him publicly. Before he moved to L.A. to join Guns N’ Roses, McKagan was an active member of the Seattle punk scene, playing in the Fartz, Fastbacks, and numerous other bands. After he hit it big, McKagan maintained ties with the local music community, hosting the members of Pearl Jam at his L.A. home on one of the band’s early tours, and even hanging out with Cobain on a plane ride to Seattle after Kurt fled rehab one last time in the final weeks of his life.

Obviously I don’t know Duff McKagan personally, but based on this clip and what I’ve read about him in various grunge-related books, I’ve got to say he seems like a solid-enough guy. And his anti-Nirvana rancor was apparently short-lived, given the empathy he felt for Cobain as he was circling the drain. But after 1991, the mere mention of the words “Duff McKagan” or anything else associated with Guns N’ Roses would inspire laughter and scorn among those who believed that the world wasn’t big enough for Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain to both be rock stars.

It’s convenient shorthand to paint Axl Rose as the meathead rock cliché and Kurt Cobain as the genuine artist, but what gets left out? Looking back, I see the crucial difference between Axl and Kurt being how they chose to act out their darkest, ugliest sides. Both men had troubled childhoods that led to adult lives distinguished by intense mood swings and a compulsive need to control their surroundings. Both men hated the press for spreading “lies” that often turned out to be true, and both were drawn to complicated women who created as much misery as ecstasy in their lives. Both men saw fame as a double-edged sword; it gave them the attention they craved after a lifetime of being ignored, and yet it also seemed to intensify their feelings of self-loathing. They were, to use medical terminology, a couple of fucked-up individuals, which both men expressed eloquently in their music.

But even in the saddest, most depressing Nirvana songs, Cobain always seemed like a sensitive, thoughtful man. Rose, on the other hand, wrote a lot of songs about being a bad person and not seeming all that sorry about it. Is this dichotomy merely a reflection of who these guys were? Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that Rose was clueless about the monstrous picture he often painted of himself in his music. He’d have to be a complete sociopath not to notice it—though even Patrick Bateman from American Psycho knew to hide his true self behind his love of Huey Lewis and Phil Collins-era Genesis tunes.

If Cobain’s songs dealt in surrealism and playful nonsense, Rose was all about directness and outrage. A song like “Dumb” seemed to touch on Cobain’s chemical romance with love (“My heart is broke, but I have some glue / Let me inhale, and mend it with you”), but he also claimed his lyrics didn’t mean anything; Rose made the connection between “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and his then-girlfriend Erin Everly unavoidable by putting her in the video. But if Rose loved Everly enough to write the best power ballad of all time about her (with an assist from Slash and Izzy Stradlin), there were also days that he hated her with equal passion—and he believed that was worth writing about as well. Cobain’s relationship with Love was far from healthy, but he never wrote the sick and twisted sequel to “Heart Shaped Box,” like Rose wrote many toxic retorts to “Sweet Child.”

I’m not saying one approach is preferable, just that Axl Rose should be recognized for the role he played in creating his own public image, including the parts that people like Kurt Cobain despised. Perhaps he was too honest; as laughable as the Use Your Illusion video trilogy of “Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged” ultimately is, it shows Rose self-consciously grappling with his suicidal impulses, childhood traumas, and proclivity toward domestic violence on a large and public canvas. Not only was he open about the demons that had stalked him from Indiana to the Sunset Strip, he freely admitted that sometimes he enjoyed them, or at least was unwilling to sacrifice them at the altar of political correctness, no matter what effect they had on how he was perceived.

The best example of this is the most controversial song Rose ever wrote, the radioactive “One In A Million” from 1988’s GN’R Lies. An account of Rose’s first days in Los Angeles, “One In A Million” is an uncomfortably frank but bracingly honest depiction of how a “small town white boy” reacts to being confronted by a number of offending parties, including police, “niggers,” immigrants, and “faggots.” Rose just wants them to get out of his way, so he can make a living in the big city. Sympathetic critics (of which there weren’t many when it came to “One In A Million”) could interpret the song as a comment on bigotry, but Rose derailed such efforts whenever he tried to defend it, saying in interviews that he was “pro-heterosexual” and that the “niggers” comment referred specifically to black people that hassle you at the Greyhound station. Other times he simply claimed “One In A Million” was a joke, which only made the song more offensive.

The power of “One In A Million” lies in it being an intolerant song that doesn’t endorse intolerance. Only a complete fucking idiot listens to “One In A Million” and nods in agreement. It’s not a persuasive song in the least, and it doesn’t seem that the protagonist is intended to be likeable in any way. “One In A Million” is a song nobody would ever admit relating to. What makes it so disturbing is that Rose doesn’t tip his hand; there’s no catharsis pointing toward a change of heart by the end, which is why Cobain and millions of others concluded the worst about Rose when “One In A Million” was released. But if Rose really was just a cardboard-cutout racist, homophobic bad guy, why would he have bothered to expose himself as such by releasing this song? Rose would’ve had to be the least self-aware pop star ever to not anticipate the shit-storm “One In A Million” caused; you have to assume that he either didn’t care, or saw value in shining a light on the dimmest regions of his psyche. Was he trying to shame himself into being a better person? If so, did it work?

Cobain was right; Rose felt that the world owed him something, and that was the fulfillment of his dreams in exchange for a painfully detailed account of his nightmares. In “One In A Million,” Rose sings, “It’s been such a long time since I knew right from wrong / It’s all a means to an end, I keep it movin’ along.” By the end of 1991, I chose Kurt Cobain over Axl Rose because I wanted someone who did know the difference between right and wrong. But even if Cobain’s music changed lives, Nevermind failed in saving the man who created it. It also couldn’t touch Axl; he’s the one who is still movin’ along.

What Happened Next? Nirvana was the first grunge band to achieve superstar status, but Pearl Jam quickly became the defining group of the label. Next week will look at Pearl Jam’s ascendancy during the grunge summer of love in ’92, when the band toured with Lollapalooza and dominated MTV, and how Pearl Jam’s subsequent legacy has shaped mainstream rock music, for better or worse. « Back to the A.V. Club home

Week 45: Patsy Cline, Chanteuse

by Nathan Rabin October 19, 2010 Article Tools

Email Print Share More Nashville or Bust Week 49: The Avett Brothers, Feelers of Feelings Week 48: Brad Paisley, Guy’s Guy Week 47: Buck Owens, Baron Of Bakersfield Week 46: The Eagles, The Crackers You Love To Hate

A.V. Club head writer and hip-hop specialist Nathan Rabin recently decided to spend a year or two immersing himself in the canon of country music, a genre he knew little about, but was keen to explore. The result: “Nashville Or Bust,” a series of essays about seminal country artists. After 52 entries, Rabin plans to travel south and explore some of country music’s most hallowed landmarks and institutions.

In previous columns I have written about how country’s iron songbirds of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were forced by the attitudes of the time and the conventions of the genre to adopt a series of socially acceptable personas, like the cheated-on wife, the fierce protector of the domestic front, the other woman, or the lovesick brooder pining for the one that got away. The subject matter of their songs was circumscribed by the same restrictions that governed their lives. A male country singer could do as he damn well pleased, and, as the lives of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, and countless other blazing comets of epic self-destruction illustrate, they took full advantage of that privilege. But the women of country had to behave according to the dictates of an often sexist and conservative country world.

As strong as Tammy Wynette, Kitty Wells, and Loretta Lynn were, they were defined, in their early albums at least, by their relationships with men. The same cannot be said of Patsy Cline. In a genre that all too often resembled a tinny Western on a black-and-white television, Cline sang in Technicolor. Her voice alone—a deep, rich, lustrous marvel of velvet and stardust—seemed to push her into a much bigger, bolder world than the domestic prison that trapped so many of Cline’s peers and predecessors.

Cline’s was the voice of experience: sensual, romantic, knowing, and wise. It demanded to be treated with respect, if not reverence. It was a voice almost too big for country. Though she never thought of herself as anything other than a country singer, Cline’s seminal songs and albums have the slickness and polish of pop and the sophistication and emotional complexity of jazz. The icon’s recording career was extraordinarily brief. In her lifetime she only released three albums: her self-titled 1957 debut, 1961’s Patsy Cline Showcase, and 1962’s Sentimentally Yours. Cline died in 1963 at age 30, yet she didn’t need more than a few years to change country and pop music forever.

Cline wasn’t the first female superstar but she may very well have been the first to be treated with the respect afforded a male star. Before Cline demanded big paydays, top billing, and creative input—if not quite creative control—on her albums, female country singers were accustomed to being treated like second-class citizens. They were often given condescending stage introductions like, “Here’s a little filly whose husband very generously let her do her chores early so she could sing a number for you before she has to race back home and put the little ones to bed.” But when Cline toured with Johnny Cash in 1962, playing venues like The Hollywood Bowl, he introduced her with the words “the one and only Patsy Cline.”

Cline took country places it had never been before, but she shares the modest, hardscrabble roots of so many of her peers. She dropped out of high school and got married at 21 to a much older man who resented her success. Yet Cline had the kind of voice and talent that could not be ignored, and in 1955 she signed to Four Star Records. The singer’s ascent to glory kicked off when she sang “Walkin’ After Midnight” on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a popular television talent show. Cline was used to performing in homemade cowgirl Western wear her mother made her, but for her big national television appearance she sported a cocktail dress that sent an unmistakable signal that she wasn’t about to be hemmed in by the confines of country.

On “Walkin’ After Midnight,” Cline follows the old dictum to sing a happy song sad and a sad song happy. There isn’t a lot of levity to lyrics about a woman searching desperately for a lost love in pools of mocking moonlight, but Cline delivers sorrowful lyrics about spotting a “weeping willow crying on his pillow” with a light, bemused touch. Here and elsewhere, Cline finds a paradoxical strength in conceding weakness: She’ll ache and brood and bleed but she will survive. In her music, Cline always survives. In life, she became country’s preeminent female martyr.

As The Simpsons taught us, there’s nothing funny about a clown getting hit in the face with a pie. No, in order for the gag to work, the pie has to humiliate someone with real gravitas and dignity—think a pre-corruption Sideshow Bob. On a similar note, “Crazy” and “I Fall To Pieces,” two of Cline’s signature songs, derive their awesome visceral power not from Cline’s weakness but from her strength, from listening to a singer in total control of her gifts sing about losing control, of giving in to sadness and despair and hopelessness.

On “I Fall To Pieces,” Cline reaches beyond honky-tonk heartbreak toward an operatic effect. Cline was playing in a different league now. Her peers were less the guitar-slinging cowboys at the local club than Frank Sinatra singing a torch song in hushed tones or Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall. Cline was embraced not as a great country singer but as a great singer whose medium happened to be country.

In one of those stories that seems just a little too good to be true, Cline reportedly hated “Crazy” the first time she heard it, perhaps because of the strange, singular delivery of the up-and-coming songwriter who wrote it and sang on the demo track, a young man named Willie Nelson. Cline would have been foolish to mimic Nelson, since nobody sings like Nelson, just as nobody sang like Cline. But the singer eventually found a way to make “Crazy” her own. Nelson’s version of “Crazy” is a sad, intimate lament, a low moan of world-weary lovesickness. Cline, in sharp contrast, turns it into an epic howl of heartbreak, 10 times bigger and more dramatic than life.

When Cline left Four Star Records for Decca, famed producer Owen Bradley decided to give her albums a sound as big as her voice. Bradley gave her what would become known as the Nashville Sound: big symphony, big strings, and lots of big back-up vocals from the Jordanaires. Country’s reliance on the Nashville Sound—which later morphed into the equally slick, equally pop and crossover-friendly “Countrypolitan” sound—played havoc with the outlaw sensibilities of folks like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, but it proved a godsend to artists like Eddy Arnold, Ray Charles (on Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music), and Cline.

Cline didn’t just have the vocal and interpretive chops to compete in the Darwinian realm of pop music; she had the vocal chops to dominate pop. She was no mere singer; she was a crooner who knew how to make sweet love to a microphone and tenderly massage a lyric. “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “I Fall To Pieces,” and “Crazy” dominated both the pop and country charts. With that in mind, Bradley set out to capture the pop market with Sentimentally Yours. The album begins with “She’s Got You,” a haunting ballad of love lost. “Heartaches,” a rendition of a popular standard published in 1931, gives heartbreak a cha-cha-cha rhythm and continental swing. Cline proves equally adept covering Hank Williams (“Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You),” as well as “Half As Much,” which was originally recorded by Williams) and standards like “That’s My Desire” and “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It).” Though it doesn’t appear on Sentimentally Yours, Cline also recorded a transcendent version of “Lovesick Blues” that, at the risk of being heretical, I prefer to the original.

Sentimentally Yours offers a vivid snapshot of both where Cline was at the time of its recording and where she was headed. Alas, Cline’s time was running out. After surviving two car accidents that left her keenly attuned to her own mortality, Cline died in a plane crash less than a year after Sentimentally Yours’ release.

Cline was by all accounts a wonderful human being in addition to being a great artist: She was renowned for her friendliness, generosity, good humor, and loyalty. Yet dying young proved essential to the singer’s ever-growing cult and legend. God only knows what Cline would have done if she were still alive today. Would she be covering Cole Porter or Roger Miller? Would she mentor obsessive fan k.d. lang (whose back-up band was called The Re-Clines in homage to her favorite singer) the way she did Loretta Lynn? Would she collaborate with outlaws and renegades, like Lynn did with Jack White on Van Lear Rose, or would she have devoted her life to Christianity and turned her back on secular music?

We will never know. Cline remains frozen in time, stuck forever in a singularly intriguing, important moment of her life and career. In 1973 she became the first woman inducted into the Country Hall Of Fame. Glamour girls like Beverley D’Angelo (in Coal Miner’s Daughter) and Jessica Lange (in the 1985 biopic Sweet Dreams) have played her onscreen. The hits didn’t stop coming after her death; since 1963, nine of her posthumous singles have hit the country charts, most notably “Sweet Dreams,” which hit No. 5.

Cline made such a profound impact on Nashville that when it comes to the tangled, complicated, and tragic history of women in country, it makes sense to divide the 20th century into two discreet eras: pre-Cline and post-Cline. Dying a premature death made her a martyr and a legend, but it didn’t make her a star; her undeniable voice and indomitable personality did.

Hereafter

BY ROGER EBERT / October 19, 2010

Cast & Credits George Lonegan Matt Damon Marie LeLay Cecile de France Billy Jay Mohr Melanie Bryce Dallas Howard Marcus George McLaren, Jason Frankie McLaren Didier Thierry Neuvic Dr. Rousseau Marthe Keller Himself Derek Jacobi

Warner Bros. presents a film directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay by Peter Morgan. Running time: 129 minutes. MPAA rating: PG-13.

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Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter" considers the idea of an afterlife with tenderness, beauty and a gentle tact. I was surprised to find it enthralling. I don't believe in woo-woo, but then neither, I suspect, does Eastwood. This is a film about the afterlife that carefully avoids committing itself on such a possibility. The closest it comes is the idea of consciousness after apparent death. This is plausible. Many near-death survivors report the same memories, of the white light, the waiting figures and a feeling of peace.

One of the characters seems to have a genuine psychic gift. But is he in fact communicating with people beyond the grave? Some form of telepathy might be possible, and he may simply be receiving what his subjects desire or need to be told by their dead loved ones. He brings nothing from beyond the grave that his clients could not have formed in their living minds.

This is a subject that lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney. It's astonishing how many people believe New Age notions, which have the attraction of allowing believers to confer supernormal abilities on themselves and others without the bother of plausibility. Eastwood's film will leave such people vaguely uneasy. It believes most psychics are frauds. It supposes one who seems to be the real thing, but what, exactly, is he real about?

This is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close. Eastwood tells three primary stories. The stories meet at the end, in one of those coincidences so beloved by multiple-strand movies. Is this possible? Yes. Is it likely? No. A coincidence never is. That's why we notice them. Throughout the film, the characters behave in ways that seem reasonable enough, and possibilities are left open, which is as it should be. We must live the lives we know and not count on anything beyond the horizon.

"Hereafter" stars Matt Damon as George, a man who sincerely believes he's able to have communication with the dead, but has fled that ability and taken a low-profile job; Cecile de France as Marie, a newsreader on French television; Bryce Dallas Howard as Melanie, a young cooking student with a fearful dark place inside; Richard Kind as a man mourning his wife; and Frankie and George McLaren as twin brothers, one of whom is struck by a truck and killed.

I won't describe here the traumatic surprises some of them experience. In the surprises as in everything else, "Hereafter" is believable. There are terrifying events, but Eastwood handles them not for sensation but to show how close we all are, at any moment, to oblivion. In the case of Marie, she undergoes the near death experience we often hear reported, with the white light and the figures. Are people in such a state already dead, or are they experiencing visions generated by the human mind in its final shutdown mode?

The powers of the Damon character seem to be authentic, although what they prove is hard to say. There is a moment handled with love and delicacy in which he says something that is either true or isn't, but is a kindness either way. When he holds a stranger's hands he experiences a flash of telepathic insight, but the movie never declares that his insights literally come from dead spirits.

Eastwood and his actors achieve a tone that doesn't force the material but embraces it: Not dreamlike, but evoking a reverie state. These characters are not hurtling toward the resolution of a plot. There is no "solution" to their stories. There are various degrees of solace, or not. They don't punch the dialogue. They lack the certainty to impose themselves. George in particular is reserved and sad, because his power has become a burden to him.

There's a sweet subplot involving Melanie (Howard), who he meets as a partner in a cooking class. She has experienced loss. George doesn't want to enter her mind. He yearns for a normal life. The ability to read minds would be an unbearable curse. The way his gift affects their relationship is stark and poignant. Marie, the newsreader, is played by Cecile de France in such a fresh and likable way that our sympathy is engaged and we understand that whatever happened to her in the first terrifying scene has fundamentally changed her. Frankie McLaren, as the solemn and earnest little boy seeking his dead twin, takes a character that could have been bathetic and makes him simple and transparent. And notice Richard Kind, so affecting as a man who has lost his wife.

The movie is an original screenplay by Peter Morgan ("The Queen"). Eastwood told me Morgan doesn't believe in an afterlife. I don't know if Eastwood does, either. His film embodies how love makes us need for there to be an afterlife. It is the film of a man at peace. He has nothing to prove except his care for the living.

Incorporates a little wording from my blog entry from the Toronto film festival premiere.

How to Properly Handle a Break Up Episode 132: October 17, 2010 Dating, Weddings, and Parties

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by Richie Frieman Love is a wonderful thing. Love has inspired artwork, music, movies, and makes Hallmark a billion dollars a week. No matter how hard or long it takes you to discover love, the feeling of knowing someone else cares for you is like walking on clouds… while eating cake… with doves flying overhead … with Here Comes The Sun playing in the background.

The podcast edition of this article was sponsored by Go to Meeting. With this meeting service, you can hold your meetings over the Internet and give presentations, product demos and training sessions right from your PC. For a free, 45 day trial, visit GoToMeeting.com click the try it free button and enter the code PODCAST. But just when you think the person on your screen saver only has eyes for you, you realize that--as of last night--you are now back to saying the words, “Table for one, please.” But before you go tossing your computer out the window or doing something less than mannerly that you will soon regret, remember that there are ways to handle things properly. How to Properly Handle a Break Up First of all let’s establish one key point here; no matter how cheesy it sounds, you will fall in love again--trust me. I don’t care if your special someone was just in People Magazine’s Sexiest People Alive edition, you will go on. After all, as my grandmother once told me, “Sometimes the wrapper was sweeter than the candy”; which means, of course, not everyone is as great as they seem on the outside. Granted, she was telling me this in reference to my having just confessed my true love for Alyssa Milano* back in the Who’s The Boss? days, but it was still a lesson learned. *Please, no offense Alyssa, I’m sure you are very nice but I was 11 at the time; it was her way of letting me down easy. So with that, check out my top three quick and dirty ways to properly handle a breakup with grace, poise, good manners, and above of all else--maturity. Having manners in your everyday life is incredibly important, and dealing with such a hard to handle event like this will test your manners threshold like never before. Note: For the sake of this column, let’s all assume that since we are all adults, the person you were in love with at least had the courtesy to do so in person. If they didn’t… well, I’ll tackle that in another article soon. Here’s a quick preview though – they stink! But I digress… The Proper Way to Handle A Breakup Tip #1: Don’t Ask Why, WHY, WHYYYYY!?!?! I know, I know, you thought you two would last forever. I know, I know, he said he had never met someone like you before. And I know, I know, you made plans for next summer already. Basically, all was bliss until the fatal words “It’s not working out for me anymore,” were uttered and your heart dropped ten floors below. In such haste, I beg you, do not react like Jerry Maguire and “flip out!”

The answer: once you find out the relationship is over, the proper thing to do is kindly say goodbye and be on your way. Impossible? Why do this? One, do you really want to have to convince them not to dump you? No! They have already made up their mind. And two, leaving and not sitting around to hear them stumble over a probably well-rehearsed explanation will be such a hit to their ego; it would make a UFC fighter drop to his knees. Walk away and don’t look back. Then once you get home, hit the cheesecake. The Proper Way to Handle A Breakup Tip #2: Don’t Sit Around And Wait This is a very tough rule to follow but I promise you if you don’t sit around and wait, assuming they are coming back, you will be better for it. I don’t want to say that people can’t break up and get back together--I did! But at the time, you have to be in the mind frame that this part of your life is just another closed chapter in your long storied romantic history. I say this because you can’t always assume time will make someone change. And it’s poor manners to even try to change someone just for your own gain. Change has to be mutual. Don’t sit around hoping they’ll show back on your doorstep with flowers and tearful apology. Leave that for Kate Hudson movies. The best way to cope: remember how badass you were before you met them--and keep that in mind when your friends take you out to find the next lucky person who gets to call you their loved one. The Proper Way to Handle A Breakup #3: Come Back So Incredibly Hot It Makes Them Nuts! Similar to the tip in #2, the best medicine to being dumped is to bounce back with an even better you. I don’t care if you are already a swimsuit model, a multimillionaire athlete, or the owner of vineyards in Napa Valley, everyone can make themselves a better person when faced with something tragic in their lives. Sometimes a life-changing event is a slap on the back of the head that says, “Show them what's up!” That is the telltale sign of a mature adult, which you are. Plus, even though it may look like you’re being spiteful and showing – somewhat -poor manners, flaunting Version 2.0 of the new you, in front of Version 1.0 of the old love, is the best way to make them wish they were never foolish enough to leave you in the first place. And there is nothing rude about that. Do you have a story about how you handled a breakup? Post them on my Modern Manners Guy Facebook page so we can all learn from you. As always if you have another manners question, I’m look forward to hearing from you so drop me a line at manners@quickanddirtytips.com. Also, follow me on Twitter with daily updated on manners @MannersQDT. And of course, check back next week for more Modern Manners Guy tips. Thanks again for reading Modern Manners Guy’s quick and dirty tips for a more polite life. Was this Tip Helpful?

One Thing I Love Today: Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson in 'Pretty Maids All In A Row' By Drew McWeeny - Warner Archive hits another home run with their release of Roger Vadim's sexploitation gem

Wednesday, Oct 20, 2010 1:40 AM

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Y'know, I can't blame that kid at all for being preoccupied with Angie Dickinson in 'Pretty Maids All In A Row,' new to DVD from Warner Archive. Credit: Warner Archive

Roger Vadim once referred to it as "the most enjoyable film I made in my career." Gene Roddenberry fans generally have no idea it exists. Rock Hudson was at the tail end of his career when he made it. And the Osmonds recorded the totally awesome theme song.

So why doesn't everyone already own "Pretty Maids All In A Row"?

Oh, that's right. It's been totally unavailable until next week, when Warner Archive (who should be given some sort of Congressional medal for their efforts in the last few years) releases the film on DVD for the first time. I saw the movie in February of 1999, when I was at QT III, the third film festival that Quentin Tarantino programmed at the old original Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, and I fell for it, head over heels. It's a slasher movie, and it's a teen sex comedy, and it's a sort of last lap around the pool for Rock Hudson, and somehow, all of these different things going on work together.

Angie Dickinson is exceptionally sexy in the film, and Rock Hudson may have been in his sunset years, but he is sharp and charming and manages to make an incredibly distasteful role into something almost charming. Roger Vadim packed the film with crazy gorgeous '70s girls, all of whom seem practically offended by the notion of wearing clothing. The young lead in the film, John David Carson, should have had a real career, but for some reason this is one of those one-offs. I don't think Vadim is a great director, but I think he's occasionally a really fun director, and maybe it was the chemistry between his sensibility and the totally wackadoo screenplay by "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry, who reveals himself as sort of a gleeful superfreak with this one. Whatever the case, this was a case of Vadim getting it all just right.

Be warned... "Pretty Maids All In A Row" plays rough, and it's a genuinely dirty little movie. One of the things that makes me laugh is just how shameless it really is. It's a film that throws everything at you, and Vadim seems to operate without restraint here. Maybe it's because it was a low-budget teensploitation film and no one was paying attention, but it feels like they got one over on everyone, and now, with Warner Archive finally putting the film out, it feels like they've put one over as well.

And I couldn't be happier about it.

Can't get enough of Motion/Captured? Don't m

Director Brenda Chapman replaced on Pixar's 'Brave' while animation insiders buzz By Drew McWeeny - As the first woman to helm a Pixar movie steps aside, what does this mean for the studio?

Wednesday, Oct 20, 2010 3:15 AM

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Early character designs from Brenda Chapman's 'Bear and the Bow,' which is now called 'Brave,' and which will no longer be directed by her. Credit: Pixar/Disney

Female directors are not uncommon only in the world of animation. There's a reason it was a big deal when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar last year. I'm not a "meet a quota" kind of guy, but I do believe that a variety of voices is what we need in film if the art form is going to remain vital and interesting. The more types of voices we have making films, the more perspective we gain on ourselves, and that's one of the primary reasons we make art in the first place.

Of course, when you're talking about giant budget franchise pictures, the word "art" is a little precious. And as much as I enjoy the work of Pixar, they are absolutely one of the most important financial brands in modern Hollywood. They have the best track record in the business for a reason. They have a carefully managed story department, and they are ruthless during development. They have had several major shake-ups on films, including "Cars," "Ratatouille," and "Toy Story 2," with directors being replaced and big chunks of story being thrown out. Recently, they pulled the plug on "Newt," and some of the concept art for that ended up on their Facebook page. John Lasseter is now also the man in charge over at Walt Disney Feature Animation, and he's had a major late-in-the-game influence on both "Bolt!," which began life under the direction of Chris Sanders as "American Dog," and "Tangled," which arrives in theaters next month in a very different form than was originally intended by Glen Keane.

Obviously, none of that matters if the film actually works. And time after time, Pixar has managed to snatch success from the jaws of failure. They've been quite open in discussing the way the process works.

Now there's been another shake-up on another picture, and so far, Cartoon Brew seems to have the only real reporting on it. No surprise. They're one of the most informed and connected sources on the animation industry, in print or online or anywhere, and if you need further proof of it, just check out some of the names who pop up in that comments section below the story. People who have credits all over town, for Disney and Dreamworks and Sony Pictures Animation and even Pixar. And what's interesting is how nakedly hostile some of the comments are, which flies right in the face of Pixar's public and press image. Just personal opinions, of course, but some harsh ones.

That's due in part to the reputation that Brenda Chapman has developed over the course of her career. She was one of the directors of the first Dreamworks Animation 2D feature, "The Prince Of Egypt," and she was head of the story department on "The Lion King." She's a talented, well-liked artist, and she's got a lot of fans in the industry. When she was announced as the director of "The Bear And The Bow," which was the original title of "Brave," there were a lot of people rooting for her. And not because she's a woman, but because that particular woman developed that story, and because she has proven with her work that she's got a real voice as a storyteller. I've talked to people who saw the story reel version of "The Bear and the Bow," and I've heard some pretty great things about it. I've also heard that it wasn't easy to describe or categorize, and that it resisted formula in the way it was told. That was one of the things people seemed excited by in describing it.

Now it appears Mark Andrews, another very talented artist, is being brought in to direct the film, or that he was a little while ago and the news is just now starting to leak. Andrews was part of "The Iron Giant" team back in '99, and he was a director on the short film "One Man Band" for Pixar. I'm sure that whatever Andrews does, he'll bring class and wit and style to the table, and he'll have the full weight of the Pixar story department behind him.

I talked to a longtime friend who works in animation earlier today, and I asked him for his take on things. He talked about how upset many of his colleagues are, simply because they were hoping they were going to see Brenda's film. It's a real testament to her that it seems like this is the first one of these Pixar staff changes that has really upset other animators.

I've got a lot more to say about the state of Walt Disney Feature Animation in particular and the Pixar-Disney relationship, but I think in order to do so, I'll need to wait until I can get into the specifics of their new film, "Tangled." I'll just say that I love and respect Pixar's work… I think my history of writing about them over the last 15 years speaks to that quite clearly. But i think the more these companies stretch to accommodate visions and voices that stand outside of what's been done before, the better they'll be, and without that encouragement of the new, they risk making the same mistakes that have driven Disney aground in the past.

Maybe not on this film. Or the next one. But there's only so much of the familiar anyone can take, and when you've got the enormous resources and talent that Pixar does, it's important to make the very best use of everything at your disposal. I hope in this case, they've made the right choice.

A Movie A Day: THE BLACK CAT (1981) Cats take orders from no one.

Published on: Oct 20, 2010 12:10:17 CDT Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Day: Halloween 2010 edition!

[For the entirety of October I will be showcasing one horror film each day. Every film is pulled from my DVD shelf or streamed via Netflix Instant and will be one I haven’t seen. Unlike my A Movie A Day or A Movie A Week columns there won’t necessarily be connectors between each film, but you’ll more than likely see patterns emerge day to day.]

I have Fallout New Vegas in my Xbox right now. I want you folks to know just how much I respect the constant readers of this column that I could exert the willpower to actually get this column out today. It’s not on time (well, it is if you’re on the West Coast!), but that’s more to do with my stupid dawn to dusk sleep schedule than a video game.

That willpower was doubly tested when the movie started and played out so… mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Lucio Fulci. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I enjoy his work more than Dario Argento’s. Argento at his best is the better filmmaker by a large margin, but Fulci’s movies always swing for the fences and go for the entertainment.

Whether it’s the undead fighting a shark underwater in ZOMBIE or the evil dead preacher making that poor woman puke out her guts and cry blood in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD that dude’s movies are just Fun. Yes, with a capital F.

Unfortunately, The Black Cat, loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story, is just silly. Not really fun, kinda tedious, but definitely silly.

If you’re going to make a horror movie you have to do everything you can to help your audience suspend disbelief, especially if a psychic murderous cat is your bad guy.

It’s not easy to suspend disbelief when your bad guy looks just like a happy cat walking across the camera or sitting non-threateningly as you overlay a nasty cat screech over the soundtrack. It’s also not easy to suspend disbelief when you have multiple cats that don’t look a thing like each other used from shot to shot.

I counted at least three different cats that I could easily differentiate between. There was a small, skinny cat, a fluffy cat and a big cat. I guess Fulci thought no one would notice because all black cats look alike. One, that’s racist. Two, we do notice and it’s a distraction.

The plot revolves around a small town riddled with strange deaths. An American photographer lady with a bad haircut finds herself mixed up in it as she stumbles upon a creepy old man who likes to take his tape recorder out to the cemetery to record the dead.

He seems to have some kind of supernatural power and has a deadly relationship with his black cat. This cat attacks him regularly, but he states that they need each other. Of course, this evil cat doesn’t need nobody to do its evil deeds and proceeds to kill a bunch of people… sometimes it hypnotizes them with it’s crazy cat eyes and forces them to drive into parked cars, sometimes it knocks over a gas lamp and sets a house on fire. You never can tell what these evil pussycats will do.

Fulci is known for his kills and while there are a few good moments (the standout being the creepy motorized dummy puppet that flails around while engulfed in flames) I’m sorry to say most of the kill scenes are uninspired. There’s still that Fulci brutality to them, like the car crash guy whose head bloodily smashes through the front windshield before catching on fire, but on the whole they were a little dull.

In a good film that wouldn’t matter, but in a film as silly as this it’s the kiss of mediocrity.

The old man is played by Patrick Magee who I will only ever see as the revenge seeking old man with Darth Vader as his muscle in Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (“More wine… ALEX?”) and he, assisted by his thick wiry salt and pepper eyebrows, is the stand-out of the film, the reason to watch. He’s not even given very much to do, I just seeing him as a lead, a supposedly sympathetic villain who is only slightly sympathetic and only slightly a villain.

Final Thoughts: The movie’s just mediocre. It’s silly, but not stupid fun. The tone is all wrong. Either the material has to be shot serious as a heart attack or it has to be fun as all hell and this is neither, so you’re left with a film that’s okay. It has moments, but that’s not really enough to justify a recommendation. I’d say only for Fulci or genre completists.

Currently in print on DVD: YES Currently available on Netflix Instant: NO

tarred items more stupid cell phone videos and the return of evil wil wheaton via WWdN: In Exile by wil@wilwheaton.net (Wil Wheaton) on 10/21/10

In a couple hours, I'll be on my way back to Los Angeles for a few days, so I can work on The Big Bang Theory. I obviously can't say anything about the episode, but I got the script last night, and it's just hilarious. I can't wait to see my friends there again, and bring a little Evil Wil Wheaton to life.

I'm nearly finished with this season of Eureka. I only have two more days of production until next season (if Doctor Parrish comes back next season, which I really hope he does) and I have a lot of conflicting emotions about that. On the one hand, I'm looking forward to seeing my family again, and I plan on taking some time off to play games and recharge my creative batteries when I get home ... on the other hand, I really love living in Vancouver and working on Eureka every day. The cast and crew are just awesome, and I've made some very good friends while working on the show in the last few months who I'll miss seeing almost every day. Yesterday, I was talking with Neil Grayston about this, and he said out that, since Colin lives in Los Angeles between seasons, a lot of the actors -- including himself and Niall, who I've become very good friends with -- come down to visit, and we'll have a few opportunities to get the band back together and hang out. I really hope that we do.

***

In other news, I made a couple more stupid cell phone videos:

When I posted this video on Twitter, I was delighted to get numerous replies from people who had made three, then two, then one frame summaries of it. I retweeted the ones that made me laugh the most, which you can see for yourself in my retweets, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Everything you ever wanted to know about that T-shirt is right here.

I am easily amused.

A Real Screenwriting Competition Believer via Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog by Alex Epstein on 10/24/10 One Friend of the Blog is a strong believer in screenplay competitions, has participated in many and won / placed / shown repeatedly. As you know, I don't believe in screenplay competitions, except for the network fellowships and the Nicholls. So I asked him what he gets out of them. Screenplay competitions help me in four ways.

1) They impose a motivational deadline on my writing. And if I miss a deadline, no producer's gonna fire me and/or come after me because I've been found in breach of contract.

2) If I place or win, they provide validation. Some argue it's validation of a lesser kind than finding a producer willing to purchase your work or hire you on assignment. I'm not entirely convinced that's true. I think we can all agree that any low-level producer/creative exec with a modicum of business sense and a strong desire to climb up the Hollywood ladder will shy away from material that isn't likely to be easily marketable or won't get teenagers to giddily hand out their parents hard-earned money over two or three weekends. If you've been to the movies lately, you'll know that financial success and quality don't correlate. So, kudos to the screenplay contests that purposely reward financially doomed projects.

3) I can get notes on my work at a discounted rate. Granted, since you do not control who reads or judges your work, sometimes you receive inane notes from readers who are clearly less experienced than you are. Oftentimes though, well-respected screenplay contests do provide useful feedback notes. I would even argue that there's still more value in receiving notes from newbie readers than the classic "not for us at this time" (a.k.a. the title of my newborn blog) you get from producers who say they read your work. At least ridiculous notes you can laugh at and choose to ignore. A generic PASS letter from an established producer will only leave you confused and wondering.

4) If, like me, you're still at a stage of your career where your best marketing tool remains the (infamous?) query letter, a long list of placement and wins provides for a dense, awe-inspiring paragraph in the middle of your one-pager.

I'm curious to hear why you're down on contests in general EXCEPT the Nicholls. If you've read the winners of the Nicholl Fellowships, you know that they're often heavy dramas, war movies, period pieces, westerns - in other words - material that is highly unlikely to be produced. I got more requests for my work by making the quarter-finals of the Nicholl Fellowships than all my other win and placements COMBINED, but the vast majority of those requests came from managers and agents who aren't established yet. My impression is that most of them haven't understood yet that the reason why you did well in the competition is NOT because you've written the most marketable script ever. So why aren't you also down on the Nicholls, the Holy Grail of screenwriting competitions we all aspire to win, but a contest that does not even provide feedback? And yes, I know of a few notable exceptions (Allison Anders, Ehren Kruger...) who managed a post-Nicholl Fellowships career. As you say, making the quarter-finals of the Nicholls got you real attention. Imagine what winning it gets you?

There are a slew of screenplay competitions out there. I can't help thinking that most of them are money farms for their owners. Say it costs fifty bucks to enter. I can probably get a recent college student to give notes for thirty bucks. Or free, if I can find one to intern. Hey, I just made twenty bucks? Now all I have to do is get a couple thousand people to submit, and I've got $40,000. Pay out $7500 in prizes, and I've made my nut for the next six months, with almost no effort except putting up a website and sending out some publicity.

That's why there are so many screenplay competitions, I feel. And if there are 2000 entrants, how many quarter-finalists are there? How many finalists?

Ooh, what if I can get 10,000 entrants? I've made over $350,000! Can anyone out there tell me how many entrants these screenwriting competitions get, or what percentage of their fees go to awards?

(Why do I keep running down competitions! I should open one! Ah, well, too late now.)

How does an agent know that a screenplay that gets into the finals is a truly commercial script with a great hook? As opposed to a "good" script, whatever that means?

The problem with screenplay competitions is that the economics means that the people evaluating your scripts are probably kids right out of Harvard or USC, who think they know everything, and don't. Industry veterans don't read scripts for Scriptapalooza, so far as I know; unless, like this notorious competition reader, they don't have to do notes, and they can knock off 75 scripts in 3 hours.

In the real world, pros read scripts because they are looking to make money from selling them (agents) or producing them (producers). And if they like something, they option it. That's the real prize. Sending a query email to an agent or producer is free, and if they like your hook, they will read your script for free too.

I take your point about cheap critiques. The problem is, you get what you pay for. You're getting a critique from someone who just started reading scripts and has no idea what gets a movie made except what she sees in the theaters. They'll tell you something they read in Syd Field, or possibly even Alex Epstein. But do they know what they're talking about?

You'll get far, far better feedback by telling your story out loud to someone, anyone, off the top of your head. If they stick with you to the end, you've made the quarter finals. If they say they would totally pay money to see that on a screen, you're in the finals.

The Nicholls is different because it's run by the Academy and people take it seriously. I bet the readers are professionals. The network fellowships, Sundance, etc., are different because you don't get a prize, you get a job, and the people reading you are professionals.

UPDATE: As Tommy points out in the comments, there are various goodies that Telefilm Canada hands out that are based on your screenwriting, and obviously those are worth competing for -- e.g. the currently defunct Writers First and Feature It! programs, the CFC, Screenwriter's Bootcamp, NSI and so forth. There's a world of difference between culture grants -- where a taxpayer-funded cultural agency already has a big basket of goodies and they hire professionals to decide whom to hand them to, and there is no fee to enter -- versus screenwriting competitions, where all the money is coming from the fees, and the ultimate objective for the competition is either profit or brand publicity.

Your new age, and mine via Roger Ebert's Journal by Roger Ebert on 10/21/10

Most events called "psychic" do not take place at all, but only seem to. All the events we can perceive take place in a rational universe governed by physical laws. They can be explained by human thinking and do not require a supernatural loophole.

I'm drawn to this thinking by Clint Eastwood's new film, "Hereafter." You may have absorbed the idea that it's about the afterlife. It would be fairer to say it's about the common human need for there to be an afterlife.

When I write that I expect to experience no more after death than I experienced before birth, I receive comments from people who pity me. They wonder how I can possibly live with such a bleak prospect. I find it more cheerful than most of the other possibilities that have been floated. I don't want to come back as an insect, haunt unquiet places as a ghost, or gaze down benevolently on my loved ones below as they, and all their generations to the end of time, die from mayhem or disease. I am also offered the possibility that I will be absorbed in God's love for all eternity, which is a better offer, but lacking in definition. If that means what it seems to mean, and if God is infinite (as he must be), then the role played by "me" can hardly be aware or conscious in any meaningful way. But I will become part of the universal, you say? I already am. You, too.

There is, however, one form of immortality that is guaranteed, if unrewarding. We certainly live on indefinitely in our constituent atoms, which will be recombined in dust, flowers, trees, the wind, other living beings, and eventually in cosmic stardust.

"Hereafter" centers on a man named George Lonegan (Matt Damon) who believes he has a real psychic gift (he calls it a curse). When he touches another person's hands, there is a jolt and sudden flash, and he becomes a conduit to that person's loved ones in the afterlife. He transmits their messages for the living. Often these messages are uncanny in the private knowledge they contain. George at one point had a web site and a wide reputation, but could no longer endure the burden of his séances; he has gone into construction work and shuns all psychic activities. The film is about his reluctant agreement to act as a medium for a few people, including a small boy who desperately longs for his twin.

It would indeed be a curse if you could read minds. A familiar theme in science fiction is a person tortured by the minds of those around him in the city -- by their fear, terror, remorse. In Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the hero finds he can telepathically communicate with all the children born at the moment of Indian independence. He convenes them regularly in his mind. This he does with such suspicious ease, I believe, because Rushdie's novel is not about telepathy but about India. The mind-reading device does him no favors, however, and the novel loses its life and urgency when he resorts to it.

If a person could really read your mind or foretell your future, should they charge for it? As Eastwood's movie makes clear, most psychics are frauds, in it for the money. But what if one in a hundred, or a million, was the real thing? "Hereafter" suggests that George might be such a person. That singular person would, I suggest, be driven stark mad soon after birth. But if the gift could be controlled -- say, by acting only when hands are held -- that would allow some degree of mental order. (The prospect of being able to read the mind of a partner during sex is as horrifying as having your own mind read at such a time.)

Let us assume George has a gift. That he tells people things he has no way of knowing. Is Eastwood saying he's truly reading minds? Yes, then he would be. But is he communicating with the dead? Close attention to the film reveals that Eastwood and his writer, Peter Morgan, don't make that claim. They never say concretely what does happen, although something does. Believers will assume George talks with the dead. That is not the only possibility.

Here I'm not, however, going to fall back on the theories of skeptics like James Randi and say George is an unusually intuitive person who picks up vibes and combines them in a Sherlockian manner with cues from clothes, accents, casual remarks and feedback. We all do that all the time. We meet a new person and arrive at instant notions of who they are, what they're like and how they're thinking. Are we correct? You know you do this. Judge for yourself.

I believe it possible that telepathy in some inchoate form can exist. I think it very unlikely, but that's not today's subject. I believe it's possible that communication can take place between two physical minds in a physical universe, with the supernatural not involved. I believe it possible that some few people may be able to inspire heightened transmission from another mind by touching hands or otherwise supplying a psychic jolt. That the "medium" receives images and and personal information of great importance from other people. And that the psychic then repeats back to those people what they desire to hear.

Neither the psychic nor the subject would necessarily be aware this is happening. That would explain why so few communications from beyond the grave are morose or terrifying. Dead spirits never tell us, "I died miserably and am in torment, and you face the same fate." That isn't what we want to hear, and therefore wouldn't be what we transmitted. Indeed, every living person in "Hereafter" receives uplifting information. (Some of it, the film suggests, is knowingly created by George as an act of mercy.)

To be clear: I think this is very highly unlikely indeed. But the more we learn of quantum matters, the slower we must be in declaring things impossible. If the scenario I suggest is possible, actual dead spirits and an afterlife are not necessary. The whole transaction takes place here in the rational universe, using a process we don't understand and may never understand. Not understanding something is not a good reason to declare it supernatural.

There is of course a loophole in my reasoning. What if telepathy, as I suspect, is completely impossible? Yet still a psychic communicates private information he has no way of knowing? Doesn't that require a supernatural level? Not necessarily. Storefront fortune tellers communicate such information all the time. How do they do it?

Typically, they begin with a "Barnum Statement," named after P. T. Barnum, who said "A circus should have something for everybody." For example, they might tell you: "Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations." Is that true of you? It's certainly true of me. And it was true of every single subject of a famous experiment made by a psychologist named Bertram Forer, cited in this invaluable link.

The link is to a report in Skeptical Enquiry, which argues that Rorschach inkblot tests are simply a form of fortune-telling. It continues by analyzing a typical psychic reading: "After being warmed up with Barnum statements, most clients relax and begin to respond with nonverbal feedback, such as nods and smiles. In most psychic readings, there arrives a moment when the client begins to 'work' for the reader, actively supplying information and providing clarifications. It's at this critical juncture that a skillful cold reader puts new stratagems into action, such as the technique called the 'push.' A psychic using the push begins by making a specific prediction (even though it may miss the mark), then allows feedback from the client to transform the prediction into something that appears astoundingly accurate."

The article observes that many psychics are sincerely convinced they have a real gift. I'm sure that's possible. I believe they may have exceptionally well-developed empathy and sensitivity, and do actually pick up "vibes." Their readings may be beneficial, as any attention and sympathy from another person is beneficial. An analyst using a Rorschach test may also be sincere, and may obtain valuable psychological information. But the information has come from the client, and not from woo-woo floating in the aether. That would be consistent with my other theory about telepathy: In one way of another, we read our own minds.

It's my guess that "Hereafter" reflects the beliefs of Clint Eastwood and Peter Morgan that such is the case. Of course they don't come out and say so, because their film is not about whether psychics are frauds, or whether there is an afterlife. It is, gently, warmly, kindly, about how we desperately desire for there to be an afterlife. George, the Matt Damon character, is a good and honest man. He isn't a genuine psychic, but he doesn't know that. He's real enough to himself and to the people he helps. There is positive therapy to be found in the process of going through a healing process, whether or not it's based on reality. He helps people. They feel helped.

Eastwood sees those people with a great deal of love: The woman whose life is transformed by the tragedy in the opening scenes. The man who loved his wife and feels he can't carry on without her. The cooking student with dark inner fears. The little boy who misses his dead twin brother. They all need to know that life is not as bleak as it seems. They need to believe those they loved still survive in some form. These are needs as long as the history of Man.

In my opinion, there is no solace for these needs. We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born. The number of possible lives that have never been lived is so large that actual lives represent a vanishingly small number after a decimal point and a great many zeros. We won a cosmic lottery by being not only alive but being self-aware and able to think rationally. That is cause for joy. We should collect our winnings and feel grateful when we die.

But we are humans, poor, frail, fearful, hopeful. We seek solace. I believe "Hereafter" understands that. It is a deeper and more subtle film than many will realize. In my review, I deliberately avoided any mention of Clint Eastwood's age. Some reviews suggested he made this film because he's getting older, and his thoughts turned to mortality. That is condescending. Our thoughts turn to mortality every day, as is natural. The important thing is that Eastwood's thoughts didn't turn to immortality. The stories in his film take place entirely on this side of the grave, as all stories must. &nbsp

October 20, 2010 : Savage Love by Dan Savage October 20, 2010

Illustrations by Misako Rocks!

My husband and I have had an open marriage for the last two years. Up until five months ago, it was working beautifully. At that point, however, I was sexually assaulted by a former partner. Since that incident, I cannot stand sex with my husband. I completely flip out when he tries to initiate sexual contact. My skin crawls. I become panicked and feel repulsed. I just cannot handle it. Those times when I go along with it anyway leave me feeling enraged and disgusted.

I don’t think this is completely unheard of for someone who was relatively recently assaulted, and I am considering therapy to help me work through it. The immediate “problem” is that I have no difficulty having sex with my boyfriend. In fact, the sex with him is amazing and leaves me feeling loved and whole and wonderful.

This is breaking my husband’s heart. He has become incredibly jealous of my relationship with my boyfriend. He’s depressed. He’s angry. He accuses me of no longer loving him, and he wants me to stop sleeping with my boyfriend until our marriage is back to normal. I feel like a horrible person, but I just can’t do that. I need that outlet. I need that support. And I admit I have a hard time believing that my husband and I will ever be able to go back to the way things were before.

I feel like I’ve already lost my former partner (fucked-up though that may seem) and my husband. It kills me to think about cutting out the one positive relationship remaining. On the other hand, I do love my husband—very much—and watching him suffer like this is unbearable. Potentially Traumatized Sexual Deviant

I’m sorry that you were sexually assaulted—that’s awful, PTSD, and I hope you went to the police, and I hope you’re pressing charges. But I also hope you know that being the victim of sexual assault is not a Get Out Of Being A Human Being Free card.

Just because you’ve been victimized doesn’t mean you operate in an alternate moral universe where you’re not obligated to take other people’s feelings into consideration—particularly the feelings of people you profess to love and happen to be married to. Your first priority in the wake of your assault had to be your own physical and emotional safety, of course, but your behavior toward your husband is both cruel and selfish.

If you truly loved your husband and valued your marriage, PTSD, you would’ve put the boyfriend on hold and gotten your ass into therapy without having to be told. So from where I sit—on the Bloomington Shuttle, headed to the Indianapolis airport—it looks to me like you want out of this marriage. But instead of taking responsibility for wanting out—not in love with the husband anymore—you’re playing the victim card while slamming both hands down on your marriage’s self-destruct button.

To sum up, PTSD: You’re being a total shit. Do you love your husband? Is your marriage a priority? Then start acting like it: Cut the boyfriend off—for the indefinite future—and get your ass onto a counselor’s couch. If you’re not willing to do those things, PTSD, then stop emotionally assaulting your husband and put both your marriage and him out of their misery.

I have two clits. How common is this? I have never been able to ride a bike because I have an earthshaking orgasm as soon as I get on the seat. I come on the bus—the soft vibrations are too much! Walking anywhere in tight pants gets me moaning. Is there anything I can do, or rub on myself, to avoid having multiple orgasms in public? Two Much Fun

I’ve never heard of someone with two clits—but I haven’t searched the medical literature or sought the opinion of an expert. And I’m not inclined to search or seek when a letter is so transparently fake. (Opaque fakes are fine; every letter that makes it into the column is a good hypothetical question for every reader save one.) People whose genitals are different or ambiguous or terrifying—maybe that’s not an extra clit, but the tip of your parasitic twin’s nose—frequently have questions and concerns, TMF, but multiple earthshaking orgasms aren’t high on the list.

You don’t have a single clit, TMF, much less two. You’re a horny boy with a dick, an e-mail account, and an obsession with/terror of a woman’s potential capacity for unlimited sexual pleasure. And I’m hoping—I’m hoping against hope—that seeing your letter in print isn’t your peak sexual experience. But odds are…

I am a 47-year-old gay man who has a desire to be humiliated and degraded—by a straight guy! How do I make this happen? Do I just walk up to a straight guy and tell him I want to get on my knees and clean his shoes with my tongue while he spits on me and calls me names? Or that I want to eat out of a dog dish on the floor while he laughs at me? How the hell do I make this happen? How do I approach some straight guy with my request without getting beaten up? Please don’t say “Settle for a very straight-acting and straight-looking gay guy.” I have tried that, and it doesn’t work! The guy must be totally and completely straight! Otherwise, it’s just not a turn-on for me. I’m so desperate that I’m almost willing to pay for it! Worthless Piece Of Shit

Long odds: If you have a wide circle of sexually adventurous straight friends, WPOS, and you were open with all of your friends about your kinks in a friendly, non-threatening manner, maybe one or two of your straight male friends might be indulgent/perverse enough to want to engage in a little role-play with you. (And, yes, it’s possible to make someone feel threatened by offering to lick their boots and take their abuse.)

Somewhat shorter odds: Don’t have friends like that? Well, there are a lot of BDSM groups and orgs out there that are mixed, i.e., they have gay, lesbian, straight, bi, and trans members, and most host mixed play parties. Get involved with one, be open about your kinks, and you’ll meet a few kinky straight male tops who would get a kick out of slapping you around.

Best odds: Pay for it, already.

I’m a het male professional in my mid-20s who wants to find a female dominant partner. Pro-dom services abound for stereotypes like me, but I’m looking for a D/s relationship rather than just playtime. Predictably, I can’t find one. Women I meet randomly are mostly socialized to want dominant men, and kink personal sites like FetLife only make my plight look even direr: Nearly all the doms are either pros or in their 50s. It’s a given that dominant women my age are unicorns, but how can I maximize those slim chances? Seeking Unrestrained Bitch

By keeping your kink personal ad updated—unlike unicorns, kinky younger women do exist, and you want them to be able to find your ad when they troll on FetLife—and by reconciling yourself to the fact that most submissive straight men in D/s relationships met vanilla women who weren’t perverts themselves, but were pervertible.

CONFIDENTIAL TO LGBT YOUTH: Please check out the new, improved, expanded, and totally awesome It Gets Better Project site: itgetsbetterproject.com. And please don't kill yourselves.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage. Got problems? mail@savagelove.net

Bill Hicks: The Essential Collection

A- by Noel Murray October 20, 2010

Publisher: Ryko Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

A- av club rating Purchase Bill Hicks: The Essential Collection from Amazon

Though he only lived 32 years, comedian Bill Hicks packed a lot into three quick decades, going through multiple transformations. He started out as a likeable smart-ass making fun of small-town small-mindedness, then became a reckless, unreliable libertine, before ending his career as a snarling political commentator with a thick streak of self-righteousness. Bill Hicks: The Essential Collection features two CDs worth of highlights from Hicks’ albums, all of which were recorded after 1990, well into his third phase. So the real prizes here are the set’s two DVDs, which contain hours of video of Hicks, dating back to 1981, when he was a teenage stand-up in Houston.

Hicks was funny from the start, telling lighthearted stories about high school and suburban family life that were true to life—with a lot of “Hey, remember this?” prods to the audience—and expressive of a deep frustration with conformity. The Hicks of ’81 is sweet, ingratiating, and distinctive from the Hicks who appears on the rest of The Essential Collection’s first DVD, which features sets from ’84, ’85 and ’86. In ’84, back at Houston’s Comix Annex, Hicks does a lot of the same kind of material that he did as a 19-year-old, about his judgmental parents and fucked-up friends. But the tone’s a little meaner, and he’s started to work in jokes about drinking, smoking, and drugs—three vices he didn’t take up until he turned 21. By ’85 and ’86, his delivery had gotten more rambling, though he continued to anchor his sets with a few tried-and-true routines. The ’80s DVD adds a couple of brief TV appearances and interviews in which Hicks cuts right to the hits, and the contrast between “any given night in Indianapolis” Hicks and “this could be my big break” Hicks is striking. One’s a seeker; the other is desperate to be thought of as a pro.

The Essential Collection’s second DVD kicks off with the 30-minute short “Ninja Bachelor Party,” a drug-fueled goof that Hicks made with his Austin musician pals over the course of several years. Then it moves on to four sets taped in Austin between ’91 and ’93, both before and after Hicks had been diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that led to his death in February 1994. This is the era in which Hicks found international fame. He kicked drugs and booze, and began writing material that skewered American consumerism and war-mongering. In front of big crowds—in Europe, for example, where he was adored—Hicks could come off as sour and smug, as though he considered himself the last intelligent man on Earth. But in Austin, in a more low-key setting, he was self-deprecating and conversational, and not as prone to deliver pronouncements from a mountaintop. Hicks’ fans and detractors alike owe it to themselves to see him in these different contexts, to get away from the common “he spoke truth to power” and “he was an unfunny asshole” reductions of his work. Hicks was far more complex, both as a comic and a person.

Key features: Those two CDs of stand-up material, plus a code to download an album-length collection of Hicks’ music. « Back to the A.V. Club home

Spartacus: Blood And Sand—The Complete First Season

B+ by Scott Tobias October 20, 2010

Publisher: Anchor Bay Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating A- reader rating based on 7 ratings Purchase Spartacus: Blood And Sand—The Complete First Season from Amazon

Early in the first episode of the Starz series Spartacus: Blood And Sand, the eponymous hunk, in a tableau that looks torn from the cover of a romance novel, ties a ribbon around the leg of his comely wife before they’re separated by war and later sold into slavery. “Keep me close to your thighs,” says Spartacus, a line so ripe that it’s either a you-had-me-at-hello moment, or cause to reach for the remote. Though it fuses the stylized action of modern sword-and-sandal hits like Gladiator and 300 with the explicitness and behind-the-scenes treachery of HBO’s Rome, Spartacus: Blood And Sand amps up the luridness of its influences in every department. Call it trash, call it pre-Christian WWE, call it a guilty pleasure, call it whatever you like: This series makes a raw appeal to the senses, essentially converting its viewers into the cheering, lustful bread-and-circuses crowd that gathers to watch its gladiators battle to the death. It proves damned irresistible, which probably speaks poorly of us as a species.

Then again, Spartacus: Boobs And Abs isn’t just a savvy piece of juvenilia. It’s also a smartly plotted melodrama that brings Spartacus’ story into a house of vipers that’s like Macbeth by way of Melrose Place. Like most of the men in the cast, Andy Whitfield looks chiseled from stone by God Himself, but his intensity and charisma as Spartacus gives the show a strong center. (Sadly, Whitfield’s ongoing battle with cancer will keep him out of the second season, and he may prove irreplaceable.) His journey begins when a duplicitous Roman general (Craig Parker) convinces him and his fellow Thracians to enlist in the service as auxiliaries, so they can fight the Getae, who frequently raid their land. When the general isn’t true to his word, Spartacus leads a mutiny that ends with his village getting razed, his wife sold to slavery, and him condemned to die at the hands of four gladiators in a public arena. His unexpected survival in the face of certain execution sets tongues wagging, and none are waggier than that of Batiatus (John Hannah), an inveterate gambler who purchases Spartacus and brings him to his ludus in Capua to train as a gladiator.

Aside from the many blood-soaked confrontations in the arena, most of the drama is confined to Batiatus’ estate, a hothouse of secrets, betrayals, and vicious power plays, not to mention more sex and violence than an average 14-year-old boy can handle without a prescription. Creator Steven S. DeKnight and his writers constantly play to our baser instincts, and the cast, particularly the delectably sinister husband-wife team of Hannah’s Batiatus and Lucy Lawless’ Lucretia, embraces the spirit of unchecked hedonism. The action sequences could fairly be tagged as 300 on a budget, but the show cleverly overcomes its limitations by playing up the unreality of its green-screen backdrops and computer-generated effects. Spartacus delivers on the brute force of larger-than-life gladiators in conflict, but its blood-spurts and beheadings are strikingly abstract and beautiful. The sex, too, is wonderfully shameless: It’s rare for movies or TV shows to be equal-opportunity objectifiers, but there are no limits to the beef- and cheesecake on display here, and the pansexuality—men and women, men and men, women and women—exists without need for comment. It’s fuck or fight in the world of Spartacus: Blood And Sand, and that’s what pay cable is all about, right?

Key features: Commentaries on select episodes join a fourth-disc extras package that includes a 15-minute behind-the-scenes doc and a disposable batch of mini-featurettes. « Back to the A.V. Club home

October 20, 2010 Stone

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Stone

DRAMA/THRILLER:

United States, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-10-08

Running Length:

1:45

MPAA Classification:

R (Profanity, Nudity, Sexual Content, Violence)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

2.35:1

Cast:

Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Milla Jovovich, Frances Conroy

Director:

John Curran

Screenplay:

Angus MacLachlan

Cinematography:

Maryese Alberti

U.S. Distributor:

Rogue Pictures

Subtitles:

none

The problem with Stone, at least insofar as there is a problem, is that director John Curran (The Painted Veil) can't decide what he wants the movie to be. As with a previous script in which he had a hand, The Killer Inside Me, there are strong noir influences, but Stone is even more schizophrenic than the earlier effort. Is it intended to be an oblique and cryptic drama about a group of four characters whose life-trajectories are deflected by their interaction? Is it a thriller about the gamesmanship and conflict of wills between two powerful personalities? Or is it an allegory for a message about spiritual ambiguity and corruption? In a sense, Stone is all three, but its approach to each is so confused and tentative that it ends of succeeding as none. It's an interesting motion picture to be sure. The craftsmanship is impeccable as is the acting, but the storytelling is where the movie falls down. And with such a poorly realized narrative, it's hard to be enthusiastic about the many things Stone does right.

It is unquestionably good to see Robert De Niro once again in a straight dramatic role. The actor has appeared in so many comedies and parodies in recent years that it's easy to forget what a force of nature he can be when a script is tailored to his unique talents. De Niro is in fine form here and, whatever failings Stone may have, his performance is not among them. His scenes with Edward Norton (with whom he also appeared in the 2001 heist movie, The Score) crackle with tension, although the screenplay never takes full advantage of what it has in these two. Milla Jovovich, who typically appears in less lofty company, holds her own, as does Frances Conroy in a smaller part.

The story that unfolds focuses on the interaction between corrections officer Jack Mabry (De Niro), who is winding down after more than 40 years in a job about which he has become disgusted and disillusioned, and inmate Stone (Norton), who, after serving eight years of a 10-15 year sentence for arson, is up for parole. Stone is so desperate to get out from behind bars that he recruits his wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), to approach Jack away from the prison walls and do whatever is necessary to gain his cooperation. Since Lucetta is a highly sexual creature, there's little doubt what that will entail. Meanwhile, Jack's wife, Madylyn (Frances Conroy), trapped in a loveless marriage, buries her head in the sand. Things take a turn for the weird, however, when Stone appears to connect with his spiritual side, and it becomes an open question whether his transformation is real or a ploy to aid in his parole.

Stone flouts the saying that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Even though all signs post to this being a noir-tinged thriller - the shadow-rich composition, the flaws of the protagonist, the sense that there are dark secrets, and the apparent presence of a femme fatale - things are more straightforward and less suspenseful than they seem. If Stone is viewed as a thriller, it will be seen not only as pedestrian but as unsatisfying, since calling the ending "ambiguous" is a kind way to describe the situation. The movie doesn't so much end as it stops. With the main story told, the filmmakers appear unconcerned about all the loose ends left dangling.

Stone is more effective as a character piece, although none of the four primary individuals is fleshed out sufficiently for it to be entirely successful playing in this arena. The film takes short-cuts to the detriment of its credibility. For example, Stone's conversion is accomplished so quickly and with so little build-up that it seems more like a narrative contrivance than genuine slab in his character arc. It's hard to accept as real, so a possibly false predisposition is created by the way in which the story is presented. In some cases, such careful audience manipulation might be considered clever. Here, it's merely sloppy.

Curran saturates the background with religious and spiritual language and imagery. Every time a character is in a car, there's a Christian talk radio station playing. Each of the four primary characters has distinct views about morality, God, and the afterlife. (Or do they?) Curran's reach exceeds his grasp here; it's obvious he's trying to tie all this together to mean something substantive, but his message comes across as garbled and incoherent. Worse, it creates an expectation that there's going to be an eye-opening revelation, but there is none. Stone does no more to resolve this than it does to close any of the character arcs or to answer the questions raised by the thriller elements.

Perhaps Stone would have worked better as a pure art film, freed from any constraints or expectations associated with trying to attract a broader audience. It is, at its heart, not the film noir it tricks us into thinking it is, but a moody, introspective drama with four deeply flawed characters. By failing to establish a strong narrative spoke, Stone wastes some strong performances and is likely to generate the same level of irate audience reaction as the superior The American.

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When You Have Eliminated the Impossible: An Advance Review of Sherlock on Masterpiece Written by Jace | Thursday, October 21, 2010 | 10 comments »

Mention Sherlock Holmes and there are a great many things that immediately come to mind for most: that dearstalker hat (which the great detective never actually wore) and a magnifying glass, 221B Baker Street, "Elementary, my dear Watson" (a conflation of two separate quotes, actually), and that damned hound running around on the moors.

Of the seemingly infinite literary characters ever created, the human imagination has latched onto Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in a way that very few other creations have. Scores of adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective have been launched in the years since Holmes was first created. We've see young Sherlock, Nazi-fighting Sherlock, and bare-knuckle brawler Sherlock, courtesy of Guy Ritchie.

We also now have a truly modern-day Sherlock Holmes (and I'm not counting House's Gregory House here, though the comparison is apt and the homage intentional) in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' sophisticated and stellar Sherlock, which premieres Stateside on Sunday evening on PBS' Masterpiece Mystery.

With the simply titled Sherlock, Moffat and Gatiss bring the consulting detective and his companion into the 21st century, to a London that's just as fast-paced and desperate as its Victorian counterpart and just as hung up on technology. But the magnifying glasses and Inverness capes have given way to iPhones and stylishly modern tailoring, text messaging and high-tech forensics labs.

The series, containing three feature-length episodes, stars Benedict Cumberbatch (The Last Enemy) and Martin Freeman (The Office) as Holmes and Watson and each is perfectly cast here. Finding actors to bring a famous partnership such as this to life is a delicate thing but together Cumberbatch and Freeman are so supremely balanced, so ideally matched, that it seems as though each was born to play the role.

Cumberbatch's take on Holmes is one of supreme arrogance bordering on hubris; he's so misanthropic, so utterly detached from the rigors of the real world that his interpersonal skills are appalling. Witnesses, victims, police officers are all mere ants under the shoes of this intellectual Goliath, who has sublimated his emotions to the point where his every interaction is based purely on analysis, with no consideration for the feelings or secrets or others. Every encounter is a chance to score another victory for his unrivaled intellect, to deconstruct the world to its bare bones, seeing connections and implications in the simplest of details. A wedding band's condition becomes proof positive of the strength of the marriage, a coat indicative of where the wearer has been and when. He's a loner in a long coat, a scornful curmudgeon who is so very bored with the antics of the stupid and sloppy. What Holmes wants is a worthy opponent.

For his part, Freeman's Watson isn't the rotund, clumsy sidekick that many might expect. Freeman infuses the former army doctor--recently returned from Afghanistan--with a vulnerability and humor but also a steely resolve. He's handy with a loaded gun and, unlike Holmes, geography. If Holmes sees the worst of man, Watson might represent the very best that the species has to offer: he's steadfast, loyal, and even-tempered. Here, he's once again cast in the role of chronicler, providing the narrative spine to Holmes adventure. Given that this is 2010, it's only fitting that he's a blogger, albeit a reluctant one, the blogging part of his therapy after he was injured in the war.

As in the original novels, he'll also cross paths with the ladies, the fair sex being, according to Holmes, Watson's "department." So too is Freeman's Watson no monk, as much as Sherlock would prefer that he tamp down his sexual needs and lead an ascetic life like him. But there's also an intriguing sexual tension between Sherlock and Watson and a continual recurring thread in which everyone they encounter naturally assume the two men--roommates and partners--to be lovers.

It's a modern view that's not played for belly laughs but rather an indication of the times we live in. And, in the eyes of Sherlock's observers, it might make the great detective appear just a bit more human. Holmes, after all, doesn't have a lot of friends or even sympathizers, though he has formed a working relationship with Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves), one of the few coppers who sees Holmes' deductive methods for what they are: the work of a genius.

In the hands of Moffat and Gatiss and directors Paul McGuigan and Euros Lyn, Sherlock's world leaps off of the screen in dramatic fashion. Text messages appear on-screen as thought bubbles in a comic strip, a great chase sequence is brought to life using maps, smash cuts, and slick cinematography. The effect manages to take us inside Sherlock's mind, to see the way that his brain processes data, and to be a part of his deductive reasoning. While the solutions are concealed from the audience until Holmes chooses to speak them aloud, the methodology is brought to live with a clarity that's not been seen before in other adaptations. His genius--and perhaps madness--made so abundantly vivid and clear.

As for the mysteries themselves, they are top-notch. Moffat's "A Study in Pink" and Gatiss' "The Great Game" (the third and final installment) are masterworks of suspense and gripping mystery. While the second episode, "The Blind Banker"--based on "The Dancing Men"--is still better than quite a lot of television mysteries, it fails to match the superb quality of the first and third outings, which introduce Holmes' world to the audience and, in the case of "The Great Game," leave us on a tantalizing cliffhanger until the second season of Sherlock, which will head to BBC One in Fall 2011.

Along the way, the creators of Sherlock layer in some of the most memorable things about the Holmes canon: Mrs. Hudson, Moriarty, the bullet-laden smiley face, and more. I don't want to give away too much about these three lusciously layered mysteries because they're really best experienced first-hand when your mind can attempt to be half as sharp as Sherlock Holmes'. (And, yes, that is Mark Gatiss himself as, well, that would be telling.)

But it goes without saying that behind the door of 221B Baker Street lies this irresistible gem of a mystery series, an intelligent, humorous, and incisive drama for the ages. It's far from elementary, really.

Star Trek: The Next Generation "Hollow Pursuits"/"The Most Toys" B+

by Zack Handlen October 21, 2010 Star Trek: The Next Generation "Hollow Pursuits"/"The Most Toys" season 3 , episode 21-22 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating A- reader rating based on 3 ratings

"Hollow Pursuits"

Or The (First) One With Barclay

It's hard not fitting in. Everyone knows this; we all have some time in our lives when we felt like we weren't in step with the group no matter how hard we tried. But there's a special kind of hell reserved for being stuck in a group of nice, friendly folks who make every effort to make you feel welcome, and you still keep stuttering and tripping and generally making a fool of yourself. Assholes are never fun to be around, but at least when they treat you badly, you can tell yourself they're the ones with the problem. What do you do when the ones holding you down are blameless? What do you do when the only person you can really blame for your misery is yourself?

If you're Reginald Barclay of the USS Enterprise, you create a holodeck simulation that features some of your crew-mates, allowing you to mock the ones that terrify you with their self-confidence, and win the hearts of the ones you wish to woo. It's not a very good solution, seeing as how poor Reg is still late half the time, and can't speak more than three words without nearly choking to death on his embarrassment. But that's the fun thing about social humiliation: it makes you so desperate for any kind of love or respect, you cling to any response that lets you feel even a little less miserable. At the start of "Hollow Pursuits," Barclay is clinging as hard as he can, and he's inches away from getting a transfer to another ship. It's the first time on the show I can remember seeing Geordi actively frustrated with someone under his command, and it's also the first time we've seen our main characters from the perspective of someone who doesn't neatly fit in to their group. It's an interesting experience, and while "Pursuits" has its problems, it's also a telling look at how even a utopian society can still have its share of losers.

Before we get into that, though, can we all agree that Barclay's holodeck programs are utterly ridiculous? I don't mean ha-ha ridiculous, although they have their moments; Riker's diminutive double is funny, and the actors clearly enjoy getting a chance to spoof themselves. What I mean is, there is no way any of this should be possible. Allowing a crew-member to use the likenesses of his fellow crew-members in this kind of elaborate, detailed simulation, while everyone is stuck together on a space ship hurtling through the void--well, I'm not sure it's a good way to relieve stress (one of the points of the episode is that Barclay's fantasies let him hide from his problems, which means he doesn't ever deal with them in a constructive way, which means he's never going to get better), and it's definitely an excellent way to create uncomfortable situations.

I can't remember which psychologist first discussed this (I think it was Jung), but there's a danger in having imaginary conversations with the people in your life. Everybody has them; it's a way to feel more in control, a way to rehearse difficult moments before they happen, a way to try and determine the best way to elicit the desired reaction out of someone without actually having to deal with them directly. (And yes, it's a way to find comfort from a person who will never give you what you need.) The problem is, if you do this too often, it gets difficult to tell the difference between what you've really said, and what you've only dreamed of saying. Not necessarily in a "psychotic break" way, either, but in a very down-to-earth, it's happened to all of us deal. It's subtle, but it colors your perception of a relationship when you've fantasized about telling so-and-so how much you hate it when they do such-and-such. Even though you've never worked up the courage to deal with them directly, part of you remembers all those fake confrontations, and becomes resentful. Interactions are difficult enough as it is, and the more you can focus on dealing with someone when they're actually around, they better you'll be in the long run.

Now, imagine this with the holodeck involved. Barclay is the most harmless possible iteration of a disturbed personality--he's basically just a shy, nerdy teenager who has the misfortune of being stuck in an adult body. The greatest sins we see him committing in his electric dreams are making time with Troi, and winning fights against his betters, and going by the reactions of Geordi and the others when they discover his programs (all right, so the holodeck just allows anyone to wander inside, mid-routine? I can understand a senior officer being able to override a lock, but at the very least, you'd think there'd be some kind of warning to Barclay that he was no longer alone), this is all a completely new experience for them. That's part of TNG's whole perfect-future kick, that everyone's problems are solvable; Barclay's troubling because his solution isn't readily evident, not because he's dangerous or upsetting. But like I've said before, I have a hard time believing in a future like this, and I have an even harder time accepting that no one would realize the potential psychological havoc the holodeck could wreck. Imagine if Barclay had become convinced the real Troi had feelings for him, and that all he had to do to win her was take care of that stooge Riker?

This is a conceptually intriguing episode because it deals (even in an incredibly polite and unconfrontational fashion) with misfits on a ship that's designed to make everyone feel at home. We get to see how unpleasant it might be to have to deal with these people if you weren't on their wave-length, and Geordi's inability to understand that someone could just be insecure and over-worked doesn't speak very well for him as a boss. I've heard the Barclay gets more intolerable with each successive guest appearance, but I like Dwight Schultz, and I like that Barclay is legitimately awkward and not just nervous. It just seems so obvious that he's overwhelmed and unsure of himself, and Geordi's complete bafflement (especially considering that it's, y'know, Geordi, aka, "Not Mr. Cool") speaks to how ill-prepared anyone on this ship is for dealing with anyone who's not strictly normal.

Riker acts like a hard-ass, as though Barclay's repeated tardiness is a malicious or blatantly irresponsible act--but of course Riker would go the tough love route, the guy is probably champing at the bit to get a chance to play lovable army sargeant. And Picard, well, Picard has never been much use in trying to deal with people; he's not inept, exactly, he's just enough of a social deviant himself (albeit in far more productive, easier to manage ways) that this isn't his field. But Welsey? Freakin' Welsey Crusher comes up with a nickname for Barclay, and interrupts him during a staff meeting, and then doesn't understand why the guy is a little on edge. Even Troi is a waste. For a supposed empath, her ability to read that Barclay is infatuated with her and, because of this, intensely nervous around her is bizarre. I can accept that she's used to men (and the occasional woman) on the ship finding her attractive, but her attempts to relax him by turning down the lights and getting physically closer are not the actions of someone who understands what their patient is feeling.

Right, I haven't really gotten much into the plot, have I? I have notes, but let's face it, this all boils down to: Barclay needs to find someway to prove himself. So there's a crisis on the ship, and Barclay's the one who figures it out, after we get some amusing holodeck sequences, and have to squirm our way through the humiliation of Riker and Troi finding out just what the poor guy thinks of them. Everything else is just a science fiction MacGuffin designed to make Reg's redemption possible. There are good ideas here, and Schultz give an performance just the right side of creepy, but in the end, this plays too much like a children's show. That's always a tendency with TNG. The best episodes ignore it or subvert it by refusing us easy answers, but here, everybody worries about Barclay, Barclay hates himself, then Barclay ends up okay. There's a lovely scene at the end that at first plays like the poor guy is transferring off the ship, but instead turns out to be him saying good bye to his simulations; it's nicely done, but I wonder if the episode might not have been better if Barclay really had left at the end. Sometimes we forget that just wanting to be a part of a group doesn't make that group the right one for us.

Grade: B

Stray Observations: I like how there are only two possible women on board the ship that Barclay could have a crush on. Both this and "The Most Toys" feature characters who could easily be fictional versions of accepted nerd stereotypes--here we have "The Guy Who Keeps Writing Fan Fiction." "Have you ever been with a counselor before?" Yeah. It was over in five minutes, but she still charged me the full hour! Woo! Okay, moving on. Nice reference to "Booby Trap." All right, Troi claims they need to leave Barclay's holodeck program running when they go looking for him so they can get a glimpse into his psyche. I can sort of buy that. But the instant Picard calls and tells them he needs them back at work, why doesn't Geordi just turn off the simulation? Did the writers forget that none of this was actually real?

"The Most Toys"

Or The One Where Data Is A Valuable Collector's Item

There are sometimes shows that run under the surface of our favorite shows--well, maybe not shows entirely, but suggestions of deeper motives and darker implications than the surface level allows. As a critic, my biggest fault (well, okay, one of my biggest faults) is my tendency to over-think things. With some series or books or movies, this can be a liability, as I'll either give credit where it isn't due by seeing something that doesn't actually exist; or else I'll over-consider a concept until I can no longer remember why anyone would enjoy it in the first place. But in reviewing Trek, in all the iterations I've seen so far, over-thinking has served me well. That's part of the fun of watching genre television, after all. They give us the worlds, and the barest of trappings to color them, we provide the minutia.

For instance, "The Most Toys" is arguably just a variant on "The Measure of a Man." It is an excellent variant, no question, and it stands quite well on its own, but we are dealing here with concepts of ownership and sentient property, and we already know the answers to these questions. Thankfully, this time the antagonist is a non-Federation man, which means we don't have to worry about Starfleet suddenly forgetting the lessons it should've already learned. Data's conversations with the horrible Mr. Fajo (played by the not horrible, and in fact quite excellent, Saul Rubinek) take us down familiar semantic paths, but they remain satisfying, for all their familiarity, because it's good to see Data standing up for himself. Fajo is a particularly nasty villain; TNG doesn't always do nasty bad guys, and it's a pleasure here to see one who's both fully drawn and completely reprehensible.

There's something else going on here, too, and it's much more subtle. For a call-back, it mostly reminds me of one of the final scenes of "The Ensigns of Command," when a pretty young woman tried to put the moves on Data, and got, well, exactly what you'd expect. Nobody flirts with Data in "Toys," but there is that same fascinating glimpse of Data's alien nature, that same peek below the surface of a being who appears charming and harmless, but has a good deal more depth to him than anyone, even his friends, really realizes. It makes me wonder if maybe there's an episode that never got filmed, that told some darker story about our favorite android. It makes me wonder just what the hell he gets up to with all those countless hours he spends aboard the Enterprise, not sleeping, not eating, just being there.

It's this subtle character exploration that gives "Toys" its edge. The plot is straightforward enough: Mr. Fajo collects one of a kind items. Data is a one of a kind item, so Mr. Fajo fakes Data's death and then collects him. There is then much discussion between Data and Fajo about the nature of captivity, about Data being a sentient being who is unaccustomed to ownership. It's terrific stuff, because Rubinek is nerdy without ever being likable, and Data is always the most interesting when he's in a situation where a human being would experience emotion. His reactions throughout the episode have this wonderful ambiguity to them, summarized beautifully in his final line (which is in Stray Observations, if you forgot it); he has no feelings, but it's impossible not to hear his words and feel some sense of righteous fury yourself. There is something implacable about Data. It's almost always used as a joke--his constant questions about the reasons behind illogical behavior, his explanations, his inability to understand when a conversation has reached a conclusion. Once Data reaches a conclusion, and has exhausted all other avenues, he will not weaken out of uncertainty or self-doubt or fear. That's not very funny when he turns his implacability on you.

While all this is happening, the crew of the Enterprise is dealing with Data's "death." It's always a compromise when a show has to pretend one of its characters is gone. We know Data isn't really dead, and the writers know this (and know we know it). That means the grief the characters show is essentially wasted screen-time; it's irrelevant to the plot, and as audience members, we don't experience any catharsis watching the mourning because we aren't mourning ourselves. Plus, if Data actually died, you couldn't simply deal with it in a few scenes of one episode. There would need to be some sense of impact, and since Geordi needs to suspect something is wrong almost immediately for the rest of the episode to work, there's just no time to waste on unnecessary tears. (Yes, Tasha Yar's death was given about a scene, but c'mon--it was Tasha Yar.)

So, there's a compromise. Geordi and Wesley are sad, Picard reads a line from a book he gave Data, but there's no real pretense that this is actual raw grief. It plays more like, Data's shuttle explodes, everyone assumes he's dead, and then we cut to a month later after the initial wave of shock and pain have ridden through. You could say that the reason we don't see the impact more is that Geordi "senses" that something is wrong, but that's just a cheat. I don't have a huge problem with this, really, as it's largely dictated by storytelling requirements (and you could even argue that the detachment we see is just professionalism). What I do have a problem with is how much urgency the episode loses every time we cut away from Data and Fajo. Those two (and Fajo's tormented assistant, Varia) are what this episode is really about. Geordi needs to figure out that Data's "death" was faked so that the Enterprise can arrive and beam him back to safety, but his story isn't strong enough to support as many scenes as it gets.

That doesn't stop this from being an excellent episode, thankfully, because Data's storyline is very, very good, and its conclusion is satisfying. After he's kidnapped, Data is forced into essentially passive resistance; Fajo is protected, and Data can't use physical strength to escape. But his willingness to compromise himself to protect Varia wins Fajo's assistant over, and she helps Data attempt an escape. It's not very successful. While Fajo's thugs are easily dispatched, Fajo manages to use a disruptor on Varia, killing her. The disruptor is a nasty weapon that kills slower than a phaser, causing great pain as it does so, which means things get tense when Data gets the drop on Fajo with one. Fajo is convinced that Data won't fire, but after reasoning out that he has no other choice, Data does fire. It's just lucky for the collector that the Enterprise picks just that moment to beam Data back aboard.

I'll admit it, I was a little disappointed by this. It seemed like a half-measure--let's show Data is capable of killing when given no other choice, but let's not have him actually kill anyone. (Still, he basically lies to Riker back on the ship. Has he ever lied before? I also didn't write down exactly what he said, so I'm not sure if it's a direct lie or a careful evasion. But then, why the evasion? Curious.) Thankfully, the final exchange with Fajo pays off the character's survival. As with "Ensigns," it's another case with a humanoid assuming Data will have an emotional response--here, Fajo assumes Data will gloat. The beauty of it is, Data doesn't show any sign of pleasure or triumph. Because of course he can't. And yet, there must be some reason he want down to see Fajo in the brig, some reason he explained to him that all his possessions are gone. It might just be circuits firing. Or maybe he was thinking of flung acid, a chair, and a dead woman.

Grade: A-

Stray Observations: One scene that definitely doesn't work: Troi talking with Worf about his promotion to Data's position. It's pointless, because we know the promotion won't last long, and it makes Troi look nosy and confrontational. Spiner is really terrific in this episode. There's a great moment when he's processing his options near the end--it's like if the blinking light on a computer hard drive had a face. "Tell me, Data, have you killed yet?" "No sir, it does not. I do not feel pleasure. I am only an android." General question: I never really thought about it before, but someone recently pointed out to me that my TV reviews are all in present tense. I like writing that way because I like trying to capture some of the excitement of a good episode in the summary, but I honestly don't know how it reads for anyone else. Should I switch to past tense? Is this confusing? Next week, it's (woo!) "Sarek" and (oh sweet dear jeebus) "Menage a Troi."

"Keeping Me Alive" A-

by Todd VanDerWerff October 21, 2010 Cougar Town "Keeping Me Alive" season 2 , episode 5 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

A- av club rating B reader rating based on 18 ratings

At this point, it's become obvious that a.) nothing will break up the cul-de-sac crew (a coinage so weirdly irritating I can't stop using it) and b.) Busy Philipps crying will add at least a point to any review of this show. I really like the way Cougar Town is digging into its own history this season, but it sometimes feels like the show is doing this in lieu of moving forward (or moving even further backward into the characters' stories). That's for fairly obvious reasons: There's not an immediately obvious engine driving this show. It's about a bunch of middle-aged people who hang out in a divorced woman's house and drink a lot. I sort of have this nightmare vision where ABC picks up the show for a third season but retools it to be about these same people hanging out all of the time, but in a police station or something, so there's something obvious to tell stories about week to week. Because at present, the show's loosey-goosey vibe is what I like best about it, yet it's also the thing that I'm half convinced stands in the way of the show being a bigger hit.

It's somewhat forgotten that when Cougar Town debuted as a show about an older woman who started dating younger guys, it actually drew better ratings than it does right now, airing after a bona fide hit in Modern Family. (Indeed, its debut actually outperformed the Modern Family debut in a few key demographics.) The biggest thing standing in the way of Cougar Town may not be the name, which everybody involved in the production admits is possibly a bad idea at this point in time, but, rather, the fact that if you want to get someone interested in the show, it's all but impossible to tell them what it's about. When it was "an older woman starts banging younger dudes," that was a show you could explain to people, even if it sounded incredibly trashy. But "middle-aged people hanging around on lazy afternoons and drinking a lot and having strangely moving conversations about the ways they've failed each other"? That's a whole other kettle of fish.

The thing is, all comedies improve with time to get to know the characters. The Cheers pilot might be the best sitcom pilot of all time, in terms of introducing characters and situation and still getting actual laughs, but even that show takes on weight once you've given it five or six episodes to really get going. (And, of course, toss your picks for greatest comedy pilots out in comments, by all means.) One of the things that has stood in the way of comedy making a significant comeback is the fact that TV comedy often doesn't pilot well (if I may use pilot as a verb). Comedy is built so heavily off of characters interacting with and reacting to each other that it means a handful of episodes has to air before viewers can really start to understand the depths of humor the show is capable of. But in a world where pilot numbers often make or break a show, that's a problem.

Even if that's true of every comedy, though, it's especially true of Cougar Town. Every week, people wander through in comments and say something to the effect of having heard the show was good but having dropped in for that night's episode and not gotten the appeal. And to a real degree, that's because there's very little to hang onto in Cougar Town, in terms of premise or setting or even humor style. For better or worse, the characters ARE the show, and if you haven't spent a few episodes with them, it can be tough to get a grip on what the show is going for. Bobby talking nonsense with a fellow redneck is hysterical to me because I've seen all of the show's episodes and know that Bobby's redneck past (h/t Ben Folds Five) is a recurring motif that gets goofier every time it comes up. But if you've never seen the show before? It just manifests as a guy wandering around, talking in a faux-Southern accent about something called a "shnook."

But this season, the show's been digging back into its past, finding the story avenues it mostly abandoned in season one and seeing what happens when it digs them up again. The heart of tonight's - uncharacteristically focused - episode centered on Jules continuing to pay alimony to Bobby. When he's made fun of for this fact during a game of Truth or Pennycan (a device I hope the show brings back), he immediately restructures his life to get off of the alimony payments. He's able to do it, but only by cutting his health insurance. Does he then immediately injure himself trying to catch a Frisbee with his mouth while diving from a diving board? Have you watched television before?

More broadly, this episode focuses on insecurity. Ellie's insecure about losing her smarts and sophistication because she hangs out with a buncha "dummies." Bobby's insecure about his acceptance of alimony, which leads to him getting a job with Jules, a job that proves he's adept at getting customers through the door but not closing the deal (or keeping the office clean while they're there). And Laurie continues to be insecure about the fact that she and Smith have broken up, that he didn't love her as much as she loved him, though the two continue to try to be friends (a play that Grayson and Andy, rightly, find suspect). The closing montage here is maybe the best of the season, as Laurie breaks down again about why Smith doesn't love her, Jules and Bobby talk about their situation, and Travis reassures Ellie that they're smarter than everyone else mostly because they've realized they're not. They're three good scenes, and they go even better together.

The question, though, is how much any of this will play for someone who might not know that Jules and Bobby were married before the series began or who didn't see Laurie and Smith's relationship take an intriguing turn toward serious last season. Character interaction tends to be what I value in comedy, and I love that every character on Cougar Town has a different relationship with every other character. But those relationships have taken time to build, and understanding them requires that the audience - or at least the audience members who are just tuning in - take a few episodes to let the show wash over them. "Keeping Me Alive" is probably the best episode of this season so far, but it's also the one that proves the show probably needs to find some sort of second-season-unique storyline for new viewers to jump on board.

Stray observations: I'm running behind, so here's an all-quotes edition. "Do you guys wanna know what bejazzling is?" "Yes, I ... don't?" "He's even too redneck for me, and I've got a cousin named Grits." "The margarita instruction manual wasn't a book." "Sad is when your foster brother loses an eye in a backyard wrestling match." "I was counting the exclamation point." "That's who I am now, Travis. A penny-throwing dummy." "They're too preachy, and you can't clap when someone dies because it's real."

Patton Oswalt ready to start dating networks again, developing his own Fox sitcom by Sean O'Neal October 21, 2010

Having been unceremoniously ousted from NBC’s proposed Matthew Broderick sitcom Beach Lane—which was then unceremoniously never picked up anyway, then quickly forgotten about during a lavish, well-attended ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria—Patton Oswalt has finally found solace in the arms of Fox, which is now said to be developing a half-hour sitcom as "a showcase for Oswalt's on- and off-camera skills.” Oswalt has teamed with former Mr. Show writer and Comedy Death-Ray host Scott Aukerman for the comedy, which will star Oswalt as a guy whose wife of 20 years leaves him, forcing him to learn to feed and dress himself again, as well as get back out there in the dating world. Not much else is known about the project at this point, so we’re free to speculate that this will essentially be a sitcom form of Takashi Miike’s Audition, with every episode featuring a different part of Oswalt’s body being mutilated or amputated. (Which would still be better than Stacked.) « Back to the A.V. Club home

Interview Bob Woodward

by Gregg LaGambina October 21, 2010 Article Tools

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Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward is best known (alongside colleague Carl Bernstein) for reporting on the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s unceremonious downfall in 1974. In 1976, Robert Redford was even flatteringly cast to portray Woodward in the Academy Award-winning film All The President’s Men.

Such notoriety at the start of a career can be a blessing and a curse, yet Woodward has prevailed, continuing to gain access and information where others have failed. He’s a famously tough nut to crack in terms of revealing personal ideology; over 39 years with the Post, he’s tried to maintain an old-school reporter’s objectivity in a world now dominated by Bill O’Reillys and Keith Olbermanns.

He’s written definitive accounts of the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the latter spanning four separate books over Bush’s two terms. His extensive bibliography also includes an investigative look into the Central Intelligence Agency (Veil: The Secret Wars Of The CIA), and Wired: The Short Life And Fast Times Of John Belushi. He’s received two Pulitzer Prizes and has written 12 No. 1 bestselling books.

To coincide with the end of the first half of President Obama’s first term, Woodward recently published Obama’s Wars, the result of an 18-month investigation into the current administration’s lengthy, contentious deliberations over Afghanistan.

In a recent conversation with The A.V. Club, Woodward, as usual, played his cards close to his chest, but managed to describe a White House he sees as intellectually apart from the military, award an imaginary Best Supporting Actor nod to Vice President Biden, betray affection for General David Petraeus, and express astonishment that America hasn’t been attacked again since September 11.

The A.V. Club: In Obama’s Wars, the president emerges as uniquely isolated. It’s difficult to gauge whose advice he trusts on troop deployment. His White House staff is preoccupied with politics; his military advisors are focused on victory. Obama is somewhere in the middle and seems frustrated, lonely even.

Bob Woodward: That’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s lonely, because of course he can talk to anyone, but there is a divide within him, on a cerebral, intellectual level. He hears and reads all the intelligence and the military analysis, and realizes it’s a pretty dreary situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan—which, of course, is the key to this—and he says, “That’s where the cancer is.” So what do you do? How do you coerce, or find the leverage on Pakistan? How do you fight a war in Afghanistan that isn’t going to be 10 years or a trillion dollars, as he says? So he understands the downside, but he’s the Commander In Chief; he’s got to be the boss, he’s got to lead. So he comes up with his own strategy of 30,000 troops instead of 40,000, but then insists we’re going to withdraw sometime next year.

The word I guess I would use is, so much is unsettled in this war. He wants out. Time and time again, at these meetings, he just lets loose with unambiguous assertions—“This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan.” There cannot be any wiggle room. He tells his vice president, “If what I proposed is not working, I’m not going to be like other presidents and stick to this based on my ego or politics.” In other words, he’s not going to be Lyndon Johnson.

As I’ve been thinking about this [book] and talking to people about it, it’s about the Obama we don’t know. The message management in the White House—they have an iron grip on everyone, to a certain extent, determining what the story is going to be. I had 18 months to try to find out what goes on, really, behind the scenes. It’s a look into the way he leads and thinks about things. But the tough decisions are in the future for him, in terms of the war in Afghanistan, the secret war in Pakistan, and the war on terror. He’s got to clarify—because I just think it’s not clear enough—exactly what he wants and where we’re going here.

AVC: As described in the book, Obama keeps going over Afghanistan strategy because he isn’t satisfied with his options. But the people he tasked with generating more options are military minds who are hardwired solely for victory.

BW: That’s a really good word: hardwired. They’re military generals and officers and Admiral Mullen, the Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs—they think in terms of victory, winning, words President Obama never uses. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to win. Of course he wants to win. But he sees how hard it is, and he doesn’t want to get into [another] Vietnam, and Biden is there, kind of like a Greek chorus of one, shouting out, “We’re going to get locked into Vietnam if we don’t limit this mission somehow!” The president agrees and insists privately to Biden, “If this doesn’t work, I’m not going to be like the other presidents.”

AVC: Biden is preoccupied with a Vietnam-style quagmire. In the book, Senior Advisor David Axelrod characterizes General Petraeus as “Mr. Counterinsurgency,” someone who thinks “he could simply take his Iraq model on the road.” Are the wars in Vietnam and Iraq relevant historical precedents, or useful in terms of strategy in Afghanistan?

BW: Well, that’s a good question. That’s the way everyone frames a debate: in terms of experience and their knowledge. And, of course, the most immediate experience and knowledge is Iraq and Vietnam. And they don’t necessarily apply. It’s a conundrum of much greater magnitude than I realized when I started this project.

AVC: Obama was 13 when the Vietnam War ended, and as a senator, he was opposed to the war in Iraq. So he has no real visceral experience with Vietnam like Biden, and Petraeus is regarded by some to be the hero of Iraq’s turnaround. The president wants out of Afghanistan, and he’s talking to people with historical precedents he doesn’t share, who want to win—

BW: That’s exactly right. And that’s got to be resolved. I think it’s hanging, and there’s got to be a rigorous clarification. Or there should be, ideally for everyone, but particularly for the troops on the ground.

AVC: At one point, Obama refers to Eisenhower’s famous speech where he coined the term “military-industrial complex,” but he seizes on the passage “Each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” It’s a reminder about all that’s going on outside of the margins of this book, like the potential collapse of the economy.

BW: Right. But he’s not commander in chief of the economy. He talks to the economists and the treasury secretary, and all they can tell him is “We can try this and we can try that. We could do more of the stimulus package. We could get the Federal Reserve to do the following.” But the belly of the beast here is American business, and the people who own and run the businesses. That’s where the economy is determined. The belly of the beast in this war is in Obama’s head. He could tomorrow say, “You know what? I’ve decided that we didn’t add enough troops. I’m sending the whole military to Afghanistan.” In a practical sense, no one could stop him. I remember talking to academics when I had done four books on [George W.] Bush, and they were saying, “Congress declares war.” And I said, “No, even though it’s in the Constitution, in practice, presidents decide how to employ the force.” I remember saying, “George Bush, when he was president, could order the invasion of Mexico tomorrow.” Somebody stood up in the back and in anguish said, “Don’t give him any ideas.”

It underscores the point of the authority and the concentration of power that’s in the presidency on these matters. Frankly, that’s why I picked it [as a topic]. I also picked it because Obama gets the consequences. You’ve gone through the book. When he goes out to Dover [Air Force base] and looks at the caskets and tells his aides, “I’m coming to see what the reaction of the families is to this.” He gets it and knows the sacrifice. I think that makes it harder, because there’s no chart that’s going to show him “Spend this much money, this much force, this much time, and you’ll win.” It’s what Rumsfeld called the unknown unknown. In the end, this book is an attempt to draw a portrait of [Obama].

AVC: Some in the press characterized that trip as nothing more than a photo-op. But you see it as genuine, with Obama truly wanting to have that experience of seeing the cost of his decisions.

BW: Yeah, exactly. And I think he was trying to assess… One of the worst things that could happen to him, or any president, is the parents and widows of the fallen getting up and rebelling and saying, “Wait a minute. This war makes no sense.” What is really profound in all of this is that they don’t. This is the sacrifice they signed up for, they carry the burden, and rarely do you hear of people who’ve lost somebody in these wars going after Obama.

AVC: Whether it was deliberate or not, in your book, General Petraeus seems to hover on the fringes. There appears to be no real intellectual or personal connection between him and Obama.

BW: Well, that’s exactly one of the problems. And you’ve nailed it. Petraeus is the commander there—he’s the Central Commander, and then he becomes the Afghan commander all by himself, so he has the ball—but there’s not that personal relationship. Obama didn’t have it with [General] McChrystal! He met with McChrystal for 10 minutes. I said to Obama, “You’re picking your Eisenhower.” Obama’s response was to come back very hard and say, “Well, that suggests I’m FDR. I’m not FDR.” I said, “But this is your war.” To spend 10 minutes… The distance is… It’s the president’s job to close that gap.

AVC: Somewhere in the book, someone makes the extraordinary claim, “If there was someone trying to roll Obama, it was Petraeus.”

BW: Yes. That was General Lute, the guy in the White House, the guy who really says to Obama, “You don’t have to do this!”

AVC: And after the failed bombing attempt in Times Square, Petraeus is made to feel like he’s been left out to dry when he refers to the [would-be bomber] Faisal Shahzad as a “lone wolf” in an interview, and then the White House contradicts him by pointing out that the Pakistani Taliban trained Shahzad. You quote Petraeus as saying, “They’re fucking with the wrong guy.”

BW: I mean, that’s just… And there’s the scene where Petraeus talks to [Chief Of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and he says, “I can be your lead sled dog!” And Emanuel says, “Oh, yeah, yeah…” But they never bring him into the inner circle. There’s always a distance here. Part of it is cultural, part of it is, I don’t know, but Petraeus is Obama’s Eisenhower. He’s the guy who is either going to make progress, or lose, or win—or whatever—this war. There’s no one more important to the Obama presidency. Petraeus is very smart, very political. I think he almost has an inhuman focus on his job. There’s no one like him, in terms of level of effort and time against the problem, and the president should have a Mr. President/Dave talk. “What do you think? Where do we go? What can I do? What are you doing? What’s on your mind? What are your worries?” But there is that distance that is… [Pauses.]

AVC: But you could argue that Petraeus nurtures this distance, even if he didn’t create it. His Central Command offices are in Tampa, Florida, where he’s literally in his own tower, where he moves money around to create his own commissions without permission from anybody—

BW: Well, it’s not commissions. He creates this Center Of Excellence, this intelligence and analytical group. More power to them. It reminds me of reporters. In other words, people are going to work five years on things, and they’re going to do the homicide-detective work. We need more homicide-detective work in intelligence—getting into the details, getting on the ground, not sitting up and spinning their wheels analyzing things. “What’s this tribe really like? How do we get to them? Are they on our side? Are they on [Afghanistan President] Karzai’s side? Are they secretly supporting the Taliban? Are they openly supporting the Taliban? How many fighters do they have? Where do they get their money?” Our soldiers on the ground need to know these people. We need to figure out who they are. As do the intelligence people. So that money is some of the best-spent money, because it is directed at gathering real facts.

AVC: To cut to the chase: In your estimation, do you see Petraeus remaining purposefully aloof as an early strategy to go for Obama’s job in 2012?

BW: No. I don’t. Because at these meetings, he says—and I think it’s a telling line—he tells the president, “In the military, we’ll support you, we take orders. We are not self-employed.” That’s exactly the way they operate. At the same time, they push really hard and they erect these four or five blocks of granite and kind of box the president in where he would have to do something very radical in terms of strategy or troop levels. You know, these are his generals, his secretary of defense. I report [Bob] Gates, the secretary of defense, saying to the generals, “I’ll give you as many troops as you need for as long as you need them.” In other words, “I’m going to give you a blank check, but I have battle space like you do in Afghanistan. I have battle space in Washington.” In other words, he has to fight the political battles. I think it’s General Lute who says “The secretary of defense should be the final window into the world of choice for the president.” Gates doesn’t do that. He tells the generals, “I’ll give you as much as you want for as long as you need it.” So at the civilian level, there’s insufficient analysis about “Well, what are the alternatives here?” It’s Vice President Biden—who has a Best Supporting Actor role in this book—making some very potent arguments.

AVC: The scene you describe where Biden arrives at the White House early in the morning to surprise Obama in the passageway between his residence and the Oval Office—

BW: Yeah, isn’t that something? And Biden says, “You’re gonna have to make some goddamn tough decisions, man!” Not “Mr. President,” [Laughs.] but “man.”

AVC: Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton also plays an interesting supporting role in the book. During one of the strategy meetings, you describe a moment where she “seemed to be almost jumping out of her seat, showing every sign she wanted to be called on.” Depending on your political persuasion, so much can be read into that one moment: her ambition, impatience, wanting credit, having the answers, etc. And when it becomes clear that she’s siding with the military and General McChrystal, you write, “It was a definitive moment in her relationship to the White House… Could she ever truly be on the Obama team?”

BW: You really read this closely! That’s a really important line. For the political staff on the White House, like Axelrod, he says to Obama, “Can you ever really trust Hillary?” And there’s this pushback from them. I think, from Obama’s point of view, he decoded Hillary Clinton and said, “She’ll be loyal if she takes the job of secretary of state.” He’s well aware of her loyalty as first lady during some of the most turbulent times in her husband’s presidency, including the Lewinsky affair. She stood by him. So Obama is able to use her, but the political staff just won’t embrace her. Again, there’s that sense, like with Petraeus or with Admiral Mullen, or with Admiral Blair—who was eventually fired as director of national intelligence—that there’s insufficient team-building here.

AVC: Some of the military brass seem to have a problem with Rahm Emanuel. Director Of National Intelligence Dennis Blair gets exasperated at one point, noticing how much access Emanuel has in terms of military decisions.

BW: It was in the context of, [General James] Jones is Obama’s national security advisor, his deputy Tom Donilon has access to the president, Dennis McDonough has access, John Brennan the counterintelligence guy has access, Rahm Emanuel sometimes dabbles and gets involved—so there’s five national security advisors. That’s when Blair says, “It’s the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen!”

AVC: How much will Rahm Emanuel’s recent resignation affect how the White House operates in the future?

BW: Well, I describe him as “the hammer.” The second day of the administration, when Petraeus comes in and says we’re going to start working on the number we’ve asked for, it’s Emanuel who slams the door and says, “General, I know you’re doing your job, but I didn’t hear the president of the United States make that decision.” In other words, from the first week, Emanuel’s putting the brakes on. At one point, right on the eve of this decision about the 30,000 [additional troops to be deployed to Afghanistan], Obama says, “Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.” So Rahm’s view is pretty clear.

AVC: You gained access to the 66-page classified “Commander’s Summary,” drafted by General McChrystal, assessing the situation in Afghanistan. You and Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli decided it should be published, but you met first with Pentagon officials to determine what to withhold. You’ve probably been in countless similar meetings, and your own history would imply that you lean instinctively toward the people’s right to know. How do you parse out the bullshit from what is truly in the interest of national security to keep confidential? Do you ever fear that you might leak something that could truly cause harm?

BW: Well, I hope not. And I listened very carefully to the arguments. We listened to the arguments on the McChrystal Report, and we even cut out the line about “inadequate intelligence.” Which we now know is, of course, part of the problem chapter and verse, but the Pentagon didn’t want it in there. But we were able to publish 98 percent of that assessment, and tell people what was really going on. That document is very important in the whole narrative here, because when we published it, I had people in the White House who were furious, and then as they got further into the strategic assessment, and the review by Obama was done—a number of them didn’t understand how for McChrystal, it was a cry from the heart: “This war is going the wrong way and I don’t have enough troops. If you don’t give me more, we’re going to have mission failure.” Only getting that into the public forum focused people on what McChrystal was really saying.

This, of course, is my problem with all this classified information that’s over-classified. That could have been put out. Why not tell the world what exactly is going on? I think everyone benefited. It’s a smart assessment. It lays out all of the issues, many of which exist today. The part about where they were going to conduct operations in the future, we didn’t publish, of course. So there’s a way to balance it. Now, I always am very aggressive and putting out much more than people would like, but that’s the business I’m in.

AVC: In these meetings, they spend weeks trying to define the distinction between the words disrupt, dismantle, degrade, and defeat. It’s amazing how much of the decisions in Afghanistan were based simply on what language to use when describing the mission as it pertains to the Taliban.

BW: Isn’t it? They hadn’t decided, and then they did this strategic implementation plan, and Gates said “Well, let’s make it ‘defeat.’” The most ambitious goal. Then they started looking at it and they realized, “Now wait a minute. The Taliban are part of the fabric of Afghanistan. You can’t defeat them, so you degrade them.” Well what does that mean to the soldier? “Come on, men! Let’s go degrade the enemy!”

AVC: You live in Washington, D.C. with your wife. You have two children of your own. You’ve had the unique experience of witnessing up close the people charged not only with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but with keeping this country free from terrorism. Do you feel safe with these people in charge?

BW: There’s never total safety. You look at all these warnings, and when I interviewed President Obama, he said—what has become very controversial to some people—he said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack.” And went on to say, “We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but we can absorb it.” A lot of Republicans jumped on him and said “He’s almost giving up.” I think what he’s doing—because he realizes he lives in this sea of warnings about attacks, that someday one’s going to get through. As he said, “One man, one bomb,” and it’s going to traumatize the country. I think he’s trying to say, “We’ll deal with it; we can absorb it. We’re strong.”

It’s astonishing there hasn’t been another attack since 9/11. Absolutely astonishing. One of the mysteries. It’s the sequence of good luck and whatever has happened here, but it’s almost heightened the worry about that one small attack. And Dick Cheney’s out there waiting in the wings ready to pounce and say “See? It’s because you let down your guard. It’s because you didn’t have enhanced interrogation. It’s because you’re not us.” It could be a big deal. So I think Obama sees intellectually that there could be another attack, and I think he was speaking honestly, realistically, “We could absorb a terrorist attack.”

AVC: Would the capturing or killing of Osama bin Laden allow the president to declare some kind of victory, symbolic or otherwise? Could it act as a pivot point to allow him to move toward an entirely new anti-terrorist strategy that is really his own, instead of this inherited quagmire in Afghanistan?

BW: It would be a big deal. But maybe only for a day or two, because it would depend on what followed. If there were terrorist attacks in this country or elsewhere in the world, all the analysts would be on TV and say, “See? Bin Laden wasn’t that important to the organization.” So it would depend on what would happen, but you’ve posed an interesting idea that if that happened, you could use it as a pivot point to say “Okay, we’ve essentially dismantled and defeated al-Qaeda. They’re not in Afghanistan.” And you could have some sort of significant troop withdrawal. At the same time, the war on the ground is ugly and violent, and we’re losing a lot of troops.

You can’t divorce yourself, when you look at this, from the sacrifice and payment some individuals and families are making in this war. The responsibility and price is unevenly distributed. I asked this question of people in Obama’s circle working on this, “What do we owe the people who are over there?” And one of them said, “Everything. They’re our surrogates.” I then asked “What are we giving them? Are we giving them everything?” Of course, the answer is, “No.” Part of what we’re not giving them is the clarity of mission and leadership and focus and commitment. The Obama campaign of 2008, the clarion call, “Yes we can!” We haven’t heard it about these wars. « Back to the A.V. Club home

Boxing Gym

B+

by Noel Murray October 21, 2010 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating C+ reader rating based on 2 ratings Director: Frederick Wiseman Cast: Documentary Rated: Not Rated Running time: 91 minutes

Say this for Frederick Wiseman: No one is ever going to accuse one of his documentaries of being fake, or a hoax. Wiseman’s latest film, Boxing Gym, adheres to the same vérité principles he’s been following since the ’60s. He settles into one place—in this case, an Austin, Texas gym where amateurs, pros, and hobbyists of all ages and ethnicities practice footwork and jabs—and just takes in the action and conversations, without trying to guide the action or even ask any questions.

In keeping with its subject matter, Boxing Gym is a little faster-paced and dynamic than some of Wiseman’s other films about public institutions. It’s much shorter, with more camera moves and quick cuts. But there’s no narrative, and though Wiseman spends a lot of time observing the gym’s owner and manager, Richard Lord, he doesn’t stick long enough with Lord—or anyone else, for that matter—to turn Boxing Gym into a character sketch. The movie isn’t all that aestheticized, either. Boxing Gym is shot on film, and it features more than a few beautiful shots, but whenever anything looks too good, Wiseman cuts away quickly. Anything that smacks of a director imposing a point of view on the material, Wiseman avoids.

As such, viewers’ interest in Boxing Gym will likely wax and wane, depending on their interest in martial arts. There’s a lot of footage of athletes skipping rope and socking heavy-bags here, and not enough of the downtime, when they sit around and talk technique, chat about their kids, tell anecdotes about what they do when they aren’t working out, or pontificate about how dangerous the world is becoming. Still, anyone who’s spent any time around gym-rats will appreciate how well Wiseman captures that peculiar mix of geekiness and sweaty determination that marks those who use brute physicality as an escape from the grind of everyday life. And in a way, Wiseman’s intimate-but-unrevealing approach suits the culture he’s observing. People walk in the door, pay their $50 monthly fee, and get as much action as they can before the round-timer goes beep.

Joss Whedon to writing alums: "You have done well, my pretties" by Leonard Pierce October 21, 2010

Joss Whedon's writing staff have learned their lessons well at the feet of their dark master, and are now being sent out into the world to spread their wicked gospel. According to TVWeek (via The Vulture),former Buffy/Angel/Dollhouse vets Marti Noxon, Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain have inked a deal with network powerhouse The CW to develop two new shows that involve -- gasp! -- hot young women who have unusual powers. Craft and Fain will be helming an adaptation of Vampire Diaries author L.J. Smith's Secret Circle series, about a California teenager who moves to New England to pursue the glamorous lifestyle of a witch, while Noxon will be in charge of Chloe, about a deceased teenage girl who comes back to life as a "Divine Covert Operator", which is like a witch, only deader and more nosey. We're going to make a wild guess and say that Secret Circle and Chloe will feature lots of attractive, ass-kicking young girls who also get romantically involved with bad boys. Tragedy (the dramatic equivalent of hilarity) will likely ensue, but without Whedon's direct participation, will there be the requisite rapid cancellation followed by vociferous fan outcry? Time will tell. « Back to the A.V. Club home

e Films of Charlie Chaplin

BY ROGER EBERT / October 20, 2010

Charlie Chaplin When: Friday through Nov. 4 Where: Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Tickets: $9.25 per movie; all-Chaplin pass, $30 in advance (via the Music Box website); $35 at the door Info: musicboxtheatre.com

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It used to be said that Charlie Chaplin was the most famous living person in the history of the earth. You could make a good argument for that. He was the first great star of motion pictures, he made silent films so everyone could understand them, and his films penetrated to the most distant corners of the globe.

Today with television such fame is common. Consider the grief when Michael Jackson died. But Chaplin was a new species of famous person, and part of his success is that he almost always played the same person, the Little Tramp. Other silent comedians were also famed: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Ben Turpin. But even though they might look similar from picture to picture, and Buster often wore his porkpie hat, they played different characters. The Little Tramp was a constant.

The great moments from Chaplin's work will be featured in an ambitious two-week retrospective starting today (Oct. 22) at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Ave.

Charlie Chaplin was not only famous, but very good. He directed his later films, and so much was he in command of every nuance and gesture, so much was he the designer of elaborate sight gags, so much were the films tailored for the Tramp, that in a sense the character was the auteur.

Chaplin is in a constant state of rediscovery. Unlike many silent stars, he was rich and powerful enough to control the prints of most of his own films; still overseen by his estate, they seem to be in a constant state of restoration, so that you could argue they look better today than when the majority of people saw them for the first time.

The Music Box extravaganza is part of a retrospective, touring nationally, organized by MK2, the Chaplin estate and Janus Films. There will be new 35mm prints of such classics as "The Kid," "The Circus," City Lights" and "Modern Times."

It's not the first time Chaplin has returned to glory. I recall the first great retro which played here at the old Carnegie theater, circa 1967. Then in 1972 I was at the Venice Film Festival when it showed literally every Chaplin film it could find, with Charlie in person. That climaxed with a breathtaking outdoor screening of "City Lights" in the Piazza San Marco, jammed with a huge audience, and after the film ended (not without some tears), the great square fell dark and a single spotlight picked out a balcony high above, onto which stepped a small, happy man.

Admission to single screenings is $9.25. There's an "All Chaplin Pass" good for every screening at $30 in advance or $35 at the box office. If you plan to see at least six films, that's the way to go. Anyone who turns up for the Halloween screenings dressed as the Tramp gets in for $6. The complete schedule of the Chaplin festival is online at http://j.mp/ceaumY

he Circus (1928)

BY ROGER EBERT / October 20, 2010

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Charlie Chaplin was a perfectionist in his films and a calamity in his private life. These two traits clashed as he was making "The Circus," one of his funniest films and certainly the most troubled. When he sat down to write his autobiography, he simply never mentioned it, perhaps because he wanted to sidestep that entire period. Yet a delightful movie emerged from the turmoil.

When he released it in 1928, Charlie was long since established as the greatest star in Hollywood. He must have feared the advent of the talkies, which by bringing sound to the movies would rob him of his silence. But more than sound was on his mind during the two years it took him to finally finish his production.

Always attracted to young girls, he married the 16-year-old Mildred Harris in 1918, when he was 29. After affairs with Pola Negri and Marion Davies, in 1924 he married Lita Grey, who said she was 16 but may have been 15. He learned she was pregnant while preparing "The Circus," and after she sued for divorce and threatened scandal, her family scented a big settlement. They agreed on $600,000, while the IRS simultaneously determined he owed $1 million in back taxes.

Meanwhile, Chaplin had hired Lita's friend Merna Kennedy as his lead in "The Circus"; Lita charged that they had an affair, and he also had an affair during the same period with the great silent star Louise Brooks. There were also rumors of wild parties, apparently true; his genitals led an undisciplined existence.

I mention these matters to underline his accomplishment with "The Circus." Calamities struck the production. The circus tent set burned down. A reel of finished film was lost. His perfectionism demanded 200 takes for a difficult scene on a tightrope. He was divorcing Grey, romancing at least two other women, his funds were in disarray, the talkies were coming and yet his Little Tramp carried on unperturbed.

It's interesting to ponder how smart the Tramp really is, and how much he understands the situations he finds himself in. He's sort of a Holy Fool. In "The Circus," he gets hired as a clown by accident after he proves so incompetent as a property man that he steals the laughter from the real clowns. He's the star of the circus, but has to have this explained to him by Merna, who plays the ringmaster's mistreated stepdaughter. He has no idea what made him funny, no clear idea of why he stops being funny, and usually seems the unwitting pawn of events outside his comprehension.

This makes him, for me, a little less inspired than Buster Keaton, whose characters are smart and calculating, if also beset by life's disappointments. But both get many of their laughs by their sheer physical grace and acrobatic skills. The physical world conspires against them, and they prevail. They are often yearning romantics, with this difference: Buster seems a plausible mate, and the Tramp hardly seems to possess a libido, only idealized notions. If their comedies had been made in a more liberated time, it is possible to imagine Keaton in bed with a woman, but disquieting to think of the Tramp as a sexual being.

Yet here he contrives a giant crush on Merna (the character takes the actress' name). They are brought together in the first place by one of the constant motifs in Chaplin, hunger. In "The Gold Rush," he had eaten a shoe, and now his only piece of bread is stolen by the girl, who has been forbidden to eat as the ringmaster's punishment for a bad performance. At one point, he slyly filches a baby's bun. Later, in a lovely bit of pantomime, he rehearses for a comic bit as William Tell's son, but grabs stolen bites of the apple. Merna and the Tramp are brought together in the first place as comrades in hunger and travail, and in the Tramp's mind, they're lovers.

The film is rich in sight gags. It opens with a complex pickpocket scenario, continues with a famous chase around the fairgrounds, includes a house of mirrors scene in which multiple Tramps, cops and strangers chase one another's reflections. One scene has him locked in a lion's cage; measures must have been taken to assure his safety, but CGI was unknown and the lion seems real enough. The editing here, coordinating the lion and the Tramp, must have been daunting. There are also bits showing Chaplin's flawless timing, as when he wreaks havoc with the magician's elaborate tricks.

The piece de resistance is the extended tightrope scene. The Tramp watches morosely as Rex, King of the Air (Harry Crocker), performs on the high wire, and Merna sighs and bats her eyes. Later Rex misses a performance, and the Tramp seizes the chance to go on the wire himself to win back her admiration. With the device of a secret safety wire supposedly manned by a prop man, he performs stunts that are extraordinary because of their difficulty; he uses the wire as a means of making the performance much harder than ordinary tightrope walking would be.

Yes, camera angles no doubt disguise his distance from the ground. Yes, there must have been a net. Yes, the "wire" must have only been the half of it. But still, what remarkable agility, a reminder of a time when Chaplin and other great stars (Fairbanks, Keaton, Lloyd) did their own stunts and could be seen doing them. And the addition of the pestering monkeys is a masterstroke.

The ending is rather a letdown, involving the Tramp's oddly motivated reasons for reuniting Merna and Rex. There is a comeuppance for the ringmaster, and then, of course, the familiar closing iris shot of the Tramp, alone and forlorn but with a defiant little hop, going back on the road.

Chaplin was a considerable artist, brave and gifted, but I am in a minority in placing him second to Keaton among the silent clowns. My reasons for that are admittedly impulsive: I sense Keaton was the better man. Chaplin was so famous, so rich, so powerful when so young that there is a kind of conceit in the Tramp, a reverse noblesse oblige. Yes, he had a miserable childhood, and in his films, he often plays the friend of waifs, but there's an air of back-patting about it. The Buster Keaton character has his feet on the ground. He would be embarrassed to parade his goodness. He uses ingenuity rather than divinity. Chaplin's untidy love life suggests he felt he deserved whomever he wanted; Keaton in private life seems to have been melancholic because of alcoholism, but a decent enough sort with women.

But is this merely arbitrary judgment on my part? No doubt. A lesser man can make a better film, and a great man can make a bad one. I feel Keaton's work has aged better than Chaplin's. His films are drier, less lachrymose, less in love with their hero. Audiences still snuffle on cue at the end of "City Lights," when the little blind flower girl discovers the identify of her benefactor. I'm touched, too. But it's a set-up, isn't it? You write a movie in which you are the benefactor of a blind flower girl, you're gonna come out looking great. Buster is engaged in immediate practical problems.

I realize these are cavils. The wonderment is that we still have the silent clowns, many now available in restored versions. Almost all of Keaton, of Lloyd, of Chaplin. They were artists who depended on silence, and sound was powerless to add a thing. They live in their time, and we must be willing to visit it. An inability to admire silent films, like a dislike of black and white, is a sad inadequacy. Those who dismiss such pleasures must have deficient imaginations.

Also in the Great Movies Collection: "City Lights," "Modern Times" and "The Great Dictator."

odus Operandi

BY ROGER EBERT / October 20, 2010

Cast & Credits Stanley Cashay Randy Russell Director Holiday Danny Trejo Dallas Deacon Mark Borchardt Squire Parks Michael Sottile Casey Thunderbird Barry Poltermann Black Licorice Nikki Johnson Copper Gore Mark Metcalf Agent Xanadu Andrew Swant Marcello Maserati Bobby Ciraldo

The Zoo presents a film written and directed by Frankie Latina. Running time: 78 minutes. No MPAA rating (nudity).

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You need to have paid your dues to appreciate "Modus Operandi." Have you marinated in exploitation films? The cheap kind from the 60s and 70s, made by fly-by-night filmmakers on starvation budgets? Where you can almost sense them gasping as they try to accumulate enough footage to qualify as a feature? And where the female characters are wearing bikinis even in business offices?

It's not enough to like such films because they're "so bad they're good." You need to specialize, and like the films because they're so good about being so bad they're good. "Modus Operandi," a film by Frankie Latina that has won praise on the midnight movie festival circuit, is such a film.

Yes, it has babes in bikinis. Yes, it has a "plot" about spies and assassins. Yes, it's filmed in Cheapo-Color which is used interchangeably with black and white. Yes, it has scenes set in "Siberia, Russia" and "Tokyo, Japan." But what makes it special is that it was mostly filmed in Milwaukee, and one of its stars is Mark Borchardt, who you may recall as the subject of the great documentary "American Movie." That was about the making of his own bargain-basement horror film, "Coven," which a British actor informed him he was mispronouncing.

If you have paid those dues, there is a special pleasure to be had in "Modus Operandi" sequences like this one: The evil Dallas Deacon (Borchardt), apparently wearing the same glasses he wore in the doc 10 years ago, is being chased in b&w across an open field by a helicopter, in homage to "North by Northwest." He runs and runs and runs, and then disappears into some trees that didn't exist in the previous shots. The (unseen) pilot shouts, "We lost him down by the river!" Cut to high quality new color footage of some ducks floating past, but no Borchardt. Cut to unmatched Cheapo-Color footage of three babes in bikinis, feet astride, standing menacingly on the prow of a speedboat on a lake, not a river. One babe means business. A second babe unties the top of the first babe's bikini and she dives in the water -- because, of course, she is unable to swim while wearing the top. Cut to Borchardt wading into the (river? lake?) fully clothed.

Do you understand why I enjoyed "Modus Oprandi?" You don't. Millions agree with you. The film, now at Facets Cinematheque, is touring the nation in search of those like Quentin Tarantino and John Waters who would stay planted in their seats and watch it a second time.

Often the satire is embedded in the very arrangement of the characters. Know the crime movie cliché in which an evil boss sits enthroned in a restaurant, flanked by hit-men and babes? Here they are obviously in the seating area of a Chinese restaurant's waiting room. Know how the bad guy shouts commands in a phone while his babes make out with each other? Here his headquarters is obviously a bench on the balcony of a hotel. His phone is a pastel 1970s desk model. Know how bad guys give orders to those around them? In one shot here, they're lined up parallel, so they have to look sideways to talk.

The plot involves… two briefcases, I guess. Who cares? They were stolen from a U.S. Presidential candidate. The briefcases are brought up by a scuba diver through a hole in the ice of a frozen lake in "Siberia, Russia." The ice hole is seen being created in unmatching footage pretty obviously of ice fishermen -- in "Wisconsin," is my guess. Only CIA agent Stanley Cashay (Randy Russell) can find the briefcases. When we meet him, he's passed out with his head resting in a tavern urinal, with unfortunate results. At one point the search for them involves a mission to fly to "Tokyo, Japan" to shove a letter under the door of the mysterious Black Licorice (Nikki Johnson), who invariably wears huge 1970s sunglasses, even at night or while receiving a massage. Pay close attention to the footage incorporating Black Licorice in shots of crowds crossing a street in Tokyo.

I dunno who's still reading. You know who you are. If the film doesn't sound unique enough, reflect that it's one of the few in its genre to incorporate (1) a full-screen quote by Alexander Dumas, and (2) a walking-down-the-street shot in homage to "Berlin Alexanderplatz," and (3) a tavern still using a Blatz Beer sign. The Dumas quote doesn't make clear if it was said by pere or fils, but you can't have everything.

Tamara Drewe

BY ROGER EBERT / October 20, 2010

Cast & Credits Tamara Drewe Gemma Arterton Nicholas Roger Allam Ben Dominic Cooper Andy Cobb Luke Evans Beth Tamsin Greig Jody Jessica Barden Casey Charlotte Christie

Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Stephen Frears. Written by Moira Buffini, based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexuality).

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"Tamara Drewe" is one of those British comedies in which, one way or another, we envy all of the characters — even, briefly, the one run over by stampeding cows. If one must be vain, lustful, egotistical or long-suffering, let it be here, at a writers’ retreat in the Dorset village of Ewedown, where everyone lives across the street from a field, and there are no bank branches to deface the rustic charm.

The writers’ colony is run by Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) and his good wife, Beth (Tamsin Greig). He is a best-selling crime novelist and serial adulterer, and she is a saintly helpmate who runs the retreat, befriends the guests, bakes fresh pastries for tea and is reconciled to his tomcatting because at the end of the day, he always returns to her — for the pastries, possibly.

Into this pastoral idyll drops the fragrant Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton). Once long ago she was a village lass with a big nose. She went off to London to make her fortune and find a plastic surgeon, and has returned to sell the family home. She is now a famous newspaper columnist with a standard-issue nose, the kind of woman men describe as healthy, when they mean so very much more.

The Hardiments are assisted by a robust local lad named Andy Cobb (Luke Evans), who has fallen on bad fortune but cheerfully does odd jobs and harbors a resentment against Tamara, whose family purchased what he still considers his family home. Once in their teen years, Andy and Tamara apparently rummaged a bit among each other’s netherlands, notwithstanding her nose.

This photo tells you all you need to know about the two meddlesome girls.

(Enlarge Image) Nicholas the crime novelist is drawn to Tamara like a cat to tuna. He wears his fame like a backstage pass, and Tamara, after all, is not so very difficult to seduce. She is in fact a woman who calls her own shots, and about her lovers is less likely to feel gratitude than pity. Into the mix now comes a famous London rock ’n’ roller named Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper). I believe it possible that his eye-liner is tattooed.

His presence in town inflames the adolescent girls Jody Long and Casey Shaw (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie), who spend their days moping about bored in bus shelters, and lurking behind hedgerows to spy on everyone. Tamara dumps Nicholas for Ben, flirts with Andy, and is one of the many victims of Jody and Casey’s meddling with private lives.

The movie was adapted from a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, and it was inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, although there seems to have been an uncredited infusion of French farce along the way. To the game of romantic musical chairs already under way, a new player is added: McCreavy (Bill Camp), a morose American academic who is laboring away at the poetry of Hardy and has come here to Ewedown to be inspired by a village that is indeed far from the madding crowd. He finds a sympathetic ear in Beth and begins to entertain ambitions about other bits of her anatomy.

"Tamara Drewe" resembles another British village comedy, "Local Hero," in which everyone lived in each other’s pockets. Its director is Stephen Frears, a master of many genres ("High Fidelity," "The Grifters," "Dirty Pretty Things," "The Queen"). Here he knows exactly what he’s dealing with: foolish and flawed people who harbor desires that may not be good for them.

Not all of them can be happy, and it must be said that Frears, with his writer Moira Buffini and Simmonds and Hardy lurking in the background, gives us a story in which everyone gets more or less what they deserve. If these people are silly, they are no sillier than most of us. There is admirable craftsmanship at work in the scene of the unfortunate cattle stampede, and although we regret the fate of its victim, we must admit that no one is really to blame, and a rough justice has been served.

There is another pleasure here. All of the characters, except for the two naughty girls, are adults with grown-up ideas and aspirations, however lamentable. I find myself growing weary of the overgrown adolescents who impersonate adult characters in too many recent American films. Even a jolly comedy like this has characters with more depth. For example, at no time in the film does anyone come right out and explain who Thomas Hardy was. The characters are all presumed to already know. Not that you need to know in order to enjoy the film, but it’s nice to know stuff you don’t need to know, don’t you think?

regarding dangly ankh earrings and the 18 year-olds who wore them in 1990 via WWdN: In Exile by wil@wilwheaton.net (Wil Wheaton) on 10/24/10

I shoot Big Bang Theory on Monday before I go back to Vancouver to finish out the fourth season of Eureka, so I have scored an entirely unexpected bonus weekend at home with my wife.

Yesterday, we heard that Toy Soldiers was playing on local station KDOC (which was one of the truly great UHF stations here for my entire childhood). Anne told me that she'd never seen it before, so we flipped to channel 56 and began to watch.

We picked it up somewhere toward the middle, in a scene where we're all sitting around in our underwear at night.

"Why are you in your underwear?" Anne asked.

"Because that's what dudes do," I said.

She frowned for a moment, thinking, and then said, "how long did it take you to choreograph the upcoming sword fight?"

"Not long at all," I said. "Turns out it was a class feature."

She gave me a blank look.

"D&D reference."

She nodded, patiently, and turned her attention back to the movie.

I don't remember the exact line, but in the theatrical version, I say something like, "We should get a fucking machine gun, Billy. Wid a machine gun, we could shred dees muddafuckas!"

FUN FACT: Dan Petrie, the director, asked me to do some kind of New York accent for the movie. I was only 18, and didn't think to actually study up on a specific one, so I just did what sounded right in my head, and asked Dan to ensure that I never sounded "like Corey Feldman in Lost Boys." Dan has always said that he thought it sounded fine, but I'm not so sure. I trust and respect him, though, so I'm willing to accept that I hear (and see) this movie through a lens of self-consciousness that exists only in my mind.

The version we were watching, though, was the TV edit, so I actually say something like, "We should get a [jarring edit] machine gun, Billy! Wid a machine gun, we could [jarring edit] these money finders!"

Because, you know, that's how rebel dudes in bording schools talk to each other.

"Hey, what's up, money finder?"

"Oh, you know, just flipping around."

"Did you see those girls from Delta house last night? They were flipping hot!"

"Yeah, I totally flipped that girl Gina. Flipped her [jarring edit] yeah!"

"You lucky bad man! Well, see you later, money finder. I'm going to go get some ponies and get flipped up."

I've often thought that the TV edits of movies are pretty silly. At the End of Stand By Me, Ace says, "You going to kill us all?" Gordie replies, "Just you, Ace [jarring edit] you cheap dimestore hood." OHHH BURN! You can see that Ace is so horrified by what a mother flipping bad man Gordie is, he has no choice but to back down.

Anyway, we had a really good time watching the rest of the movie, Anne just enjoying the 1990 time capsule, me watching 18 year-old me and his painful fashion choices though the spread fingers of a facepalm.

Speaking of facepalm, I paused the movie right after Joey died (SPOILER ALERT - he couldn't handle a flipping machine gun, and didn't shred a single monkeyflapper) so I could share this with the world:

Though I give myself a lot of shit for things like my accent, the dangly ankh earring, and the endless scenes of underwear-clad dudes who were totally not gay, I should point out, and make very clear, that I like Toy Soldiers a lot. Even though it's incredibly dated, I'm proud to be part of it. I had a great time working on it, made some good friends during production, and gained several levels in acting and being an adult while we were on location.

Anne and I had a surprisingly good time watching it, and it seemed like every scene prompted a memory that I hadn't thought of in years. I had so much fun recalling them, I'm considering making my own commentary track as an mp3 and selling it at Lulu for a few bucks. You know, in all my vast amounts of free time.

If you want to watch Toy Soldiers in all its non-TV-edited glory, you can stream it from Netflix, or you could always buy the DVD ... though I think it really needs to be viewed on VHS for maximum authenticity.

, I [...] He's My Agent (slap!) He's My Producer! (slap!) He's My Agent! via Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog by Alex Epstein on 10/22/10 Q. I've been contacted by an agent in Agoura Hills in response to a script query letter that I sent and I'm pleased as usual, but this is the first time an agent has responded with a 2-year exclusive producer agreement instead of the standard submission release form. This agent operates as a producer and lit manager, but I don't know if contracts like this are industry standard. Do you have any experience with a situation like this? I'm still trying to break through, so I'm open to trying different avenues as long as I'm nit abused or cheated in the process. First of all, Agoura Hills? Bzzzt. No.

There's some confusion of terms here. "Agent" is a job that is highly regulated by California law. Agents cannot produce. There would be too much conflict of interest. The producer's goal is to pay you as little as possible. The agent's goal is to get you paid as much as possible.

Moreover, a typical deal with a producer covers only one script. An agent is supposed to represent all your material, and also find you jobs.

Managers are unregulated, and can produce. There are major players who are manager/producers. However, if you are managed by, say, Echo Lake, you also have an agent, not at Echo Lake, who will be the person negotiating on your behalf. In fact, by law, technically, managers can't negotiate your deal, although practically, they discuss it a lot. You must be represented by an agent or a lawyer; your manager is only supposed to set up the deal.

Incidentally, if someone comes along claiming to be a producer, check out their credits on the IMDb. If they haven't produced a movie -- not Associate Produced, not Co-Produced -- then they're an aspiring producer. I tend to think there should only be one aspiring person in any one deal, if you want your picture to actually get made.

I don't think your first representative should be a producer. I would try to find a real agent first.

Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator.

October 2010

(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)

1. Determination

This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily.

Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman of WePay are a good example. They're doing a finance startup, which means endless negotiations with big, bureaucratic companies. When you're starting a startup that depends on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're trying to ignore you out of existence. But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not going away.

2. Flexibility

You do not however want the sort of determination implied by phrases like "don't give up on your dreams." The world of startups is so unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the fly. The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is a running back. He's determined to get downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or even backwards to get there.

The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of Greplin. He applied to YC with some bad ecommerce idea. We told him we'd fund him if he did something else. He thought for a second, and said ok. He then went through two more ideas before settling on Greplin. He'd only been working on it for a couple days when he presented to investors at Demo Day, but he got a lot of interest. He always seems to land on his feet.

3. Imagination

Intelligence does matter a lot of course. It seems like the type that matters most is imagination. It's not so important to be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with surprising new ideas. In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them. So you need the kind of intelligence that produces ideas with just the right level of craziness.

Airbnb is that kind of idea. In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we thought it was too crazy. We couldn't believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people's places. We funded them because we liked the founders so much. As soon as we heard they'd been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded breakfast cereal, they were in. And it turned out the idea was on the right side of crazy after all.

4. Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

5. Friendship

Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.

Emmett Shear and Justin Kan of Justin.tv are a good example of close friends who work well together. They've known each other since second grade. They can practically read one another's minds. I'm sure they argue, like all founders, but I have never once sensed any unresolved tension between them.

Glee Photo Flap: Lea Michele Is Not Actually Rachel Berry Posted by James Poniewozik Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 9:00 am 21 Comments • Related Topics: glee, katie couric, parents television council

Our friends at the Parents Television Council have lodged a complaint about a racy photo spread in GQ featuring Glee stars Dianna Agron, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith in which, in a nutshell, Monteith plays the drums while Agron and Michele wear skimpy outfits and grind up against things. The PTC said the feature "borders on pedophilia" (a pretty broad border, seeing as how—in the grand tradition of high-school-series casting—Agron and Michele are both 24 and Monteith a creaky 28). Even Katie Couric has felt compelled to weigh in, commenting in her online video notebook that "these very adult photos of young women who perform in a family show seem un-Glee-like."

My take? Well, yeah, number one: Lea Michele, put some freaking pants on. The spread—um, so to speak—seems like a desperate attempt to sex up her image in particular, and it's a typical example of young women in entertainment being expected to skank it up for the cameras (while Monteith remains chastely clothed). But as for the shoot being out of character and beyond the pale—Katie, are you sure you watch Glee?

For starters, if your child is too young to understand the difference between a fictional character and the actor or actress who plays that character, I would submit that your child is too young to be reading the men's magazine GQ. [Update: Or, for that matter, watching Glee.]

But leaving that aside, what we have here is the classic argument over whether entertainers who appeal to teens (or tweens, or younger kids) have a responsibility to their audience beyond their entertainments. Another classic example was Miley Cyrus' sexy Annie Leibovitz photos. There, at least, there was an argument about context: Cyrus was the star of Hannah Montana, a wholesome show aimed at kids, in which she played a character ("Miley," a pop singer) whose identity was intentionally blurred with her own.

I have a hard time seeing the argument, though, that Glee is anywhere near a similar example. For starters, the stars are clearly actors playing characters whose identities are entirely separate. [Update: To be fair, the photo shoot plays on their characters with its naughty-schoolgirl getups and setting, but again see fiction/reality distinction, above. Also: any "sexy pirate wenches" you see this Halloween? Not actually pirates.] But Glee is also entirely different from a show like Hannah Montana in its themes. And I think the issue behind critiques like Couric's is that there's a disconnect between the show some parents want Glee to be and the show that Glee actually is.

Is Glee a "family show," like Couric says it is? Well, if families watch it together, then I suppose QED. But in the sense that it's innocent and unsexualized? We do all remember, don't we, that Agron's character Quinn got pregnant and had a baby last season? That the last episode included, among other things, a character losing his virginity and a reference to "scissoring"? I'm not going to dispute that kids under 18 watch Glee and that their parents watch it with them, but that doesn't change what it is: a TV show very much about sex and its consequences, emotional and practical.

The PTC, at least, seems to get this, because its full statement about the GQ photos indicates that the root of its objection is that it doesn't much care for Glee at all, period: "Parents need to be on guard as we expect the show to push the envelope even further. Unfortunately, it seems ‘Glee' is only masquerading as family show and is far from appropriate for young viewers."

Which is the group's prerogative, but it also means that its statement here is only masquerading as concern about the photos; it's really about a show that it doesn't want parents choosing to let their own young viewers watch.

Review: 'Sherlock' comes to PBS By Alan Sepinwall - 'Doctor Who' producer cleverly brings Holmes and Watson into the 21st century

Friday, Oct 22, 2010 5:00 PM

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Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) in present-day London. Credit: PBS

The first question I had while watching “Sherlock,” a contemporary-set adaptation of Sherlock Holmes that PBS’ ‘Masterpiece Mystery” is debuting Sunday at 9 p.m., is what 21st century pop culture looks like if Holmes has just appeared on the scene.

“Sherlock,” created by “Doctor Who” producer Steven Moffat and actor/writer Mark Gatiss, exists in a world much like our own, where characters watch TV and listen to music, and where a killer can taunt Holmes (here played by Benedict Cumberbatch) by asking if he wants to phone a friend. Yet if Holmes and his methods are brand-new - and the London cops, as well as partner John Watson (Martin Freeman from the British “Office”), all act as if they’ve never seen anyone like him before - then is this a world without Dr. House, Gil Grissom, Temperance Brennan, Patrick Jane and all the other contemporary sleuths who owe a huge debt to Holmes’ superhuman powers of observation?

And conversely, given all these Holmes-ian investigators wandering around 21st century television in our world, what would be so special about watching Holmes and Dr. Watson in present day?

The answer: quite a bit, because Holmes remains a great character regardless of his imitators, and because Moffat and Gatiss have figured out how to translate him to today’s London without making it seem like a gimmick.

Sure, Watson keeps a blog instead of a journal and Holmes is a whiz with a cell phone, but those are just concessions to the time. (If Holmes was a Luddite who didn’t know how to text, that would call more attention to the character being out of his native time, frankly.) Ditto changing Holmes’ “the game is afoot” catchphrase to “the game is on,” as he would only say “afoot” if he was referencing a 100-year-old version of himself who wasn’t supposed to exist.

The basics are all the same: Holmes is a brilliant, aloof private detective who helps Scotland Yard out on the most bizarre cases, and Watson is his sometimes frustrated, sometimes impressed, always tough partner. And thanks to committed performances from Cumberbatch and Freeman, and clever writing from Moffat and Gatiss, most of it works splendidly.

Sunday’s episode, “A Study in Pink,” is the first of three 90-minute stories of this first “season” (even by British standards, it’s really short). Adapting the first Holmes mystery, “A Study in Scarlet” (another instance of updating the idiom just enough), it’s wisely told from the point of view of Watson. As in the original 19th century stories, he’s just back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan and feeling adrift. He has a limp that the doctors insist is psychosomatic, has no job and needs a roommate to help with the London rents. A med school pal introduces him to the eccentric Holmes, who has a line on a flat at 221B Baker Street he can’t afford on his own, and before Watson entirely realizes what’s happening, they’re living together and he’s helping Holmes prove that a series of suicidal poisonings are actually the work of a clever serial killer. And, more amazingly, he finds himself enjoying life again - working alongside Holmes gives him both the thrill and sense of purpose he last had in the military. And because Freeman is so inherently likable, and because Watson quickly takes a shine to Holmes in spite of all his insufferable tics, we quickly like him, too.

Though Holmes is mostly unchanged from the original Arthur Conan Doyle version, the world he inhabits has, and Moffat and Gatiss wisely don’t run from that. Holmes is weird, and his broad knowledge base, keen powers of observation and fixation on the most bizarre of crimes marks him as someone the cops don’t entirely trust, even as they recognize his usefulness.

“He gets off on it,” one cop tries to warn Watson. “One day, we’ll be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there... He’s a psychopath. Psychopaths get bored.”

(Later, Holmes retorts, “I’m not a psychopath. I’m a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.”)

Cumberbatch’s thick topcoat and flowing scarf make him look more like a new incarnation of “Doctor Who” than Holmes, and there’s a definitely alien quality to his performance. But it’s never self-conscious or hammy. Holmes simply isn’t like the rest of us. He sees the world in a different way - the writers and director Paul McGuigan show us (ala HBO’s recent Temple Grandin biopic) how their hero thinks in pictures - and carries himself accordingly.

The first and third installments are a bit stronger than the second, as the first deals with the origin of the Holmes/Watson partnership and the third pits Holmes against arch-rival Moriarty, where the middle chapter is a straightforward mystery. (In that way, the mini-season isn’t unlike the many current American dramas that become less interesting the more standalone a particular episode becomes.)

Overall, though, the reinvention is so smart and funny and thrilling that I hope we get another, longer season before too long - and not just because I want to find out what Hugh Laurie is up to in their universe if “House” can’t exist.

(NOTE: As with "Luther," "Doctor Who," etc., I'm going to ask that people who have seen all the episodes as they aired in England won't spoil any specifics for the people who are about to see it for the first time in the States. Not sure yet if I'm going to have time for posts on the three episodes, but I'll try to at least have an open post up for Sunday's debut.)

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

Dead Tree Alert: Sane Clown Posse Posted by James Poniewozik Friday, October 22, 2010 at 7:33 am 9 Comments • Related Topics: dead tree alert , jon stewart, rally to restore sanity, stephen colbert

Comedy Central

Is Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear a political event? NPR—which is currently having its own problems defining the limits of public commentary with its Juan Williams scandal—says so, having forbidden its reporters to attend the event. In an essay in this week's print TIME (not yet available online), I look at the philosophies of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, whose hosts have gotten increasingly involved in real-world issues, and at how the rally works as a real-life extension of the shows' theme: the defense of rationality in an irrational age.

One reason people are having such trouble agreeing on how "political" the rally is is that we have a hard time distinguishing political (having a specific point of view) from partisan (working pointedly to make a certain side win). To me, Comedy Central's lineup is more the former than the latter, but I'm curious to hear what you think. And on a related (nonpolitical, I think) note, did anyone catch Night of Too Many Stars on Comedy Central last night?

TV Weekend: PBS's Sherlock and the Case of Mr. Baggins Posted by James Poniewozik Friday, October 22, 2010 at 3:07 pm 3 Comments • Related Topics: tv weekend , martin freeman, pbs, sherlock, the hobbit

PBS

Though it's not TV news exactly, there are enough fans of the original British The Office here that I should note that Martin Freeman (our friend Tim from Wernham Hogg) has been cast as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. It's an exciting choice: Freeman has both the comic and dramatic ability the role needs, and simply physiologically he's more hobbitish (as I envision the books) than the rotund Rankin-Bass depiction of Bilbo.

By happy coincidence, Freeman debuts on American TV this weekend as Watson on the reimagined, contemporary Sherlock on PBS. The three-part series is written by Steven Moffat, lately of Doctor Who fame, and the kinetic, wry script imagines Holmes (the wonderfully named Benedict Cumberbatch) as a kind of terrestrial Doctor—an edgy, eccentric curt genius who sees the world in dimension imperceptible to the rest of us, and whirls disruptively through crime investigations like a hyperintelligent Cat in the Hat. The highest praise I can give the series is that I'm neither a Doctor Who cultist or a particular detective-story fan, yet I enjoyed it immensely.

Sherlock begins Sunday night on PBS. Check your local listings—if you're not too pissed off over Juan Williams to support public broadcasting—and see a video preview after the jum

Hard Times at the Parents Television Council Posted by James Poniewozik Monday, October 25, 2010 at 9:32 am 3 Comments • Related Topics: parents television council

Now I kind of feel bad about picking on the PTC lately. Reports the New York Times, the group is fighting cultural, personnel and financial difficulties:

Like many nonprofit groups, the council raises money by mail: sign and return this petition — preferably with a donation — and we will send it to the F.C.C. But internal documents show that, at least for a period of some months, the council was opening tens of thousands of envelopes, looking for money, and skipping the rest of the steps.

Yikes. The story does seem to have originated with a disgruntled ex-employee, but the revenue figures and facts in the piece are what they are. And as much as I've disagreed with the group—especially in its efforts to enlist government regulation of content it disapproves—it also does worthwhile service by publishing content ratings for its members (something that enables rather than limits choice). From one recession-impacted part of the economy to another, my sympathies.

Remembering Creator of Moose and Squirrel Posted by James Poniewozik Monday, October 25, 2010 at 10:20 am 1 Comment • Related Topics: animation obituary , rocky and bullwinkle

Alexander Anderson, creator of Rocky and His Friends and the subsequent spinoffs involving the cold-war-era capers of the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose, died Friday. TIME film critic Richard Corliss has this thoughtful appreciation: For many who grew up in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, and for later generations enthralled by reruns, this megafunny enterprise set a standard for wild comic invention, jam-packed narratives and merciless punnery (as in Bullwinkle's alma mater Wossamotta U., or its archrival college Heckwith U.). The talking cartoon animals suggested it was a kid's show; the smart humor, delivered at warp speed, clued in adults that the series was really for them. The trick that The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy try to master 14 to 24 times a year — populate a cartoon world with indelible characters — Rocky pulled off five times a week. Here's my note on Rocky and His Friends for its inclusion in the 100 All-TIME TV Shows list I did in 2007. RIP.

'Sherlock' Review: A Very Enjoyable Holmes Fights Crime in Modern London by Maureen Ryan, posted Oct 22nd 2010 12:45PM Filed under: Reality-Free, Fall TV, Stay Tuned

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In Steven Moffat's 'Sherlock' (Sunday, PBS; check local listings) the legendary London detective gets a witty, wise, even thrilling update.

This series does what you'd want a modern-day Sherlock Holmes series to do: It acknowledges that he would use technology to assist him in his prodigious feats of deduction, yet it stays true to the characters that Arthur Conan Doyle created.

But don't assume this 'Sherlock,' which stars Benedict Cumberbatch and future Hobbit Martin Freeman, is just for mystery fans or Holmes enthusiasts.

The 'Sherlock' TV movies that air in the Masterpiece Mystery series on the next three Sundays are ripping yarns that almost anyone could enjoy. Moffat's 'Doctor Who' exhibits a similar level of energy, and, like that show, 'Sherlock' is an enjoyably clever mixture of character drama and adventure tale.

'Sherlock' does get a tiny bit overheated and melodramatic now and then; if it has one (easily overlooked) fault, it can get a bit over-caffeinated in an effort to prove that it is not your father's stodgy Holmes' adaptation. On the other hand, this sprightly trio of TV movies are more rigorous and well-written than the rather sloppy, scattershot 2009 film adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.

That movie gave you the chance to watch excellent actors at work, but 'Sherlock' supplies that and taut storytelling as well. Still, just as Gregory House (a very Holmesian character) wouldn't work without Hugh Laurie giving the cranky doctor layers upon layers, 'Sherlock's' attempt to bring us a blogging, smartphone-savvy detective would fail if the casting was off. Thankfully, it isn't. The performances by Benedict Cumberbatch as the famous sleuth and Martin Freeman as his partner are engaging from the opening frame.

Even when Holmes is staring into space or uttering one-word pronouncements ("Dull!"), Cumberbatch effortlessly makes Holmes a riveting presence. It's as if Holmes has to constantly strive to keep himself in check: It's not easy for him to be patient with the slow brains of normal people. As for social conventions like chit-chat, flattery and white lies, forget it.

'You're an idiot," he casually tells Watson at one point. Seeing his partner's reaction, Holmes adds, "No, no, no, don't be like that. Practically everyone is."

Cumberbatch's vigor and 'Sherlock's' energetic pace are grounded by Martin Freeman's thoughtful, wonderful performance as Watson. Then again, Freeman is so good in everything he does (including his great work as Tim on the UK version of 'The Office') that I very much look forward to what he'll do in Peter Jackson's upcoming 'Hobbit' films. The actor has an everyman quality and yet an elusive charisma as well: There's a steely core to his Watson that makes him much more than just a foil to a brilliant crime-solver.

This Watson, like the one in Conan Doyle's stories, is a doctor/soldier who was wounded in Afghanistan; his emotional scars stand in contrast to Sherlock's almost naive believe in the power of the intellect. Sherlock may be condescending, rude and presumptuous, but he's also brilliant and the instigator of many complicated adventures. Watson is taken aback by the habits and methods of his new roommate, but he is soon, Freeman subtly demonstrates, having the time of his life.

Moffat does like his trickster characters; his Doctor and this Sherlock have a lot in common and there's a similar cheeky wit at work in both series. And though technology and the Internet play their roles in the investigations, they never take over the narrative and Moffat and fellow writer Mark Gatiss have taken pains to pay tribute to details from Conan Doyle stories (one mystery is deemed a "three-patch problem" -- this detective resorts to nicotine patches rather than pipes).

Sherlock is, according to the detective himself, a "high-functioning sociopath," but it's never as simple as that. Still, is the thrill of the chase more important than adhering to a moral code? That question is explored in a dramatically compelling way in Sunday's outing, and it's threaded nicely throughout all three films. But the reason the character endures is because the answers to that question can be endlessly discussed.

Two notes: 'Sherlock' will be available online on the Masterpiece Mystery site from Oct. 25-Dec. 7. And for more excellent British crime drama, check out 'Luther' and 'Law & Order: UK,' both of which air on BBC America.

Follow @MoRyan on Twitter.

Syfy Plots Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome Pilot: Where Does that Leave Caprica? Written by Jace | Friday, October 22, 2010 | 4 comments »

AOL's Maureen Ryan broke the news this morning that cabler Syfy will air its upcoming web series Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome as a two-hour backdoor pilot for a potential spin-off series that will focus on a young William Adama during the First Cylon War.

The project, written by Michael Taylor, shouldn't be confused with Syfy's current BSG spinoff Caprica, which ALSO features a young William Adama, here a pre-teen whose character is vastly different from the Admiral Adama played by Edward James Olmos that we came to know on Battlestar Galactica. Production on the pilot is expected to begin in early 2011 in Vancouver, according to Ryan, though it won't make it on air until at least fourth quarter 2011, if not later.

"When we read Michael's script, it was so clearly a full-blown pilot for a series," Syfy's executive vice president of original programming Mark Stern told Ryan. "The scope is fantastic and bigger, I think, than anticipated, so we said, 'Let's do it as a 2-hour backdoor pilot.' ... We're trying to get up and running as soon as possible."

"It's an opportunity to 'see them before they were famous,'" said Stern. "Here's the Battlestar Galactica as a brand-new, shiny ship -- well, not shiny, but as a new ship that had just been commissioned. What was that like?"

All of which begs the question: what happens to Caprica, the current BSG brand extension that has struggled with viewers and critics alike?

Stern indicated that a decision on the fate of Caprica will be made before November 11th and that the two series were developed independently and can stand separate from each other, given that Blood & Chrome is set ten years after the events of Caprica and four decades before the events of the BSG mini-series.

It will also be, based on the information provided by Stern, Taylor, and Ryan, much more war-driven and action-centric, something that was distinctly missing from Caprica, which focused on the interpersonal conflicts and dynamics between families grieving after a terrible tragedy, monotheistic cults, teenage terrorists, amoral lawyers, backroom politics, and the birth of the Cylon race, the latter of which has been teased for the back half of the freshman season.

But the main problem with Caprica--which I discussed in my advance review of the first two episodes of the second half of the season and in my review of the season finale--is that the stakes weren't high.

While we may have been seeing the emergence of the Cylon threat, unlike BSG, there wasn't the immediate danger of human genocide. Caprica has been about the excess and moral ambiguity of Rome Before the Fall, but throw in less than sympathetic characters and no clear "team" to root for and you have a series that's largely spinning its own wheels.

By contrast, the war-torn Blood & Chrome has immediate narrative stakes. While we know that Bill Adama, here an ensign, will survive to tell the tale, the fates of new characters introduced are up for grabs and many could be destined to be canon fodder. By pushing the narrative into the trenches, there's an immediacy to the threat here, a tension that's lacking from Caprica and a potential for some stories of survival and courage that are more in line with BSG than the current spinoff.

(It does concern me a little that Ronald D. Moore--described as the "godfather" of this project--isn't involved at all with Blood & Chrome. While I'm a fan of Michael Taylor, the lack of Moore's involvement here is a little worrisome.)

It wouldn't surprise me if Syfy looks to wrap up Caprica with the current season. Of course, they could renew it for one more season, allowing the creative team the opportunity to create a "bridge" to the new series, setting up the future conflict and providing the seeds that will pay off in Blood & Chrome.

But, ultimately, given the direction that Syfy seems to want to go in with its BSG franchise, it's only a matter of time before Caprica is, well, toast.

Caprica airs Tuesday evenings at 10 pm ET/PT on Syfy.

Paranormal Activity 2

BY ROGER EBERT / October 22, 2010

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"Paranormal Activity 2" is an efficient delivery system for Gotcha! Moments, of which it has about 19. Audiences who want to be Gotchaed will enjoy it. A Gotcha! Moment is a moment when something is sudden, loud and scary. This can be as basic as the old It's Only a Cat cliché, or as abrupt as a character being hit by a bus.

PA2 starts slyly with pre-Gotcha! teasers, such as a door or a child's toy moving on its own. Then there are obscure off-screen rumbles, like a uneasy stomach. Then loud bangs. Then loud bangs with visible causes. Then all the doors in a room banging open at once. And eventually…well, you can see for yourself, because all the activity is captured by 24-hour security cameras.

The cameras, which function perfectly but never capture the Presence on the screen. For the house is indeed haunted by a ghost-like supernatural presence, I guess. I say "I guess" because there is a scene of a victim being dragged downstairs, and the entity doing the dragging is invisible. On the other hand, the movie ends with a strong suggestion that the malefactor was in fact a living human being. So would that be cheating? Hell yes.

But who cares? People go to "Paranormal Activity 2" with fond memories of the original film, which was low-tech and clever in the way it teased our eyes and expectations. It scared them. They want to be scared again. They will be. When there's a loud unexpected bang it will scare you. The structural task of the Gotcha! Movie is to separate the bangs so they continue to be unexpected.

Any form of separation will do. The characters include the Sloats (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston), who are back from the first movie. But this story takes place in the home of her sister Kristi (Sprague Grayden), her husband, Daniel (Brian Boland), teenage daughter Ali (Molly Ephraim), brand new baby Hunter, and his nanny, Martine (Vivis). Martine is ethnic, and we know what that means: She has an instinctive knowledge of ghosts, breaks out the magic incense at a moment's notice, and can't get anyone to listen to her.

There are six speaking roles, not counting the non-speaking baby and the dog. Good odds, you'd think, that at least one of them would have something interesting to say, but no. The movie isn't about them. They function primarily as Gotcha! separators, going through vacuous social motions between Gotchas! They are not real swift. The movie numbers the days as they tick away, and along about Day #12 I'm thinking, why are these people still here? The screening I attended was treated to a surprise appearance by three stars of that cable show about Chicago's Paranormal Detectives. These are real Chicago detectives. If the Sloats lived in Chicago, they'd have a SWAT team out there by Day #7.

The movie is presented as a documentary with no set-up, unless the first movie was the set up. It begins with little Hunter being brought home, and then we get titles like "Day #3." Of what? One peculiar title says "Nine days before the death of Micah Sloat." I probably have the number of days wrong, but you get the idea. What are we supposed to do with this information? I guess we should think, "Sloat, you poor bastard, you only have nine days to go." This knowledge is about as useful as the farmer who tells you to make a left turn five miles before you get to the barn. There are also titles saying things like "1:41:15 a.m.," as if we care.

The character who suffers the most is poor little Hunter. Something is always bothering him in the middle of the night. When a security camera is on the staircase, we hear his plaintive little wail. When it's focused on his bedroom, he's standing up in his wee crib and bawling. The dog is always there barking at something, because dogs, like ethnic nannies, Know About These Things. Hunter screams and screams in the movie. If you were Hunter's parents and your house was haunted, wouldn't you move the poor kid's crib into the bedroom?

My audience jumped a lot and screamed a lot, and then laughed at themselves, even after one event that wasn't really funny. Then they explained things to one another, and I could overhear useful lines like, "She got the $#!+ scared outta her!" I understand they attended in hopes of seeing Gotchas! and explaining them to one another. I don't have a problem with "Paranormal Activity 2." It delivers what it promises, and occupies its audiences. Win-win.

October 21, 2010 Hereafter

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Hereafter

DRAMA:

United States, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-10-22

Running Length:

2:10

MPAA Classification:

PG-13 (Profanity)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

2.35:1

Cast:

Matt Damon, Cécile De France, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren, Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard, Thierry Neuvic

Director:

Clint Eastwood

Screenplay:

Peter Morgan

Cinematography:

Tom Stern

Music:

Clint Eastwood

U.S. Distributor:

Warner Brothers

Subtitles:

In English and French with English subtitles

It's safe to say that, as a director, Clint Eastwood shows no fear. Only a few years beyond telling the story of Iwo Jima from the Japanese point-of-view, Eastwood ventures down another little traveled cinematic avenue by making what is essentially a "French movie" (at least in terms of narrative approach and pacing) using American money and featuring a mostly English-speaking cast. And, although the movie is imperfect and unlikely to achieve anything close to mainstream acceptance, its refusal to court box office success exhibits a nobility of purpose. Additionally, it arrives without a hint of the sanctimoniousness that accompanied the release of Eastwood's preachy parable of racial unity, Invictus.

With Hereafter, Eastwood, like a master at a loom, spins three stories of lives impacted by Death, weaving the strands ever closer until they touch. Seams occasionally show in the way the narrative embraces coincidence. It seems contrived - it is contrived - but it's done with enough elegance and careful planning not to be too off-putting. If there's a flaw in the way Eastwood and writer Peter Morgan structure the film, it's that two of the three stories are markedly less interesting than the third, which is revealed to be the "primary" one (or at least the one that captures the most screen time). Since many viewers will be more intrigued by one of the leading characters than the others, this creates an inherent imbalance. We're interested in what happens to Matt Damon's George and every time Hereafter pauses his story to return to one of the other two, we become a little annoyed.

George Lonegan (Damon) is a San Francisco-based factory worker who gave up a lucrative career as a psychic because he couldn't stand living a life that was all about contacting the dead. His brother, Billy (Jay Mohr), who wants to see the gravy train rolling again, considers George's ability to be a "gift." But the man who believes himself capable of conversing with the departed views it as a "curse" - one that has robbed him of the ability to experience a normal existence. This is evident when a budding relationship with his cooking class partner, Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), goes awry once she learns of his ability and pleads for a reading.

Marie Lelay (Cécile De France) is a survivor of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami but she experiences death before crossing back over to life. The images she sees while hovering between the two states becomes the driving force in her existence. Given a sabbatical from her work as a television journalist, she begins to investigate the experiences of others who have touched the hereafter and becomes a devout believer that the "here and now" is not all there is. When she expresses her desire to write a book about this, she finds doors unexpectedly closed. One would-be publisher admits that anything she writes would be expressly for a "niche market."

In the U.K., twins Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren) are struggling to hold their family together. Social Services wants to remove them from the custody of their drug addicted mother. Tragedy strikes unexpectedly. While picking up a drug prescription for his mother, Jason is run down in the street. His death leaves Marcus as little more than a walking ghost in need of closure. Hoping to make contact with Jason beyond the grave, he begins seeking out psychics, but it doesn't take long for him to determine they're all frauds.

Although Hereafter is a spiritual movie, it is not a religious one. In fact, religion is barely mentioned, with an infrequent instance being a token appearance by a priest presiding over Jason's funeral (played by Colin Firth in a cameo). Like Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 After Life, questions about God are left out of the mix. The underlying premise is simply that life may continue beyond death. Hereafter does not function as publicity for any particular religious sect or denomination's beliefs.

The film frequently ventures into existential territory, which should not be surprising for something that deals with material of this nature. It asks questions that most of us, regardless of our religious beliefs, have pondered. A phrase from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy - "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns" - suffuses nearly every frame. It's fascinating to observe how each of the three primary characters copes with an intimacy with death. George is tormented by it. His relationship with Melanie, which begins with great promise, detours down a trajectory George is all-too-familiar with, and we feel for him when he recognizes the cul-de-sac in which he has become trapped. Marie becomes obsessed by her near-death vision and frustrated when no one takes this life-transforming event seriously. Marcus, whose entire life has been turned upside down, cannot anchor himself.

Hereafter is not the best focused of motion pictures, but it features wonderful, nuanced performances by the leads (one would be hard-pressed to associate this Matt Damon with the one who played the angry action-hero Jason Bourne) and touches on some fascinating issues. Its failure to plumb the depths of any of them is a fault, as is the scattershot structure (evident especially in the film's first half), but the movie is rarely not engaging. The special effects work, although limited, is exemplary. The tsunami sequence is noteworthy, adding a "you-are-there" element to recreations of familiar home video footage. As far as the little details are concerned, it's nice to find an American-made movie where characters living in France are allowed to speak French. (Although this accounts for perhaps less than 20% of all dialogue.)

In a way, it's amazing to consider that Eastwood, the "man's man" best known as The Man with No Name or Dirty Harry, is responsible for such a tender motion picture. However, as his cinematic choices over the years have testified, he has grown both in the kinds of material he is willing to bring to the screen and the skill with which he presents it. Hereafter is a fascinating, absorbing motion picture, but will work only for those willing to surrender to the story as it unspools at its own deliberate rate.

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October 23, 2010 Paranormal Activity 2

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Paranormal Activity 2

HORROR:

United States, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-10-22

Running Length:

1:31

MPAA Classification:

R (Profanity, Violence)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

1.85:1

Cast:

Sprague Grayden, Brian Boland, Molly Ephraim, Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

Director:

Tod Williams

Screenplay:

Michael R. Perry

Cinematography:

Michael Simmonds

U.S. Distributor:

Paramount Pictures

Subtitles:

none

Regardless of how it performs at the box office, this much is clear: Paranormal Activity 2 is a mistake. The clumsy and obvious byproduct of the financial success of its predecessor last Halloween, this movie has no reason for existing except to provide Paramount Pictures with a few extra shekels. Although its release does not represent an outright insult akin to the one offered by The Blair Witch Project 2, its superfluous nature not only ranks this as a waste of time but diminishes the original.

The story functions primarily as a prequel, with most of the events chronicled in this 90-minute voyeuristic extravaganza transpiring between one and two months before those depicted in Paranormal Activity. Instead of focusing on a couple, this time the roster of characters has expanded. Kristi (Sprague Grayden) is the sister of the first film's Katie (Katie Featherstone), who makes occasional appearances throughout Paranormal Activity 2, along with her soon-to-be-dead lover, Micah (Micah Sloat). Kristi is happily married to Dan (Brian Boland), who tied the knot with her some time after the death of his first wife. He has a teenage daughter, Ali (Molly Ephraim), from his first marriage. In addition, the happy couple has a new baby boy, Hunter, who's a little over a year old. He spends most of his time standing in his crib staring at things only he can see. We keep expecting him to say, "They're here!"

As in the first movie, the basic plot relates to the characters being stalked by a demon within their home and how seemingly innocuous bumps in the night gradually take an alarming turn. The stylistic choice by which everything happens in front of a video camera is carried over, although in this installment, home security cameras provide a majority of the footage (supplemented by camcorder images). This at least eliminates the silly contrivance of someone always having to be running a camera, even during the most unlikely of circumstances. By establishing this as a prequel, the protagonists from Paranormal Activity are provided with an opportunity for supporting roles. Toward the end, the time frame of Paranormal Activity 2 moves beyond that of its predecessor, allowing us a "what happens next" glimpse. The door is left open for a Paranormal Activity 3, which will undoubtedly be produced if there's profitability in making it.

While the first Paranormal Activity did an excellent job of incrementally advancing the creepiness factor with every scene and generating an ominous atmosphere as the familiar surroundings of a home became hostile, those qualities are not evident here. In Paranormal Activity 2, events follow a blueprint. It's a series of "boo!" moments connected by exposition so uninvolving that we find ourselves impatiently waiting for the next loud crash or bang. There are plenty of opportunities for startlement, but nothing approaches terror. Paranormal Activity is never frightening. In fact, considering how long it takes before the "paranormal" events begin occurring, it's on the dull side. Worse, the final ten minutes - the sequence in which the films converge - comes dangerously close to self-parody. (There were people laughing at the screening I attended, and laughter is not the intended reaction.)

The acting is better for this installment, but that's due to the employment of professional actors. Using familiar faces in a production like this can be a double-edged sword. For example, although Sprague Grayden is hardly a household name, her face may appear frustratingly familiar to some viewers. A quick perusal of her resume indicates that she has done a lot of television, including a lengthy stint on 24. When a movie is attempting to "fake" viewers into believing that what they're watching is real, it's a good idea not to involve actors who may be recognizable since that interferes with the illusion.

Tod Williams' direction effectively apes Oren Peli's approach to the first film, but the added layers of polish allowed by the larger production crew and the higher budget have not aided the sense of verisimilitude. In Paranormal Activity, it felt like we were watching two ordinary people filming themselves in the comfort of their own home. Here, everything feels artificial, from the shots of the pool cleaner going about its business to the scenes of the child standing in his crib. The qualities that made Paranormal Activity compelling have either been diluted or deleted. What's left is a faint, distorted echo of the original. It's passable entertainment for anyone who has not seen the first feature but redundant for anyone who has.

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The 'Robopocalypse' is coming, and Steven Spielberg is directing By Drew McWeeny - Will this be the pure popcorn we crave from the director of 'Raiders' and 'Jurassic Park'?

Friday, Oct 22, 2010 4:00 PM

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True, this is what we got the last time Spielberg made a movie about robots, but that doesn't prevent me from an almost Pavlovian anticipation for the just-announced 'Robopocalypse' Credit: Warner Bros.

The robots are coming!

I like to pretend that I'm okay with the evolution of Steven Spielberg into a very solid, respectable, smart and heartfelt grown-up filmmaking. I can appreciate the nuance and the craft of films like "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" and "Catch Me If You Can." But in those quiet moments, when I'm honest with myself, I confess that I would trade every "grown-up" movie he's ever made including my beloved "Empire Of The Sun" if it meant I got another piece of pure popcorn as perfect as "Raiders Of The Lost Ark."

And now, damn it, I have reason to hope.

I haven't read the Daniel H. Wilson novel Robopocalypse, but I can say with confidence that if Drew Goddard is scripting the adaptation, it's going to rock. Goddard is one of those guys who made his bones crafting some of the best TV of the last 15 years, and in his best moments, I hear the same influences in his work that inform my own tastes. That includes a big helping heaping of early Spielberg. Goddard working with Spielberg is an exciting combination.

Reading the article at Deadline, I'm also encouraged by the description of the process on this one. The novel wasn't even finished when Spielberg and Goddard got involved, so for a time, Spielberg would be working on storyboards while Wilson was turning in book pages and Goddard was adapting them into script form.

That enthusiasm is impressive, and it suggests this is going to be an energetic Spielberg. I've heard about the same sort of energy during this work on "TinTin: The Secret Of The Unicorn," a passion project for the director that finally happened, one of those long-time dreams that many filmmakers die without realizing. In general, it sounds like Spielberg's on fire right now, and that thrills me.

So we'll see the book in June 2011, and then it sounds like Spielberg will step into directing this as soon as he wraps on "The War Horse." That's one of his "serious grown-up" movies, and I'm sure it will be very good, and I will happily eat those vegetables knowing now that Spielberg and Goddard are planning to unleash the "Robopocalyspse" in summer of 2012.

We'll probably bring you way more updates about this film than you're prepared to read, but I'm excited, so I apologize for nothing.

Massawyrm is bored to tears by the complete lack of a movie in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2

Published on: Oct 22, 2010 9:11:33 CDT Hola all. Massawyrm here.

When I was in High School, I became involved in the local Halloween Haunted House and spent a few years scaring the crap out of people while learning the ins and outs of how to set one up. The end result of that experience is that I can never go to a haunted house again. Once you know all the tricks and gags, it just isn’t scary anymore. But films don’t work like that. They invest you in characters, tell you detailed stories and control your mood with score and cinematography. But what happens when you remove these four elements from a movie? You get PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2.

There is a meme that has been running around the internet for years that is just a hair more sophisticated than a Rickroll. The idea is to link someone to a picture and tell them that something is amiss, often highlighted with the phrase “When you see it, you’ll shit.” The gag is that there’s nothing out of place. The picture is fine – except that it is an animated gif or flash object that suddenly changes to something frightening and might even scream at you. It’s supposed to scare you – but what it really does is just startle you by distracting your mind long enough to leave you susceptible to being caught off guard. It’s a cheap gimmick that works once or twice before it wears out its welcome; it is also the fundamental principle upon which PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and its sequel are based.

The PARANORMAL ACTIVITY series is nothing more than a cinematic supernatural WHERE’S WALDO in which we are shown long, static shots of a room before a light turns on and off or a chandelier swings. And since these “spooky” sequences are the only thing the movie has going on, you are forced to look around the screen constantly, trying to find what the gag is before the Mensa members in the audience ooh, ahh and verbally announce it to the rest of the crowd. “Oh! Did you see that? The chandelier is moving!” Sometimes someone off camera opens a door; sometimes someone bangs on a wall after a minute of solid silence. Once the movie gets going, the characters begin seeing the activity and reacting to it, followed by two minutes of “Oh shit, wasn’t that freaky?”

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 and its predecessor are the bottom of the barrel of the Found Footage genre, falling lazily upon the format to avoid needing any kind of talent behind the camera. The scripts are non-existent, the dialog nothing more than the mindless babble of average, uninteresting reality television personalities and the characters are built out of Scotch Tape and cardboard. The most character background you can glean out of anyone here is the job one of them has; outside of that there is nothing. These people like cameras and carry them around at the most inappropriate times – that’s the most I can tell you. When the movie needs to explain a relevant piece of information, someone sets a camera down next to themselves and uses the internet, and reads to us.

In order for these films to work, you *really* have to buy into the conceit. It will not distract you with story or character development like other, better movies will; you have to want to believe it is real and get off to whatever gimmick they throw at you next. You have to accept that this is not a movie, but a theme park ride. Otherwise, you’re just playing WHERE’S BEELZEBUB for 90 minutes.

This is not a better film than the original; it is a different film from the original using the exact same gimmicks. The first film had something of a (admittedly terrible) character arc, and arguably was less about a haunting and more about an emasculated alpha male douchebag trying to maintain control of his household and beat the devil at his own game. Micah Sloat is one of the worst protagonists in modern horror history, a two dimensional asshole whose reluctance to turn to someone for help dooms his household. But at least he had a second dimension; Katie didn’t. She was just terrified all the time and wanted the camera out of her face.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 trades that startling level of character depth for an actual mythology, which it aims to flesh out about as much as the characters in the first film. Here, no one has a discernable personality short of Suburban Dad, Suburban Teenager and Katie 2.0 (who happens to be Katie’s sister.) They are characters so thin and hollow that you will beg for the deep, rich stereotypes of z-grade 80’s slasher films. The baby has about as much personality as every other character in the film, and its most likable character is the family dog. And I get it; they’re supposed to work the same way Bella Swan works in the TWILIGHT novels, in which you are told nothing about them so you can put your family and friends into those roles and feel the terror by association. Again, it’s a theme park ride, not a movie.

What they do right this time around is tie the film in seamlessly with the first, answering any questions you might have about these connections along the way, while exploring the aspects of what this creature is and why it might be haunting them. But it doesn’t have any answers and the creature remains as nameless as ever. But my hat is off to them for trying.

The first film was forgivable for being a $10,000 experiment in a sub-category of film that had yet to reach its apex when it was made. But it was not a hit because it was good. It was a hit because the people that work at Paramount marketing are fucking geniuses that know their jobs better than almost anyone else in the industry and created one of the most successful campaigns of the modern era. They talked you into being scared; and odds are you were. If you can be talked into it again, you most likely will be. I know a number of other critics that are singing the praises of this film. But if you had problems with the last one, you’ll have problems with this one; it’s just more of the same. But in ten years I imagine people will look back and remember the experience, but not the film.

Until next time friends,

Massawyrm

yrm shrugs at Clint Eastwood's HEREAFTER

Published on: Oct 22, 2010 10:15:28 CDT Hola all. Massawyrm here.

It’s always a shame to see a good idea go south. HEREAFTER is just such a film. It’s not a good movie – it is 1/3 of a good movie, padded by 2/3s filler. The idea is solid – it is the story of three different people, each touched by death, whose stories all come to a head in one another’s company. The problem is that only one of these stories is any good, while the other simply meander through cliché after cliché until ending up serving only tangentially the story you manage to give a shit about. If you can make it through the other two stories, the single story is worth seeing – but they are the very paragons of mediocrity, and will test your will to keep watching with bouts of wistful banality.

The story worth watching this for is Matt Damon’s. Damon plays a psychic spirit medium who is the real deal. The kicker is he hates it. Once upon a time he was a big deal, but he walked away, finding the realm of the dead to be no place for the living. But life doesn’t want to play fair. He can’t have relationships, can’t keep a job, can’t catch a break – and every time things get tough, his fast talking, quick buck brother is there to try and convince him to get back into the medium racket again. This story, every moment of it, is absolutely compelling. It is the tragic tale of a man very good at something that could make him rich when instead he longs only for normalcy.

Damon gives this character all the weight he deserves, nailing the nice guy/simple man vibe while also capably delivering on the moments in which he needs to sell the supernatural. He’s equally met by Bryce Dallas Howard, the sexy, effervescent, girl-with-a-broken heart looking for love in the big city. Watching these two develop before one another’s eyes is exactly the type of filmmaking you expect out of Eastwood.

But then there are the other two stories: one about a young boy who loses a member of his family and of a seasoned reporter who has a near death experience, opening a brand new world to her but sending her career into a spiral. Neither of these work. Of the two only the reporter’s story holds anything worth mentioning: an incredible opening sequence involving a tsunami laying waste to a seaside town. The tsunami is incredible. Not only is it a perfectly executed example of disaster movie magic, it also manages to capture all the emotional beats it needs to in order to drive home the sheer wanton devastation of such an event. Sadly it serves only too set up a story that could have easily been supported by a smaller, more personal tragedy and leaves you wondering why this happened at all. It’s like opening a talking head, bank robbery film with a Michael Bay freeway car chase complete with explosions and a runaway Ferris wheel. An event that big is only truly warranted is the film is about how it affects several people – not one about someone who saw a bright light when they nearly drowned.

It’s not a bad film, but the tedium of the two other stories are liable to lessen the impact of the one you’ll no doubt like. The performances in these stories are great, but what the actors are given to do and say is not. While I love that Eastwood is still working and occasionally churning out something truly great, I really wish he would hire a composer every now and again; his scores are becoming tiresome and blending together. This isn’t the worst Eastwood film in a while; but it is his most middle of the road and forgettable. It’s worth checking out on DVD, but I wouldn’t recommend checking it out in a theater.

Until next time friends,

Massawyrm

Beloved (yet morally troublesome) anti-heroes

by The A.V. Club Staff October 22, 2010 Article Tools

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Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com.

The other day, I caught Crank on cable, and realized that even though Chev Chelios is a degenerate, selfish, awful human being, I found myself rooting for him. I had a hard time reconciling this fact. How can I support a protagonist whose ethics and values deeply and sharply contrast with mine? Great cinema and television frequently features anti-heroes, but are there specific characters of this ilk that actually trigger serious cognitive dissonance in your staff? —Todd

Tasha Robinson Honestly, the biggest one who leaps to mind is Batman. He’s had a lot of incarnations in his time, but the modern one—pretty much since Frank Miller in the ’80s—has taken him away from being a hero and turned him into a grim anti-hero. He does heroic things like saving the innocent, fighting the bad guys, etc., but let’s face it, in most modern incarnations, he’s a bugfuck insane, grossly violent vigilante with little to no real human connection. His endless, obsessive brooding over his parents’ death somehow still drives everything he does, to a psychotic degree. He’s harsh, judgmental, and ruthless, more a spirit of uncompromising vengeance than a man. Every time I see a new Batman movie or read a new Batman comic, I wind up a little uncomfortable over all the retribution fantasy, and thinking “What’s heroic about this creepy guy again?” He needs extensive psychotherapy, and maybe long-term exposure to some people who aren’t a) also bugfuck crazy, b) also billionaires operating on a different plane of reality than most people, c) insane murderous supervillains, d) victims. Maybe then he could rediscover his humanity. Until then, sure, I root for him in his stories, but I’m more than a little disturbed by, well, everything about him.

Leonard Pierce Tasha, I’d love to talk to you some day about the psychology of Bruce Wayne, and present you with my controversial Unified Theory Of Batman. In the meantime, though, let me say a few words in defense of my favorite comic book anti-hero: Dr. Victor Von Doom. “Wait a minute,” some of the readers are currently furiously typing into a comment box, “Dr. Doom isn’t an anti-hero! He’s a straight-up villain!” Ah, and therein lies the game. Sure, the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis was popular enough to star in his own title for a while (a first for a Marvel bad guy), but even then, it was called Super-Villain Team-Up. And Doom can be an evil monster, depending on who’s writing him; even at his most sympathetic, he’s a vain, brutal monomaniac whose ultimate goal is global dictatorship, and whose methods are just shy of the Judge’s in Blood Meridian. But he’s also powerful, charismatic, and brilliant; he’s got a tragic family history and a some genuinely noble goals; and he’s perfectly willing to do good when it suits his purposes, which is more often than not. It’s no secret that the villain of a story is determined by who’s telling the story, and in the classic ’80s FF arc “This Land Is My Land,” the hero team learned that lesson the hard way: They helped overthrow Doom from his position as Latverian despot, only to learn that his successor was a universally despised petty tyrant—and that among his people, Doom was beloved as an enlightened, progressive, benevolent dictator. (I even think he was right about Reed Richards fucking up his experiment in college, but that’s a story for another day.)

Scott Gordon It probably goes without saying that South Park wouldn’t have held out as long as it has without Eric Cartman. It isn’t just that he’s incredibly vulgar for an 8-year-old, is greedy, and has a pushover mom who’s also the town whore. I just love the idea that a little kid can be an utter sociopath, but can also have all the normal vulnerabilities, wants, fears, and capacity for childish glee. No matter how awful or evil his schemes (and despite his relentless anti-Semitism), I always find myself hoping he’ll go yet another step past too far, escalating his kid-sized problems into yet more needless unreason and destruction. Even when he’s mindlessly rampaging through Mexican restaurant/themeland Casa Bonita in season seven—hoping to enjoy as much mariachi and shovel in as many sopapillas as possible before he gets caught—you’ve got to share in his triumph as he finally dives off the ridiculous indoor waterfall. Still, the ultimate Cartman episode has to be season five’s “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” in which he takes outsized revenge on an older boy who tricked him into buying pubic hair: After his initial attempts to get the money back (“Hello, sir, my name is Kris Kristofferson, I’m with the IRS”), he tricks the kid into eating chili made out of his dead parents, then humiliates him in front of Radiohead.

Vadim Rizov So many to choose from! Generally, my favorite anti-heroes are the ones who get all the best dialogue; the mold for me is kind of set by W.C. Fields, whose relentless onscreen ’30s wars against sobriety, marriage, and childhood are perversely endearing. Or how about Joe Don Baker in Charley Varrick? He smacks women (who take this as a cue to sleep with him), torments the weak, and doesn’t even stand for any kind of notable code of self-defined ethics, but he still has an awesome drawl and cowboy hat. Nor let us forget the Firefly Clan of The Devil’s Rejects, who kill without compunction and take particular delight in sexually humiliating people who’ve done nothing to offend them, but still offer the funniest take on Roald Dahl ever (“I’m Willy Wonka, and this is my fucking chocolate factory!” Cue face-bashing). But recently, like so many others, I’ve been totally seduced by Daniel Plainview. He’s a little more justifiable to root for, insofar as pretty much everyone in There Will Be Blood is various degrees of appalling; he’s just the most forthright about his absolute contempt for others. His soliloquies make him something like the 21st century’s Timon of Athens: He’s a horrifying misanthrope, but his reasoning is hard to argue with.

Kyle Ryan It’s hard to call anyone from The Wire an anti-hero, because there were no regular heroes. Sure, the show’s characters could be heroic, but the Bodymore of The Wire wasn’t the place for square-jawed Superman types. Reduced to the simplest terms possible, it was a cops-and-robbers show, and you aren’t supposed to root for the robbers. But I have yet to meet a fan of that show who didn’t love Omar Little. He was charismatic, clever, dedicated to the ethical code of the streets, and just a total badass. Hearing his ominous whistling sent people on The Wire scrambling and yelling “Omar comin’!” but it filled me with glee. Was I psyched to talk to Michael Kenneth Williams in 2008? Oh, in-deed.

Steve Heisler Christopher Nolan specializes in anti-heroes. Leonard from Memento may or may not have killed the very wife he’s ostensibly avenging; The Prestige’s Angier destroyed his life in pursuit of an ultimately pointless feud; and as Tasha pointed out, there’s Batman, of course. But Cobb from Inception is Nolan’s ultimate achievement in having the audience root for an unlikeable guy by sole virtue of him being the central character. Cobb enlists an elite team of dream specialists to help him with a mission, after which he can finally return to LA and see his kids. (Basically: “One last job, then I’m off the force.”) It’s certainly a noble cause, yet his greed is the reason why he’s in the predicament in the first place. Plus, once he finds these people to help him on the mission, he purposely withholds information and drives them to go deeper into the subconscious, endangering the lives of those he purports to care about. Another director might betray Cobb’s character early on. But what I ultimately love about Nolan—and why I cite him as my favorite director working today—is that his characters lie to themselves so convincingly that by the time an inkling of their true selves creeps out, the audience is already totally invested in the film. It’s only when the film ends that we realize we’ve been rooting for a crazy person the whole time, the kind of surprise that makes being on Team Anti-Hero so much fun.

Jason Heller Michael Moorcock’s Elric certainly wasn’t the first antihero in fantasy literature, but he remains the genre’s most groundbreaking and indelible. Introduced in Moorcock’s 1961 novella “The Dreaming City,” the albino prince of the island kingdom of Melniboné is a withdrawn, bookish, arrogantly apathetic monarch who’s despised by much of his court and constituents. More than that, though, he’s actively cruel and decadent, reveling in his society’s slavery, mutilation, and perversion. When circumstance forces him to become a wandering adventurer, things don’t get any better—especially in light of the fact that he’s twice addicted, first to life-giving drugs, and second to the strength passed along by his parasitic, soul-stealing sword, Stormbringer. Few characters in any area of fiction are as morally ambivalent without being utterly devoid of morality. But even at his most bastardly, there’s something so deeply daydreamish and melancholy about him, it’s hard not to feel some empathy alongside the fascination and revulsion.

Sean O’Neal I briefly considered Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David for this answer, but that would suggest that Larry’s actions (tactless and occasionally selfish as they may be) were in any way ethically compromised, when the truth is, Larry is right most of the time—it’s just that he can be kind of an asshole about it. So then I moved on to his sitcom spiritual successor, Eastbound & Down’s Kenny Powers, a guy whose self-confidence is so perilously out of whack with his actual self-worth that his behavior is almost always unjustified. And yet, as with Larry David, his total conviction makes him so damned likeable. Sure, Kenny is an egomaniac to a disturbing degree, and that means he always ends up hurting the few people who try to help him, as seen in the slow torture of his little toady Stevie, whose absolute worship for Kenny is pathetically masochistic, given all the shit Kenny puts him through, including upending his career, robbing him, shooting him, and most recently, forcing him to get rid of the first girlfriend he’s ever had. Yet it’s easy to see why, even after all that, Stevie still thinks Kenny is so cool: It’s because Kenny remains completely, unflappably convinced that he’s a hero, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he’s a loser. What better role model is there for an America that’s no longer as great as it thinks it is than a dude who, trapped in a never-ending downward spiral, just says “Fuck it,” slams some beers, and hops on a jet-ski in search of some trim?

Todd VanDerWerff It’s tempting to suggest that Deadwood’s Al Swearengen doesn’t qualify for this list, since he’s pretty much the villain of the show’s first season, but over the series’ three-year run, he gradually shifts into just as important a figure at keeping the titular town out of the clutches of ruthless businessmen as its actual sheriff. It certainly helped that Al is played by Ian McShane, who can make just about anything seem charismatic, but the character of the ruthless saloon owner and incipient crime lord who goes good because there’s more money in playing by the rules (and the people around him have grown on him) should have felt far more stoked with sentimentality than it did. Instead, McShane and creator David Milch made Al’s evolution so gradual that it was easy for many viewers to miss just what was happening, until the series’ climax, where Al had to undertake an unspeakable act, and it became an open question whether he would even be able to do it—even though when the show debuted, these very unspeakable acts were what made him such a good businessman. Don’t get me wrong: Al is no softie at any point in Deadwood’s run, and he spends the entirety of the series as the proprietor of a whorehouse, delivering monologues while receiving blowjobs, or while taking evening strolls with the head of a dead Native American in a box. It’s almost impossible to describe Al without making him sound sort of stupid and too consciously constructed, but something about his temper and his sentimental humanist streak rings wonderfully true in the process of watching Milch and McShane bring him to life.

Marcus Gilmer Of all the mysteries at the heart of Lost, few are as perplexing as the popularity of Benjamin Linus. How else to explain how a character whose primary talents are murder and manipulation can elicit such sympathy and become a fan favorite? Ben is presented to us in so many forms—killer, puppetmaster, protector—he covers all the bases. In season three’s “The Man Behind The Curtain,” we’re made to feel sympathy for a young Ben as we witness via flashback the verbal abuse he experienced at the hands of an alcoholic father who blamed Ben for his mother’s death during childbirth. Minutes later, we’re watching in horror as Ben, now grown, commits mass murder. As the ruthless, Machiavellian leader of “The Others,” Ben was set as the series’ main villain early. But that line blurred as the series unfolded and remorse crept in at the corners for Ben, who—in spite of his continued calculating manipulation—seemed headed toward some kind of redemption. And even then, at the heart of his ruthlessness were two underlying aims: protect The Island and the daughter he raised after kidnapping her from her birth mother. This complexity, along with a sharp, dry wit, made Ben the most compelling character of the series. (So did his incredible ability to survive numerous vicious beatings.) Just as The Island had so many mysteries left to unlock, so did Ben: his ongoing battle over possession of The Island with Charles Widmore, his twisted mentoring of John Locke, and his pity-inducing relationship with Island overlord Jacob. Ironically, the show’s primary hero, Jack Shepherd, was someone many fans found unbearable as the show’s run continued, while anti-hero Ben Linus became a fan favorite. And in the series’ divisive finale, the resolution of Ben’s storyline was the one that seemed to sit best with fans.

Claire Zulkey Originally, I was going to say Larry David was my beloved anti-hero, but truth be told, I think a lot of times, he’s actually doing and saying what we all feel, just in an extremely tactless way. On the other hand, there’s the crew from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. It’s hard to argue on behalf of people who purposefully get hooked on crack in order to get on welfare, have sex with each others’ parents to get revenge on each other, pretend to be handicapped in order to gain sympathy, and generally flip their ideals whenever it’s convenient. Of course, the merry way they go about being so awful, and bounce back every episode like cartoon characters who just have to shake their heads after being hit by an anvil, is what’s so appealing about them.

Noel Murray In real life, I get easily annoyed by bratty, thoughtless, self-absorbed little kids. So why do I like Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes so much? Maybe it’s because cartoonist Bill Watterson often used Calvin to comment on the culture of instant gratification, letting the kid embody the worst part of ourselves. Or maybe it’s that Watterson balanced Calvin’s raw selfishness with the kind of fertile imagination that only an egotist with a heart could muster. (After all, any kid who could conjure up an imaginary friend as sweet as the gangly tiger Hobbes can’t be all bad.) Or maybe it’s that Watterson let Calvin be a mirror, showing how we’re all a little bit awful, so maybe we should be more empathetic to the Calvins of the world. By the way, now that Calvin & Hobbes is no more, my favorite comic-strip brat is Cul De Sac’s Alice, a 4-year-old who rules over her preschool like a queen and sends her parents scrambling with every whim. Like most 4-year-olds, she’s capable of real sweetness, but thinks the world would run a lot smoother if everyone just did what she wants. Kudos to cartoonist Richard Thompson for such a funny, well-observed creation.

Zack Handlen I like characters who are hard to like. I think it satisfies a certain quotient of self-loathing in my personality; while I’m not actually all that awful, part of me suspects I am, so I can relate to fictional people who alienate themselves through antisocial behavior. Thomas Covenant from Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever is probably as far as I’m willing or able to go with this. A teacher recommended the series to me when I was in high school, but while he said it was challenging, he didn’t give me much advance warning as to just how awful Covenant could be: a leper who gets hit by a car and wakes up in a fantasy world where everything teems with health and vitality, Covenant is a constantly raging, embittered, complaining dervish of ceaseless mopery and abuse. That alone can be tiresome if you’re not in the right mood for it, but worst of all, the night after waking up in the Land, Covenant rapes a teenager. It’s a brutal, hateful act, and the first time I read the series’ first book (Lord Foul’s Bane), I almost had to stop reading—I felt incriminated in what had happened, as if my initial willingness to sympathize with the character made me culpable in his actions. I kept reading, though, and I’m glad I did. Covenant remains a difficult, off-putting lead throughout the original trilogy, and Donaldson’s over-the-top, fevered writing style isn’t for everyone, but The Chronicles remain one of my favorite works of fantasy fiction because of the books’ unblinking intensity, and because of Covenant’s ugliness. He’s an anti-hero who never gets to look cool for his crimes.

Scott Tobias Conventional wisdom holds that The Social Network kneecaps Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard whiz kid who founded Facebook and became the world’s youngest billionaire in the process. The buzz about Zuckerberg was so toxic in the lead-up to the film’s release that the real man donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools in a gesture that was about more than philanthropy. And yet while I recognize the Zuckerberg of The Social Network as a callous, disloyal, unscrupulous, status-obsessed asshole-in-training, I nonetheless rooted for him to beat back the legal claims of Eduardo Saverin, the Winklevi, and anyone seeking their slice of the multi-billion-dollar pie. He’s a man of vision battling challenges from narrow thinkers who can’t wrap their heads around what he’s trying to accomplish; as Zuckerberg snaps at the Winklevi, “If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.” As for his deficiencies as a human being, Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg, comes across as the classic outsider, a stranger to privilege whose desperate need to fit in runs against a social ineptitude he can’t overcome. Doesn’t that make him more identifiable than a pack of Harvard bluebloods?

Keith Phipps This isn’t a movie I love as much as I like the lead performance, but I have to confess to sympathizing a bit too much with Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. She knew what she wanted and wanted everyone else around her to help realize that. If that meant stepping on some toes, well, toes are sometimes there for the stepping. Maybe it’s an editor thing, though I also like to think my own editorial style is far enough removed from Streep’s Anna-Wintour-in-all-but-name that my co-workers would never make the connection I made.

Buffy / Angel “Bargaining” -

by Noel Murray October 22, 2010 Buffy / Angel “Bargaining” season 6 , episode 1 & 2 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

A- reader rating based on 9 ratings

So, what does resurrection mean, exactly?

“Bargaining” wrestles with that question on multiple levels, including a meta one. Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s sixth season was its first on a new network, UPN, and even though the continued existence of the show was never really in doubt when Buffy and the WB parted ways—at least according to what I’ve read about the situation—there’s still an element of rebirth in play here. For one thing, in 2001, not everybody had access to both the WB and UPN. (The main reason I missed Buffy the first time around was that I didn’t live in a place with the WB until 1999.) So Whedon and company entered the season knowing that they’d be losing longtime viewers and playing to new ones. Add in the way Season Five ended, with the death of the show’s protagonist, and there’s a real sense that Buffy is starting fresh as this episode begins. Buffy’s back from the dead. But is it the same?

One of the things I appreciated most about the double-length “Bargaining” is that while in many ways it feels like a Buffy episode—it’s funny, and emotionally resonant, and frequently holds to that hushed tone that makes Buffy so unlike other genre shows—it also acknowledges, from start to finish, how out-of-synch everything has become.

On the surface, all seems reasonably well. In Buffy’s absence, the Scoobies are still patrolling, with Willow telepathically guiding Spike, Tara, Giles, Xander and Anya from above as they track and stake demons. But mistakes do get made. When Tara tries to confuse a portly vampire by blowing powdered Sobri root at him, it just makes him peppy. (“Do you think he was taking prescription medication?” she asks. “Good God, what if he attempts to operate heavy machinery?” Giles deadpans in reply.) And what should be the gang’s secret weapon—the Buffy-bot—isn’t responding as well as it should to Willow’s programming. That is, unless Willow wanted the bot to treat the bad guys to snappy banter like, “That’ll put marzipan in your pie-plate, Bingo.”

The glitchiness of the Buffy-bot exemplifies what I liked about this episode. The bot looks like Buffy. In some ways she’s better than Buffy. She’s loyal, and helpful, and much less angsty. She makes cute, comical errors. But her very presence seems to make everyone around her sad. Spike has demanded that Willow deprogram all of the bot’s previous affections for him, while Willow is both protective of and exasperated by the thing. (When B-bot tries to answer the phone, Willow suggest that she let the machine—“the other machine”—take it.) Only Dawn seems not to mind having a walking, talking, life-size model of her sister around; she actually snuggles up with the Buffy-bot at night.

Given how conflicted everyone feels about the robot version of Buffy, maybe that should be a sign that they shouldn’t do what they’re secretly planning to do: Raise Buffy from the dead.

But no. Willow’s been assembling what she needs for the spell—including an Urn Of Osiris, which Anya gets off eBay—and when Xander expresses some trepidation, Willow snaps, “Nobody’s changing their minds. Period.” When Xander asks, “Who made you the boss of the group?” Anya reminds him, “You did… you said ‘let’s vote’ and it was unanimous.” (Tara: “You made her that little plaque that says ‘Boss Of Us.’”) But Xander’s right to be cautious. Later we see Willow call forth a cute baby deer, and then gut it. And when the Scoobies are actually putting the resurrection spell into action, Willow’s skin erupts with tiny cuts, and a snake comes out of her mouth. When Xander sees how dark the magic they’re all involved with has become, he’s pissed.

How are they able to cast such a powerful, inadvisable spell in the first place? Blame Giles, who has been feeling morose and useless in the wake of Buffy’s death, even as he acknowledges that all slayer/watcher relationships end this way, and that, technically, “I did my job.” He’s heading back to England, and only after the gang sees him off at the airport—from back in the days when security allowed you to hang out at the gate even when you weren’t flying—do they assemble to attempt to resurrection. (And without Spike and Dawn’s input, I might add… something that I imagine will be significant in the weeks to come.)

The first half of “Bargaining” is a lot stronger than the second. Around the midpoint, Willow’s spell is interrupted by a demon biker gang named The Hellions—led by a mountainous, pierced beast named Razor—who’ve come to Sunnydale to wreak havoc, having gotten word that the home of The Hellmouth is now only protected by a mechanical version of The Slayer. I do like the Romero-esque quality of a well-laid-plan being undone by random hoodlums, but the scenes of mayhem felt prolonged to me, as though the Buffy writers (Marti Noxon and David Fury, as credited) really only had enough story for an episode-and-a-half.

That said, there’s a lot to like about “Bargaining, Pt. 2,” including the actual return of our undead heroine. Although Willow’s spell gets cut off when The Hellions run over the Urn Of Osiris, Buffy’s soul does re-enter her body—her rotting body, inside its casket. The body quickly gets restored to its pre-death state (though the hair’s a little longer), but since the Scoobies have been scattered by The Hellions, Buffy’s left to scratch her way out of the coffin and dig her way out of the grave all by herself. Then she stumbles, in a daze, through a Sunnydale that’s been smashed and torched by the bikers. Finally she comes across The Hellions, in the process of ripping the Buffy-bot apart. It’s no wonder that at the end of the episode Buffy asks the most obvious question: “Is this Hell?”

Before that happens though, Buffy has business to take care of. She eventually snaps out of her catatonia, tells The Hellions that she doesn’t recognize their bullshit MC, and kicks their asses, with her friends’ help. And then she runs off, and finds the scaffolding where she leapt to her death in “The Gift.” Dawn climbs up after her, and tries to convince her not to kill herself again, in a replay of the S5 finale. (One that drags on a bit too long, in my opinion.) Eventually, before the structure collapses, Buffy grabs Dawn and a nearby cable and swings down to safety, while Dawn sobs, “You’re alive and you’re home!” But there’s no happy epilogue with everybody eating snacks and laughing in the Summers’ kitchen. Instead, we close on a shot of Buffy’s face, completely blank. Yikes.

I wouldn’t put it past the Buffy writers to turn something triumphant—a rebirth!—into a curse that haunts our heroes for weeks on end, or maybe even to the end of the season, or to the end of the series. Unlike a lot of TV shows, Buffy tends to weigh all the possible impacts of a decision and then pursue the one that’s the most devastating. Not for nothing does Tara suggest to Willow that maybe The Hellions arrived because the spell wasn’t supposed to work. (And back on that meta level, I have to wonder if that reflects the feelings of the Buffy writers, talking amongst themselves about the show coming back.)

But at the same time, if you’re not alive and in this world, then what are you? What’s the alternative? I think my favorite scene in “Bargaining” is when Spike and Dawn find the poor, dismembered Buffy-bot and the machine jolts to life long enough to ask, “Where did I go?” She’s asking about the real Buffy, whom she saw before getting destroyed. But the bot could just as easily be talking about herself, after the demolition. Where did she go?

Stay tuned. I’m curious to know the answer to that question myself.

Stray observations:

-I urge you to be gentle with me as I make my way through Buffy S6. I know it’s a divisive season. Some of you hate it; some love it. It’s my pal Scott Tobias’ favorite Buffy season, and since Scott and I tend to have similar tastes in such things, I’m coming into this very optimistic. But outside of a few rough plot details, I don’t know what’s coming, so if I like an episode a lot more—or less—than you, try not to hold it against me. We’re all friends here, right?

-Credits report: Anthony Stewart Head is now just a special guest star. Amber Benson still doesn’t make the opening.

-Spike imagines how it would go if Giles’ life flashed before his eyes: “Cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged, cuppa tea.”

-Buffy-bot, unwilling to let a knock-knock joke go: “If we want her to be exactly she’ll never be exactly I know the only really real Buffy is really Buffy and she’s gone who?”

-The B-bot’s uncomprehending earnestness makes her interactions with Dawn’s teachers painful to watch, but other parents misinterpret her comments as germane, so it all turns out okay.

-I love the nuances of Spike’s interactions with Dawn in this episode. He takes care of her—almost obsessively—and tries to impart a little wisdom when he tells Dawn that the educational system is all about turning children into automatons, but that she should go to school anyway because Buffy would’ve wanted her to. But Spike also clearly resents Dawn a little, since she’s ultimately responsible for Buffy’s demise. That’s partly why he watches her so close. Since Buffy died for Dawn, Spike’s damn well going to make sure that Dawn doesn’t waste her life, even if Dawn timidly insists, “I’m not The Key… or if I am, I don’t open anything anymore.”

-Before Tara gives Giles the monster finger puppet, she does the Mutant Enemy growl.

-“I happen to be a very powerful Manwich myself.”

-Tara axes Razor. Her first kill!

-“Some of my boys have some anatomical incompatibilities that tend to tear up little girls.”

-Some good comic business as Anya keeps looking for a chance to announce her engagement to Xander, to brighten everyone’s mood. She never does find the right time—at least according to Xander, who keeps stopping her.

-Love the shot of Spike on a motorcycle with the football-helmeted Dawn riding behind. Iconic stuff.

-Any significance to the proliferation of number-shirts in this episode? Willow wore 11, Xander’s 13, and Dawn is 7. (Yes, Daaawn is seven. Daaaaawn is seven! This monkey’s… etc.)

-Next week: Angel, “That Old Gang Of Mine” and Buffy, “After Life.” « Back to the A.V. Club home

on the finding (and not finding) of evil wil wheaton via WWdN: In Exile by wil@wilwheaton.net (Wil Wheaton) on 10/26/10

We filmed until 330 this morning, and when I finally got home a little after 4am, it was all I could do to convince myself to wash off my makeup and go to sleep. I woke up at 1230 this afternoon in the same position I fell asleep, and I probably could have easily slept another 3 hours or more. When I wrap (I'm writing this from the set) in a few hours, I go straight to the airport, fly up to Vancouver, drive two hours to location, and start work on Eureka at 655 tomorrow morning.

Ever since I woke up, I've felt like I'm wrapped in this warm blanket of happy exhaustion, and I'm so grateful that I'm only in 4/8 of a page tomorrow, so by the time I really hit the wall tomorrow afternoon, I'll be able to fall into bed and stay there.

It's a lot to do, and it's as exhausting as it sounds ... but it's also a lot of fun. This has been my life to varying degrees for the last several months, and though it's overwhelming at times, and I don't have a lot of free time, all I have to do is look at the times I had as much free time as I wanted (from about 2001 to 2007) and everything falls into a wonderful perspective. I keep saying that I hope I don't wake up from this wonderful dream, and I mean it more today than ever.

Last night, we shot on the back lot at Warners. It was a night shoot, with about a hundred extras and all kinds of atmosphere - cars driving and lights changing - and I felt like I was really in the movies, more than I usually do. When we got to my scene, it took me several takes to find Evil Wil Wheaton, and I started to feel like I was screwing up and causing everyone to think twice about bringing me back for more episodes. After the second take where I just felt off, the director came over to me and told me to have more fun, don't be so controlled, and remember [SPOILER] and [SPOILER]. A few things clicked into place, and we shot a few really funny and truthful takes. I couldn't put my finger on exactly why, but Evil Wil Wheaton came to life, and I couldn’t believe that, even for a second, I hadn’t been able to produce him out of snarky air.

Earlier today, before we began shooting, I walked over to Mark, our director, and said, “I just wanted to thank you for helping me find Evil Wil Wheaton last night. Your notes made all the difference for me.”

He said I was welcome, and told me that the scene was really funny, and looked great, too.

“I always have such a good time when I’m here,” I began, and I then I knew exactly why I was having so much trouble finding Evil Wil Wheaton. “And I just realized why I was having so much trouble last night.”

“Oh?” Mark cocked his head a little bit to one side and waited for me to continue.

“Yeah. I was so exited to be working outside, at night, on the backlot, and so overjoyed to just be back on this show, it got in between me and Evil Wil Wheaton. My very real joy and happiness was so overwhelming, it informed my performance and pushed it in the wrong direction. When you told me [SPOILER], it brought me out of that nerdy joy enough to focus me back on finding the truth in the scene and the character.”

“I saw that happen,” Mark said.

“Usually, I have four days of rehearsals and run throughs to get that giddiness out of the way -- and I honestly feel like a real freakin’ noob to not have realized this right away -- but I only had the one rehearsal and the one run through on Friday, and then … well, there we were.”

Mark nodded slowly and smiled at me. “Well, you were great.”

“Thanks, man,” I said. “I feel so silly, because it’s not like this is my first rodeo, you know?”

Mark nodded, and was called away to do director stuff, so I came up to my dressing room to write this post, while the memory was fresh in my mind.

I’ve been an actor for just over 30 years. I’ve worked in nearly every environment possible, on all kinds of productions, in all kinds of roles. If I wasn’t playing an evil version of myself, I would have remembered that I was playing a character who is snarky and evil and lies about his grandmother and breaks couples up to win at bowling … but that blurring of the line between me and the character I play of the same name is something that is relatively new to me. I’m grateful that I had a fantastic director like Mark to help me find and define the line between me and Evil Me again.

Added long after we wrapped: Seconds after I finished writing this, I was called to the set to work, and then I got in a car to come straight to the airport. I’m waiting to board my plane back to Vancouver now, and I have a moment to edit and post this. Before I get on my plane and instantly fall asleep, I want to add that had a wonderful time on the show, like I always do, and I just want to take a moment to once again thank the cast, crew, writers and producers for making me feel so welcome. My episode airs on November 11 on CBS. I really hope you’ll tune in, and tell your friends to watch.

Un-Legacying Your Code, One Step At A Time via Paul Tevis by Paul on 10/27/10

Michael Feathers' Working Effectively With Legacy Code starts out with the most useful definition of "legacy code" I've ever seen.

To me, legacy code is simply code without tests. I've gotten some grief for this definition. What do tests have to do with whether code is bad? To me, the answer is straightforward, and it is a point that I elaborate throughout the book: Code without tests is bad code. It doesn't matter how well-written it is; it doesn't matter how pretty or object-oriented or well-encapsulate it is. With tests, we can change the behavior of our code quickly and verifiably. Without them, we really don't know if our code is getting better or worse.

As someone who finds himself working without a lot of code that doesn't have tests, this resonates strongly with me.

So, how do we "work effectively" with code like this? By getting it under test. In particularly, by crafting unit tests that (1) run fast1 and (2) help us localize problems. Michael identifies two things we really need in order to write these tests. First, we need separation between modules. Most legacy code bases are hard to write units test for because of snarled dependencies. I've struggled through trying to instantiate a class in a test framework only to end up with half of the application in my test, so I understand the complexities involved. I've also dealt with code that we can't test in a framework because of undesired side effects from running it. Second, we need to be able to sense certain values that our code computes so that we know it did the right thing. Both of these are accomplished by what he calls a "seam":

A seam is a place where you can alter the behavior in your program without editing in that place.2

To exploit this notion of separating and sensing with seams, the book presents a set of dependency breaking techniques3 that can be done fairly safely to bring legacy code under test. The majority of the book is structured with familiar problems as chapter titles. I Don't Have Much Time and I Have To Change It I Can't Get This Class Into a Test Harness I Need to Make a Change. What Methods Should I Test? I Don't Understand the Code Well Enough to Change It How Do I Know I'm Not Breaking Anything?

With only a few minor exceptions, each chapter spoke directly to a problem I've personally encountered in one or more of the code bases I've worked on. Each gave me a specific set of techniques to apply to the problem in such a way that I could see how they would work. I've started to do just that in current project.

The last section of the book is a catalog of the simple but powerful dependency-breaking techniques introduced throughout. Of the two dozen presented, there are handful that form the core and that are used repeatedly throughout, while the rest are used only in particular, less-common situations. What struck me most is how much these techniques are about getting back to core design principles. Classes should have one responsibility. Methods should be short and do one thing. When you find code that violates these principles, you can use the refactorings in this book to introduce new methods and classes to break them up. Yes, it can take a long time to get to that idllyic land where everything is simple, clean, and under test. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and if you take just one step a day every day, you'll get there sooner than you think.4

1 And by fast, he means that each test runs in 1/100th of a second. This means usually (1) no hitting the database, (2) no communicating over the network, (3) no touching the filesystem, and (4) no editing special configuration files to run it. Tests that do these things aren't bad, they just aren't unit tests.

2 While much of the book deals with object-oriented programs, because object seams are one of the easiest types to work with, in languages like C we have link seams and preprocessor seams as well.

3 At Agile 2010, I overheard Martin Fowler describe these as "blind refactorings," because you have to make what you hope are behavior-invariant changes without the benefit of tests.

4 And much sooner than if you never take a step.5

5 And even sooner if you don't take steps backward. Stop writing legacy code.

Movie Answer Man: Ebert vs. Scott Pilgrim vs. the world? via RogerEbert Headlines on 10/28/10 Q. Why haven't you reviewed "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World?" While it certainly underperformed at the Box Office, given your (embarrassingly) tumultuous relationship with Video Games, it would seem like fertile ground for a nuanced and controlled critique of video game culture and its effects on other forms of media. (Christian Russo) A. Video games rank low on the list of tumultuous relationships I feel embarrassed about, but I've been amazed how often I've been asked your question. I took a month's leave to work on my memoirs, and alas didn't see "Scott Pilgrim." I still sleep of nights. Hugh Hefner has been good for us via Roger Ebert's Journal by Roger Ebert on 11/6/10

From the moment that Hal Holmes and I slipped quietly into his basement and he showed me his father's hidden collection of Playboy magazines, the map of my emotional geography shifted toward Chicago. In that magical city lived a man named Hugh Hefner who had Playmates possessing wondrous bits and pieces I had never seen before. I wanted to be invited to his house.

I was trembling on the brim of puberty, and aroused not so much by the rather sedate color "centerfold" of an undressed woman, as by the black and white photos that accompanied them. These showed an ordinary woman (I believe it was Janet Pilgrim) entering an office building in Chicago, and being made up for her "pictorial." Made up! Two makeup artists were shown applying powders and creams to her flesh. This electrified me. It made Pilgrim a real person. In an interview she spoke of her life and ambitions. The photographs that burned into my mind did not reveal any of Miss Pilgrim's wondrous bits. I sensed even then that bits were not what it was about. All depended on context. Miss Pilgrim would disrobe and have her body made up by two other women for her Pictorial, and then...then... turning the page...and then she would put on a dressing gown and enter a photo studio and meet a serious and respectable looking photographer... and then...then...she would drop the gown to the floor and then... I turned the page...she would pose for the Centerfold.

It was the process that entranced me. I'd seen cheesecake pin-ups before; my own basement, across the street from Hal's, also contained certain hidden magazines we had studied. That our fathers concealed these magazines from our mothers and that we studied them secretly was surely a rite of passage into manhood. The women we found in those other magazines had no existence apart from their pages. They came into the world full-blown as we saw them, wearing polka-dot bikinis or holding Japanese umbrellas, and after the photo was taken they ceased to exist. They didn't come to work, go home from work, eat, sleep, sneeze, or have any corporeal existence. They were pin-ups. The women in Playboy were real, and lived only 135 miles from Urbana, Illinois, and in some unlikely but thinkable universe I might meet them. My pre-teen hormones cried out: Yes! This is what we're hormones for!

In the years to come, Hugh Hefner was often in the news, and rarely in a story I didn't read. He lived in a Mansion. He drove a Mercedes two-seater. He smoked a pipe. In his Mansion, Tony Bennett, Julie London and Bill Cosby hung out, and there were parties every night, and something was happening that was halfway between a bachelor's pad and a bacchanal.

I promised to myself that if I ever got a job Chicago, I would get myself invited to the Mansion within six months. It didn't take that long. I was hired by the Sun-Times in the autumn of 1966, and two months later I was assigned to write a feature story about a party at the Mansion. It was a party for the top Chevrolet dealers of America. Julie London was nowhere to be seen. But there was a big buffet, and Hef was in the living room with his dressing gown, his slippers, his pipe, his Pepsi and his date. I slipped into an alcove and found my way down to the Grotto with its plate-glass window opening onto the aquatic underwater vista of the pool.

And there I met, not Miss December, but a young woman named Royal Kennedy. She worked in broadcasting, and was also covering the party. She was amused by the Grotto. We later went out on one or two perfectly respectable dates. She had never met a Playmate. We had that in common. It gradually became clear to me that Bill Cosby might meet Miss December but I never would.

I went back to the Mansion several more times, for parties and movie nights. When Russ Meyer came through Chicago with his new bride Edy Williams, Hef had us over for dinner and gave us the tour. Russ shot some of the first Playmates. I covered the opening of the West Coast Mansion in Holmby Hills, and stood at the bar with Tony Curtis. Later Chaz and I went to some of Hef's New Years' Eve parties out there. In Playboy I'd read about parties at Hef's pad with people like Ray Anthony, Mel Torme and Miss October of 1967. And now it was 1988, and OMG, there they still were! Ray Anthony, Mel Torme and Miss October of 1967! And I went to one of Hef's "movie nights" at the Mansion, with Hef using notes on a yellow legal pad to introduce "Treasure Island."

Many of you will find my comments deplorable. You may believe Playboy was the enemy of women. It objectified their bodies. It schooled men to regard them as sex objects. It stood for all that feminists fought to correct. There is some truth to that, but it doesn't impact upon my experience, and the best I can do here is be truthful.

Nobody taught me to regard women as sex objects. I always did. Most men do. And truth to tell, most women regard men as sex objects. We regard many other aspects of another person, but sex is the elephant in the room. Evolution has hard-wired us that way. When we meet a new person, in some small recess of our minds we evaluate that person as a sex partner. We don't act on it, we don't dwell on it, but we do it. You know we do. And this process continues bravely until we are old and feeble.

&nbsp &nbsp To protect you from possible trouble at your work,the photograph that was formerly in this space is now linked here. &nbsp &nbsp

Yes, Playboy presented women's bodies for our regard. Yes, they were airbrushed and photo shopped to perfection. Not a blemish, not a zit, not one single chewed fingernail. This process of perfection doesn't deny nature, it reflects it. When we meditate on the partner of our dreams, the mental image we summon is without flaw. We don't dwell upon a pimple or a bad tooth or a little underarm fat. We meditate on the gestalt. We meditate on being accepted and loved by that wonderful person. Photographers like Diane Arbus photographed people realistically, and were called cruel.

Nor it is only women's bodies that have been objectified and turned into sex objects. Men have undergone the same process. If few women feel they can live up to a Playmate, few men believe they belong in a Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein ad. Vogue doesn't publish 700-page holiday issues filled with models with zits. I'm not saying this is ideal. I'm saying it's the truth.

So now I move on to a larger view of Hugh Hefner. Yes, he has possibly experienced more orgasms with more different women than any other man who has ever lived. But his relationships have been consensual, and no woman has ever said, "Why, Mr. Hefner! I had no idea you were that kind of man!" It is also notable that in an age where sexual harassment lawsuits are as common as bankruptcies, Hefner has never been charged with misbehavior. We must conclude that Hefner's behavior is that of a generous gentleman who likes to get laid. That is not the worst thing in the world.

I've just finished watching a new documentary named Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, by Brigitte Berman, who won an Oscar for "Artie Shaw: Time is All You've Got" (1985), and also directed "Bix: Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet" (1983). My guess is that Hefner and Berman met through their interest in jazz. The film is pro-Hefner, although it supplies Susan Brownmiller and Pat Boone to make the obligatory arguments for the prosecution. It presents Hefner as he would probably want to be seen, as a supporter of civil rights, civil liberties, freedom of speech, and freedom of choice.

His credentials in these areas have cost him some money and trouble. His syndicated TV program "Playboy After Dark," which he owned and controlled, showcased mixed-race singing groups and blacklisted performers like Pete Seeger at a time when networks enforced a ban on both. It also showed black and whites dancing together on a set supposed to be "Hef's Penthouse." Some stations in the south refused to carry it. The show went on the air not long after Nat King Cole's show left NBC after failing to find advertisers who would buy into a "black" show.

In New Orleans, Hefner franchised one of the first Playboy Clubs, later to learn it was forbidden by law to mix black and white patrons. He bought back the franchise, and reopened it to club members of all races. It was in that club that a black comedian performed before whites for the first time in Louisiana (although black musicians were "legal"). He was a young man from Chicago named Dick Gregory. Gregory appears in the film, recalling that he was a replacement for a white comic, Dr. Irwin Corey, and the Playboy event turned out to be a private party for 300 white businessmen. "Three hours later, I was still talking," Gregory says. "Everything turned around on that day." For his career, it certainly did.

It became a old joke that people said they read Playboy because of the articles. But Hefner tried much harder than necessary to maintain a high editorial standard. His issues #2 through #4 serialized Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. He championed Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin and Jorge Luis Borges. His Playboy Interviews were newsworthy, and his editors must have smiled when they sent Alex Haley to interview the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. (Haley recalls, "I told him I'd been called 'nigger' many times, but this time I was being well paid to hear it.") "The Hurt Locker" was based on Playboy reporting.

Hefner and Playboy have been around so long that not everyone remembers what America used to be like. It was sexually repressed and socially restrictive. College students were expelled for having sex out of wedlock. Homosexuality and miscegenation were illegal. Freedom of choice was denied. McCarthyism still cast a pall over the freedom of speech. Many people joined in the fight against that unhealthy society. Hefner was one of them, and a case can can be made that Playboy had a greater influence on our society in its first half-century than any other magazine.

No doubt Playboy objectified women and all the rest of it. But it also celebrated them, and freed their bodies from the stigma of shame. It calmly explained that women were sexual beings, and experienced orgasms, and that photographs of their bodies were not by definition "dirty pictures." Not many of today's feminists (of either gender) would be able to endure America's attitudes about women in the 1950s.

As Hefner speaks, you realize that he believes in civil rights and liberties so deeply that it's instinctive. Many people shared his politics in the 1950s and early 1960s, but not many of them ran corporations that (a) depended on mass audiences, and (b) stood to lose business because of political beliefs. When it came to African-Americans in his clubs or on his TV show (or as his centerfolds), Hefner did the right thing without calculation, and paid a financial penalty. When the (endless) Playboy Philosophy argued for change, it is unlikely he gained a single reader. But he outlined and defended a progressive philosophy. And when magazine interviews were often revolting puffery about celebrities, he went long and in detail with people like Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Marshall McLuhan. The fact is that sex made money for Hefner, and he used it to produce one of the best magazines in America.

He also spent money to free a man who faced a 50-year prison term for...fellatio. And helped overturn laws that made fellatio and cunnilingus a crime in all 50 states (for which many of us must be grateful). He fought against laws punishing homosexuality and interracial marriage. He supported Lenny Bruce's fight against an obscenity arrest in Chicago. He fought obscenity prosecutions brought by such as Charles Keating, founder of the Citizens for Decent Literature. He won. Berman's doc cannot resist juxtaposing shots of Keating lecturing on morality and Keating in handcuffs being led to prison for bank fraud. Hefner's Playboy Foundation fought for civil liberties in general. The cost for these activities came out of his profits, and that didn't give him a moment's pause.

Some argue, like Brownmiller, that Playboy was bad for women--that it made them objects for masturbation. I would suggest Playboy was several thousand years behind the curve in doing so. And not only women are used as subjects for meditation during masturbation. Masturbation is an equal opportunity employer. Others argue, like Boone, that Playboy promoted immoral behavior. I believe sex in our society, in general, is more moral today than it was when Playboy began. I think young people in particular have healthier attitudes toward it than they did when I was in high school. I agree that teen pregnancy and STD are tragic, but it was Hefner who fought for birth control and protection when they were illegal in some states. I was taught that a woman's body was a possible Occasion for Sin. What kind of morality is that?

Hefner is returning to Chicago this week with his brother Keith, to revisit their childhood home and their old high school, Steinmetz. I went along with them on their previous return home in 1994. I'd love for him to see the Audience Award winner in this year's Chicago Film Festival, "Louder Than a Bomb." It's a documentary about the city-wide High School Poetry Slam Contest, co-directed by Jon Siskel, nephew of Hef's old poker buddy Gene. In its first year of competition, Steinmetz, an unsung school in a mixed neighborhood, came out of nowhere and won the event with a gifted group of poet-performers. In the film, it's one of the finalists again. The students of Steinmetz may not much care that Hugh Hefner graduated from their school, but without the social changes he fought for and helped to influence, all of the members of their Poetry Slam team might be in jail today along with the ghost of Lenny Bruce. &nbsp &nbsp The photograph of Azizi Johari, Miss June 1975, was originally posted at normal size but has been reduced in response to many readers complaining about NSFW issues. She is a beautiful woman. When I resized it I felt like I was back in the age of hiding my Playboys in a stack of Linn's Weekly Stamp News. When will we ever grow up?

...clawing at the ceiling of his grave... via WWdN: In Exile by wil@wilwheaton.net (Wil Wheaton) on 11/1/10

All this week, I'm recording the audio version of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream. It's a delightful book, with wonderful characters, smart dialog, and some of the most enjoyable side trips into world building I've ever read in a SF novel. Also, it's really, really funny.

Tomorrow, I'm going in later than usual, because I have an audition in the morning for a show that I'm really, really excited to possibly be on. I can't say what it is (whether I book the job or not, when it's all resolved I will reveal at least the title of the show), but it's something I've wanted to work on for years, with some creative people I really respect. So, yanno, fingers crossed and all that.

The sides I got for the audition are just wonderful (an incredible rarity these days, sadly) and the character is one of the best-drawn and most clearly-defined characters I've read in years. I'm really looking forward to trying on his skin for a little bit, and seeing how it fits. And then making a lampshade and some luggage out of it, so I can carry him with me wherever I go forever and ever and ever.

I'm really looking forward to this audition, and no matter what happens, I'm grateful to the writers and to casting for giving me something I can really work with, instead of something I have to overcome, which seems to happen more frequently than not, (and which I will blame on Reality TV, because ... why not? Fuck Reality TV, man. Fuck it right in its empty soul and black withered industry-destroying heart.) This character is a thinker, reclusive, intense, and broken. The sides just hint at it, but there is something seriously wrong with this guy, and the scenes are so well-written, I can set my twisted imagination free to run around in the field of dark and fucked up things, and use whatever it digs up to inform the character choices I make. This sort of thing hardly ever happens (the material we typically get for television just isn't this solid), so I'm making the most of it; it's pretty fun, and tremendously satisfying.

This afternoon, I told my manager, "even though this guy is nothing like me, he's right in my wheelhouse as an actor, and I'm really looking forward to this, and I feel like I'm less likely to suck than a year or two ago, because I've been lucky enough to work a lot recently, and I don't feel like I'm all rusty and weird." He pointed out that I've been getting cast in a lot of roles like this, lately, too, so something is working when I play these guys ... though both of us decided it was probably a good idea not to dig too deeply into the roots of this particular mystery. Besides, my imagination is doing a pretty disturbing job all on its own, and I don't want to mess with its mojo, lest it decide to turn me into a lampshade or something.

Inside Movies & DVD with Drew McWeeny One Thing I Love Today: 'Ishtar' is coming to Blu-ray By Drew McWeeny - Would would a simple press release get today's spotlight?

Tuesday, Oct 26, 2010 3:00 AM

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Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Isabelle Adjani, and a blind camel all star in the long-unavailable '80s comedy 'Ishtar,' finally coming to Blu-ray in January Credit: SPHE

This is just plain odd, and it makes me very happy.

I got a press release this morning from SPHE, and I had to read it twice because I didn't believe it the first time. I've been hearing for the past decade how "Ishtar" was never going to come out on DVD because of all the delicate negotiating it would require between the various principal players like Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, and Elaine May.

Anyone who's been reading this blog since it launched, or who was reading my work on Ain't It Cool, probably knows by now that I'm a fan of "Ishtar," and not in some winky ironic way, either. I think it's a genuinely funny film that got unjustly slammed when it was released in 1987, and it's deserved a major rediscovery for some time now. Last year, Mr. Beaks and I hosted an evening at the New Beverly where we double-featured this film with "Joe Vs. The Volcano," and seeing it with a crowd was great.

It's been hard to defend the film when it's been largely unavailable to the viewing public, and it's been hard to explain to people that there are reasons other than the quality of the film that have kept it off of DVD entirely. How many high-profile film can you honestly say have never had a DVD release in the American market? How many Warren Beatty films or Dustin Hoffman films have been completely shelved and sat out this format entirely?

One of the reasons I love the Warner Archive program is because it's finally making available films that might otherwise not justify the marketing and manufacturing money it would take to put them out. Something like "Doc Savage" or "Freebie and the Bean" or "Pretty Maids All In A Row" might not sell 10 million copies, but the way Warner handles those particular titles, the films don't have to. I assumed that if we ever saw "Ishtar," it would be some sort of similar strategy by SPHE.

Instead, they're just skipping DVD entirely and putting the movie on Blu-ray, and here's what the press release had to say:

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment brings the highly-anticipated, hilarious1987 spy misadventure Ishtar to Blu-ray Disc for the first time on January 4, 2011. This outrageous satirical comedy directed by Elaine May (Oscar® Nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay for Heaven Can Wait, 1978) and starring Warren Beatty (Oscar Winner for Best Director, Reds, 1981) and Dustin Hoffman (Oscar Winner for Best Actor, Rain Man, 1988 and Oscar Winner for Best Actor, Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979) was never released on DVD and now leap-frogs onto the high definition format for the suggested retail price of $24.95.

Beatty and Hoffman star as down-and-out, past-their-prime singer-songwriters Lyle Rogers and Chuck Clarke, who refuse to believe they are anything but undiscovered musical geniuses. With no job prospects on the horizon in New York, they travel to the Far East to play a gig in a Moroccan hotel, but end up amidst an international crossfire during a layover in the fictional Middle Eastern state of Ishtar between the country’s government, the CIA, and left-wing revolutionary rebels.

With a song in their hearts, the CIA on their backs, a gorgeous revolutionary in their arms and two nations after their heads, Lyle Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Chuck Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) find adventure, romance and comedy on the road to Ishtar.

Ishtar has a running time of 107 minutes and is Rated PG-13.

I'm curious to see if their entire campaign is built around the idea of calling the film "controversial" and selling the idea that this has never been released before. I'm also curious why they're not even bothering with a DVD release, but I'm not complaining. If I'm going straight to a HD transfer of the film, I guess I'll cope.

It's not going to be often that the mere announcement of a title makes it into this particular column, but for a movie that's taken this long to come out, and for it to come out in such a great format is pretty much just the icing on the cake.

Didn't see this one coming, and I can't wait to see it again.

NBC continues to flail in last place, with new shows like Outlaw and Undercovers bombing and veterans like The Office eroding. Jace Lacob offers six possible ways to save the Peacock.

NBC is in terrible shape. Once the home of such brand-defining comedies as Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, and Cheers, it was a first-place network that created the oft-repeated catchphrase “Must See TV.”

It seems like a lifetime ago.

Despite executives' huge promises of investments in scripted programming and renewed creativity, NBC's fall programming has been DOA. The network might be able to brag about Sunday Night Football, but it can't rely on the sports franchise all year for ratings. Its biggest scripted hit is Law & Order: SVU, which, in its twelfth season, is currently averaging just 9.2 million viewers. It's all downhill from there, with beloved 30 Rock—despite being named the best comedy on TV of the last decade by Newsweek—only bringing in an average of 5.7 million viewers so far this season. The Apprentice scored an insanely low 3.5 million viewers recently. NBC hasn't had a breakout hit since the days of Heroes, which the network ran into the ground until it was finally put out of its misery last season.

It's in keeping with just how dire the situation is at NBC that the network last week picked up full seasons of the serialized thriller The Event (which has lost more than 5 million viewers since it launched), along with Law & Order: Los Angeles (a.k.a. LOLA), critically reviled comedy Outsourced, and Jerry Bruckheimer's struggling procedural Chase (which has sunk to 5.2 million viewers). The jury is out on J.J. Abrams' glossy spy show, Undercovers, the pilot of which alone cost $10 million.

Quality shows these aren't. Despite the pedigree of Undercovers, the action-comedy teeters on tedium, the married spies at the heart of the story saddled with a catering cover story that is absurd. LOLA is underperforming (though last week saw a bump), despite having Law & Order: SVU as a lead-in. Chase is as standard a procedural as they come, and Outsourced has dodged accusations of being racist from day one. Was this really the best that NBC had to offer?

NBC is meant to be in recovery mode after last year's Conan O'Brien-Jay Leno fiasco, and Jeff Zucker is on his way out amid the NBC Universal-Comcast merger. And there is a lot that the network can do to get out of last place if it can put aside diminished self-expectations and remember the legacy of risk-taking and creative achievement that once made them the network to beat.

Here are six suggestions on how NBC can save itself:

1. Since you already have low ratings, just embrace it and go really niche (and affluent).

NBC tried to make some noise with The Event but viewers haven't taken to its Lost-meets-24 ethos, fleeing the show in droves. Ditch the generic development of tired procedurals and Lost wannabes and do something different. Given that NBC seems to be content with the low numbers it's garnering, it ought to build on affluent viewers, as it did in the late 1990s. Rather than offer remakes or retreads, it should attempt to go after quality and bring HBO or AMC-level programming to the broadcast networks. Go niche rather than broad with your dramas and comedies and deliver advertisers a concentration of educated, wealthy viewers who want to buy high-end merchandise.

Some of NBC's most and least inspired shows.

2. Promote the innovative shows you already have.

NBC has some superlative shows, like Community, Parks and Recreation, Chuck, and Friday Night Lights. But none receive the on-air support, marketing, or widespread promotion that they deserve. Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation—one of NBC's few critical breakouts of the last few years—isn't even on the air right now; it's been relegated to midseason, while Outsourced scored the plum post-Office slot.

Shows don't broaden beyond their bases by word of mouth. On-air, online, and alternative outreach goes a long way toward getting people to tune in and sample. It takes more than just tweeting your nightly lineup. Release your DVDs early and make a push for widespread promotion, so people catch up rather than walk by the following season.

3. Find a reality hit that isn't The Biggest Loser.

Unlike CBS, Fox, and ABC, NBC lacks a buzzy tentpole reality franchise. Before you say it, yes, it has The Biggest Loser, but that's more of an inspirational show than a behemoth along the lines of Dancing With the Stars, Survivor, The Bachelor, or American Idol. And on any other network, The Biggest Loser's ratings would merely be passable.

A new strategy is clearly in order for unscripted. The planned Survivor and The Bachelor mash-up, the tentatively titled Love in the Wild, might be a smart move, as the network is in need of some headline-grabbing attention.

Additionally, NBC should be leveraging its news magazine Dateline and spinning off some limited runs about specific topics, like ABC has done with Primetime. Not only does it deliver a concentrated burst, but it also allows the network to plug any holes with one-off specials and short-run programming that can fill gaps for a few weeks.

4. Counter-program.

NBC should counter-program whenever possible. Despite the creative spark of NBC's comedies, they're now being killed on Thursdays—Community, for example, is crushed weekly by CBS' Big Bang Theory. Why the kamikaze mission? Switch the comedy block with Tuesday's two-hour-long Biggest Loser, where the weight-loss competition would be the only unscripted programming on offer on Thursdays.

Would it mean giving up its comedy legacy on Thursdays, once the home to Friends and Seinfeld? You bet, but it would also allow them to offer an alternative to dramas and American Idol in January. It's worth noting that NBC's highest-rated comedy, The Office, originally aired on Tuesdays way back when and, at the height of the Must See TV craze, NBC had two comedy blocks: one on Tuesday and one on Thursday.

Look to rearrange the comedy lineup. Return Parks and Recreation sooner rather than later and give it the same opportunity to grow that turned The Office into a hit. Shift Community behind 30 Rock to give it some additional protection.

5. Program themed nights.

If NBC is looking for a diversity of programming rather than specificity, it should consider creating genre-specific programming blocks across the week. Monday nights, which has been tanking since the season began, might perform better if the shows were more compatible with each other. Chuck, Undercovers, and, say, The Cape (a comic book-influenced vigilante drama set for midseason), all wish-fulfillment/superhero/super-spy dramas, would make more sense together than an action-comedy, a thriller, and a procedural. Make one night solely devoted to reality programming, another for quirky comedy, a third for grittier dramas, etc.

While we're at it, move Law & Order: SVU back to Wednesdays at 10 p.m. again, pronto.

6. Figure out the brand.

NBC needs to start thinking like a first-place network again and, instead of following the pack, look to lead it. The first step is to formalize something resembling a brand. CBS has crime procedurals (CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds); Fox is bombastic (House, Bones, Glee); ABC has soapy dramas (Grey's Anatomy) and family entertainment (Dancing With the Stars, Modern Family). NBC is the odd one out, looking like a patchwork quilt.

NBC should be looking to find a common thread that links its programming in a way similar to successful cable networks. Its current motto, "More colorful," means nothing. If its corporate sibling USA can manage to find a common thread between its WWE weekly program and a stylish crime drama like White Collar to create marketing that makes sense, then NBC can find a link between NFL Sunday football and Emmy-winning, little-watched 30 Rock.

But, really, the network has to do something to get itself out of the pit it's been in lately.

Ultimately, NBC has to stop admiring the reflection of its legacy and focus on a hard truth: it's quickly becoming a superfluous broadcast network whose programming is largely failing to match up with its sister cable networks like USA and Bravo. NBC: Ditch the sad complacency already, and do something drastic.

Plus: Check out more of the latest entertainment, fashion, and culture coverage on Sexy Beast—photos, videos, features, and Tweets.

Jace Lacob is the writer/editor of Televisionary, a website devoted to television news, criticism, and interviews. Jace resides in Los Angeles. He is a contributor to several entertainment Web sites and can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

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Glee Watch: They've Created a Monster Posted by James Poniewozik Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:39 am 8 Comments • Related Topics: glee

FOX

Spoilers for last night's Glee coming up:

In one sense, "The Rocky Horror Glee Show" was exactly what I expected: an episode in which the cast of Glee performs songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the thinnest of plot justifications for doing it and characters behaving inexplicably in order to fulfill the episode's music demands. In other words, it was no better than I thought it would be, nor was it bad in a way that especially surprised me.

Where the episode did become interesting—if not actually good—was not in the show's longterm stories (which it did little to advance) or the musical's themes and sexual complexities (which it watered down or ignored), but in how it worked as a weird, unintentional metacommentary on the GQ Glee photo spread the world freaked out over last week.

The photo shoot controversy, after all, boiled down to what audience Glee is for, and what kind of sexuality is appropriate for actors playing teens and the teens watching them. And insofar as "Rocky Horror" had a theme, it was just that: the discomfort of representing sexuality among an age group that is, nonetheless, sexual, and the complications that ensue when adults enter the picture.

One issue with the GQ photo—and a typical one for men's-mag layouts like that—is that it stripped down and objectified the two women in the shoot while Cory Monheith Monteith stayed clothed. So it was oddly ironic at least that this episode focused on male objectification and body-image issues, and climaxed with Finn walking through McKinley's halls in his underwear. ("Guys objectify us all the time," said Quinn, played by Diana Agron, one of the two actresses GQ got to show off skin for their readers.) And the conflict running through the episode, based on the glaring inappropriateness of Rocky Horror for a high school musical, is a pretty fitting meta-commentary on Glee.

With this material to work with, there was probably an actual good episode of Glee to be found in here somewhere, but the way co-writer Ryan Murphy engineered the conflict was a mess in so many ways. For starters, the show has always wavered on how realistically it wants to depict the content guidelines in its fictional educational environment. Sometimes this is an environment where adults are scandalized by performances like "Push It," from the first season, but it's also a world in which a show choir's killer competition number is Amy Winehouse's "Rehab."

What's more, Mr. Shue's sense of content-appropriateness is not even consistent within the same episode. He begins by impulsively assigning the musical, then immediately recognizing that he'll have to cut a lot of age-inappropriate material from it. Then he realizes that it is maybe not that great an idea to put a high school boy on stage in gold underwear—but, for some reason, thinks the better solution is to cast himself in a role that will have him basically doing a stylized sex scene with his own student, Rachel, in "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me." (Fortunately the production never got that far; unfortunately I still have that image of shirtless Matthew Morrison searing my retinas.)

There are two problems at work here: one, that the show is again reaching for whatever contrivance it can to work in the week's music, and two, as Todd Van Der Werff wrote at the AV Club, that Will basically stopped being a character and became a plot-movement device a long time ago. Added to that is the troublesome question of what Will does decide to cut: for some reason, while the skin and implied sex is OK, the references to transsexuality gender subversion—which you may also know as the major subject of Rocky Horror—have to go. (E.g., "transsexual Transylvania" in "Sweet Transvestite" becomes "sensational Transylvania.")

I'll admit that I'm not a Rocky Horror fanatic—I've seen it once or twice, never in a theater or in costume—so I leave it to those who are to judge how Glee staged the show. But it just makes no sense to deal with the musical while ignoring that major theme—especially in a show so concerned with sexual identity and otherness as Glee.

If the episode addressed the reasons why the production had to avoid dealing with transsexuality these themes, I'd buy that; to essentially sidestep it just seemed bizarre. To watch this episode, you would think that the main transgressive element of Rocky Horror was showing characters in their underwear. I could see why Kurt might not want to play Dr Frank-N-Furter (though I could just as easily see him wanting to), but not getting into why he preferred not to seemed like a missed opportunity. As was Sam's storyline, which could have been an interesting subplot about adolescent boys and sexual pressure, but was undercut by the episode's suddenly turning him into a complete ass. (And casting adults in the musical was creepy, unbelievable and again seemed forced simply to service the Will-Emma plot.)

When you have an episode of Glee in which Sue Sylvester ends up being the voice of reason, you've either got a work of genius or a failure, and "Rocky Horror Glee" was the latter. I'm not sure it was a good thing that I was cheering her on by the time she was nitpicking the pacing and logic of the production.

"When pushing boundaries is [artist's] only aim," Sue editorialized, "the result is usually bad art." She was talking about sexual shock for shock's sake—and arguably giving voice to people who have critiqued Glee for just that—but in a broader sense her message was: simply throwing a bunch of button-pushing junk on screen to provoke a reaction does not a coherent narrative make.

Granted, throwing together disparate wild elements to build to emotional climaxes is what Glee does at its best, and in a better episode of Glee, I'd give the show credit for embodying it's own critique. Here I just have to say: next time, listen to Sue.

Quick hail of bullets:

* Light on the Brittany-isms this week, but I would love to see someone dressed as a peanut allergy.

* "They have the Internet, they are exposed!" Again, I realize that any commentary on the GQ spread here is entirely unintentional, but the similarities were really eerie.

* Another thing I might have enjoyed/forgiven in a better episode was Will's comparison of Rocky Horror—for "outsiders"—with the glee club, and by extension, the show Glee itself. Here, it just seemed self-congratulatory and unearned. (Also, a better episode would have made the point through example, not lecture.)

* One thing I will give the staging of the musical: Monhteith actually does have a little bit of a young Barry Bostwick thing going—and it was nice to see Bostwick make a cameo along with Meat Loaf. (Susan Sarandon, are you really so busy?) Now I want to go watch an old episode of Spin City.

'Caprica' Is Cancelled by Syfy by Maureen Ryan, posted Oct 27th 2010 6:39PM Filed under: Reality-Free, TV News, Stay Tuned

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Due to low ratings, Syfy has cancelled the 'Battlestar Galactica' prequel 'Caprica.'

Syfy is pulling the show from its broadcast rotation immediately, and the remaining five episodes of the show's first season will air some time in the first few months of 2011, according to the network.

"We appreciate all the support that fans have shown for 'Caprica' and are very proud of the producers, cast, writers and the rest of the amazing team that has been committed to this fine series," Mark Stern, executive vice president of original programming and co-head of content for Universal Cable Productions, said in a statement from the network. "Unfortunately, despite its obvious quality, 'Caprica' has not been able to build the audience necessary to justify a second season."

On Friday, AOL broke the news that Syfy had greenlit a 'Battlestar' spinoff about William Adama's early days as a Viper pilot. The two-hour 'Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome' pilot is expected to air either late next year or in early 2012, and could lead to a full young Adama series.

'Caprica' began full of promise and boasted a fine cast, but when it returned this fall with new episodes, it remained frustratingly incoherent, as I said in this review. The series had some good moments and interesting ideas, but let's hope the 'Blood & Chrome' project contains both thought-provoking concepts and visceral tension. The latter quality was notably lacking in 'Caprica.'

Full Hearts: 'Friday Night Lights' Returns for Its Final Season by Maureen Ryan, posted Oct 27th 2010 5:20PM Filed under: Reality-Free, Stay Tuned

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It's easy to be overtaken by nostalgia when watching the final season of 'Friday Night Lights,' which begins 9PM ET Wednesday on DirecTV's 101 Network (the final season will air on NBC some time next year).

Loyal viewers been through a lot with these people; we have stuck with the show through so many ups and downs. And just as many of its characters this season and last have said their farewells, soon we'll have to say goodbye to Dillon, Texas.

'Friday Night Lights' has made many of us cry over the years, and it's hard not to get a lump in your throat just thinking about the fact that the show will be over for good soon. Below are some thoughts on the first few episodes of the show's fifth season. (You may wish to wait until Season 5 airs on NBC to read what's below, but this review shouldn't spoil any major plot developments, for either NBC or DirecTV viewers.)

Five years: That's one year more than the amount of time it takes to get through high school (or exactly the amount of time it takes to get through high school, if we choose to forget the Year of Landry and That Thing We Don't Talk About). In that time frame, it almost feels as though America has caught up to 'Friday Night Lights.' It's not as if life was carefree and easy four years ago, but boom has given way to bust and financial setbacks and reduced expectations are the norm.

As other critics (especially Time's James Poniewozik) have astutely pointed out, the residents of Dillon have always had limited options and modest dreams. The goal, if there was one, was merely to get out and, with any luck, get an education.

Far from glorifying Texas football culture, 'Friday Night Lights' has always shown how hard it has been to get that athletic scholarship or score any kind of ticket out of town. Next fall, when a couple dozen glossy dramas about lawyers and doctors in fancy offices premiere, I'll long to visit Dillon, one of the few shows in TV history that actually shows how hard it is to raise a good, productive and happy kid -- one who didn't necessarily assume that becoming a lawyer or doctor was a realistic goal.

But it's too soon to write about 'FNL' as if it's already gone. Who knows when NBC will show it -- it may still be airing on that network a year from now. And in its fifth season, the show still has new stories to tell about new students, even if the general paradigms are the ones we've seen during the past four years: Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and guidance counselor Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) take troubled or essentially unparented kids under their generous wings and try to guide them toward better choices. Sometimes they're simply there for the kids, in ways that their own families are not.

Much of which transpires in the first few episodes seems familiar, if not a little predictable, and what saves the Taylors from being impossibly virtuous are the flaws the writers give them and the consistently great performances that Chandler and Britton give. Coach can be arrogant and stubborn, and Tami's well-intentioned exhortations can, as one character tells her, come off as lecturing. The Taylors aren't perfect, but even other adults recognize that they're able to reach kids in ways that most people don't.

Their new challenges include a chronic truant named Epic whom Tami sizes up instantly (Tami knows to show consideration to the girl, but she also makes it clear that, unlike the other adults in Epic's life, Tami's not going to take any crap from her). The East Dillon Lions, on the other hand, have a new player who is really good but who seems as disconnected as Epic is, for different reasons (he's a laid-back dude who thinks that football is violent and lame).

A story concerning Luke's football career feels somewhat contrived and the East Dillon Lions' improved fortunes seem a little convenient. It's not that the gridiron action on 'FNL' is irrelevant -- far from it -- but some of the best episodes (like season 4's 'The Son') have almost nothing to do with the game.

The new characters aren't especially compelling in the early going, but a season of 'Friday Night Lights' is like a season of 'In Treatment': You never know what performances or stories are going to hook you until halfway through. Who knew that Michael B. Jordan's arc would become so compelling over the course of season 4? But now that young actor is a standout member of the 'FNL' ensemble as hardworking quarterback Vince, and likewise Madison Burge, who plays Becky, more than proved herself last year.

From the younger cohort of show's original cast, only Julie Taylor (Aimee Teegarten), Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons) and Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) are still around, and they're all getting deserved farewell arcs (Scott Porter, Adrianne Palicki and Zach Gilford will also return to the show before it ends for good). Like the rest of the actors who have "graduated" from 'FNL,' these young actors are deserving of continued career success, but I hope they never forget the lessons they learned about subtlety and truth. Taylor Kitsch, in particular, has shown enormous growth as an actor. Tim's body language in a prison scene tells you all you need to know about where the former Dillon Panther's mind is at. It's exceptional work.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing; it can make things seem rosier than they really were. And 'Friday Night Lights' isn't perfect; this season, there are a few instances in which the storytelling doesn't feel as fluid and as graceful as it could be. And while there's a worthwhile attempt to tell stories for the show's young female characters, there's also a hair-pulling catfight that seems to have been borrowed from '90210.'

Yet those are minor issues, all things considered. Whatever else it has accomplished -- and that's a lot -- 'Friday Night Lights' has always had respect for the confusion, anger and worry that people of all ages feel in their quests for emotional connection. This show went to places that most shows aren't brave enough to go. For that reason, it'll forever be in the 'win' column.

The 'Caprica' cancellation: what went wrong? By Alan Sepinwall - Many factors went into the "Battlestar Galactica" prequel's failure.

Wednesday, Oct 27, 2010 9:15 PM

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Paula Malcomson on "Caprica," which Syfy canceled today. Credit: Syfy

Two unusual things happened with Syfy's decision to cancel "Caprica," effective immediately: First, we had a cable channel pulling a show off its schedule before its current run of episodes had finished (though the remaining five are supposed to air sometime next year). Second, rather than try to downplay the news - say, by sending out a schedule update press release that briefly mentions at the end that Cheap Filler Program X is replacing the previously-scheduled Canceled Show Y - Syfy put out a press release putting the cancellation upfront, complete with a frustrated quote from executive Mark Stern, who noted, "Unfortunately, despite its obvious quality, ‘Caprica’ has not been able to build the audience necessary to justify a second season.”

Neither move is unprecedented, but both are unusual. Their convergence at the same event speaks both to how much Syfy wanted "Caprica" to succeed, and to how badly the show failed. This was a continuation of the channel's prestigious (if not always highly-rated) "Battlestar Galactica" franchise, and the most obvious symbol of the channel's new "science fiction doesn't mean spaceships" ethos, and its ratings were so poor that they couldn't even stick with it for an extra five weeks.

So what went wrong?

Among the possibilities:

The roll-out schedule was odd. The "Caprica" pilot was released as a standalone DVD in April of 2009, only a few weeks after "BSG" ended, but the series proper didn't launch on Syfy until January of 2010. Ten episodes aired in winter and early spring, and then the show wasn't scheduled to come back until January 2011. Someone at Syfy realized that perhaps the waits were getting too extreme, even by cable standards, and in September the return was moved up to early October, which gave "Caprica" the benefit of a good timeslot (after "Stargate Universe") but the detriment of little advance promotion.

Those long and/or irregular gaps in the schedule certainly didn't help the show gain traction, but I don't think it was a major factor.

"BSG" fans were bitter about that show's finale. Reaction to the "Lost" finale was mild compared to some of the vitriol aimed at Ronald D. Moore and the other "BSG" producers (many of whom moved on to work on "Caprica") after a finale that was heavy on spirituality and light on concrete explanations to various pieces of the show's mythology. As with the "Lost" finale, not all fans hated it - maybe not even most of them - but the "BSG" audience was so small to begin with(*) that even if, say, a third of the viewers bitterly swore off the franchise, "Caprica" was already starting in a hole that may have been too deep to climb out of.

(*) And given that, I'm going to be making some audience generalizations in the next couple of theories. I'm not suggesting all viewers feel this way, but when you start with such a small base, it doesn't take a lot to push things in the direction of cancellation.

Sci-fi fans don't necessarily want to watch soap opera. Moore's initial pitch for the show was, "It's a sci-fi version of 'Dallas,'" and while the finished product moved quite a bit off of that, there were still plenty of elements - marital discord, corporate intrigue, teen angst/rebellion - that may not have played well to viewers who don't like so much overlap between their genres. (The mix also included a whole lot of theology, which is essential to the origin of the "BSG" universe but, based on reaction to the "BSG" finale, not everyone's favorite subject.)

Of course, "BSG" did plenty of genre cross-pollination - it was as much a political drama as a hardcore sci-fi show - but it always had the spaceships and killer robots (the same genre staples Syfy execs said they wanted to move away from) to make the purists feel comfortable. "Caprica" had a killer robot, but it was one with the mind and soul of a teenage girl. For some, that's icky.

Soap opera fans don't necessarily want to watch sci-fi. And here was perhaps the bigger miscalculation. Syfy envisioned "Caprica" as a show with a broader audience base than "BSG." They saw the spaceships and other hardware as a turn-off to viewers who might have enjoyed the political allegory or character drama. But a planet-bound incarnation of "Battlestar Galactica" isn't enough of a break for that sort of hypothetical viewer. If you're not going to watch sci-fi, you're not going to watch sci-fi; it's not a matter of degree or number of shots of the vacuum of space. Some viewers just won't watch shows with certain subjects.

(That's a problem that's always plagued "Friday Night Lights." Many soap fans won't watch because of the football; many football fans won't watch because of the soap operatics.)

It wasn't very good. This, really, is what it comes down to. "Caprica" didn't get off to a great start in the ratings earlier this year, owing to the previous reasons, but if it had held that number or increased a bit over time, Syfy would have given it a longer leash. But many viewers who came into "Caprica" without prejudices about genre or the "BSG" ending still didn't like what they saw. It was a series with some interesting individual pieces that never cohered into a whole.

The most compelling and/or sympathetic character was Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Torresani), and she was the aforementioned teenage girl's soul stuck inside a killer robot. The writers kept losing the thread on ostensible leads Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz) and Joseph Adama (Esai Morales), and had even less idea what to do with Graystone's wife Amanda (Paula Malcomson) or bumbling schemer Sister Clarice (Polly Walker).

The show returned from hiatus trying to reshape its various problematic characters - Clarice was much less inept, Joseph stopped whining and embraced his family's gangster roots, etc. - but there was still a lack of clear storytelling direction, and I kept having to convince myself to watch the episodes that were sitting on my DVR.

That won't be necessary now. In broad strokes, we know how the story of "Caprica" ends - the killer robots multiply and wipe out most of humanity, while Adama's delinquent son Willie will grow up to be the leader of the few thousand survivors - but that's decades in the future for these characters. Their specific stories won't get to finish. Syfy is going to retreat to safer territory for another prequel: "Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome," about Bill Adama's early military career, and featuring all the spaceships and other elements that Syfy was so afraid of a couple of years ago.

I liked the idea of "Caprica" very much. I enjoy space battles as much as the next fanboy, but there should be room on television for science fiction that doesn't have to lean on the hardware, and can lean on the futuristic trappings to tell great stories about ideas and characters. "Caprica" just wasn't that show.

Obama and Stewart: What Fake News Can Do Posted by James Poniewozik Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:21 am 7 Comments • Related Topics: barack obama, jon stewart, the daily show

"I don't want to lump you in with a lot of other pundits," President Barack Obama told Jon Stewart in his interview on last night's Daily Show. In saying that, Obama brought up a question that Stewart's rising prominence, and this weekend's Rally to Restore Sanity, have underscored: should we lump in Stewart with other pundits? Is he a social commentator or an entertainer? Is he a newsman or a fake newsman? Is he funny or serious?

It's a simplistic question, of course, one that misunderstands both the nature of public life today (journalism and politics are at least half performance) and of satire (which is comedy informed by serious matters). And Stewart's interview with Obama—not a conventional, somber sitdown, but often very substantive anyway—was a sort of answer to it.

Stewart wasted little time bringing Obama on, dispensing with his monologue, running over into Stephen Colbert's timeslot on Comedy Central and going through a few opening niceties (presenting POTUS with a souvenir mug) before launching into questions on such laugh-riot topics as healthcare and financial reform. And while it wasn't a textbook journalistic interrogation, it also demonstrated some things a late-night program like The Daily Show can do that the "real" news can't.

The Daily Show audience was an indisputably friendly one for Obama, and in more than an applauding-to-be-polite kind of way. (When Obama said the set reminded him of his 2008 convention, he could have been talking about more than the Roman columns.) This as not just a crowd that clapped at the mention of the administration's children's health insurance program; this was a crowd that clapped at the names of Democratic representatives Tom Perriello and Betsy Markey.

But if the visit was obviously a way for Obama to reach out to his base a few days before midterms, he had to do so by way of addressing the ways that he's let his base down. Stewart, let's have no illusions, is not ideologically neutral, and when he pressed the President on policy—like his "timid" approach to healthcare reform—he leaned from the left. (Among Obama's responses were that critics shouldn't focus on "the 10% we didn't get" as opposed to the other 90%.) These are criticisms Obama has heard and addressed before, to be sure, but not generally in the format of a national TV interview.

In a typical network-news interview with the President, "getting tough" with him is defined as presenting him with the criticisms of his opposition. Obama is a Democrat, so the questioning of him is usually framed in terms of the Republican critique. And it's fine and appropriate that reporters should try to get the President to answer his opponents' charges—but in this binary system, it means that there's a critique of the President that goes mostly unaddressed. Sometimes that critique is from the left (healthcare reform or the stimulus were too weak), sometimes it's not ideological at all (the administration didn't act boldly enough to remake a corrupt system).

Stewart's interview, like The Daily Show itself, wasn't a replacement for the work of the rest of the news media but a supplement to it. A comedian has certain advantages straight reporters don't. He can call the President "Dude." When Obama referred to Larry Summers as having done a "heckuva job," directly recalling George W. Bush's unfortunate praise of his FEMA head after Katrina, Stewart pounced, "Dude, you don't want to use that phrase." (Obama tried to recover with, "Pun intended." Yeah, I don't think so, and it wasn't actually a pun.) And a comedian can laugh when Obama says, "Yes We Can, but..." a moment that probably encapsulated better than any gotcha question or editorial the disparity between the campaign promise and the administrative reality of the Presidency.

That said, just because Stewart and his staff are aces at pinpointing the foibles of the rest of the media doesn't mean Stewart is ready to take over their job. He at times seemed overawed, and—unlike with past guests, with whom his interview skills have sharpened over time—had trouble getting words in for stretches. ("It's just so hard not to talk," Stewart mock-giggled. At least I think it was mock.)

But he also kept his questions off the horserace and process queries—except for a question about Democrats running against their party's record—that are so typical of politics coverage. (How do you think your party will do in the midterms? Will you hold the Senate? What's your plan for repositioning your message after election day?) Instead, he asked about the sense—again, from a liberal perspective, but one held across the ideological spectrum—that Obama, having campaigned on basic structural change, simply "papered over" a basically corrupt system.

There's plenty of love for Stewart among journalists—Brian Williams, for instance, praises him to the skies—but also, sometimes, grousing that Stewart takes cheap shots at the work reporters do, while trying to have it both ways himself. He's sanctimonious when he wants to be, goes the criticism, and then retreats behind the defense that he's just a comedian.

There's something to that, but the criticisms of Stewart, particularly of interviews like this one, also try to have it both ways: on the one hand, he's not hard-hitting enough in them; on the other, he's not funny enough in them. In the end, The Daily Show is probably most valuable when it's critiquing the straight media, not imitating them. But taken for what it was—a conversation more than an interrogation—Stewart showed that he's better at asking questions than most reporters are at being funny.

[Update: For a different time.com take on the interview, see Michael Scherer's Swampland post, and especially his back-and-forth with responders in the comments. I disagree that Stewart's irony and his earnestness are two different things, that we need to untangle where "one ends and the other begins"—I think that, in his satire, one works in service of the other—but Michael has a pretty thoughtful analysis of how Stewart's comedy works.]

Hideaway

BY ROGER EBERT / October 27, 2010

Cast & Credits Mousse Isabelle Carre Paul Louis-Ronan Choisy Serge Pierre Louis-Calixte Louis Melvil Poupaud La mere Claire Vernet

Strand Releasing presents a film directed by Francois Ozon. Written by Ozon and Mathieu Hippeau. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 105 minutes.

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The actress Isabelle Carre was pregnant during the filming of “Hideaway,” and the pregnancy of her character supplies the center of the film. It figures in the plot, but also in the yearning emotions that take an uncertain form. Two men are fascinated by her swelling womb, and so is she. It is this promise of new life that overwhelms all of the other elements, and there are a lot of them.

Carre plays Mousse, an enigmatic 30-ish woman, girlish and yet sometimes with tired eyes, who, as the film opens, is in a room with her lover, Louis (Melvil Poupaud). Their drug dealer arrives and asks, “Is she all right?” Louis: “Now that you're here, she will be.” Louis injects them both with heroin, and the next morning, rising early, he gives himself another shot, which is fatal. Mousse discovers that he left her pregnant.

There are extraordinary scenes on the day of the funeral, involving Louis' pragmatic mother and his gay brother, Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy). The family would prefer that she not keep the baby. She agrees, then disappears to her “refuge,” a lovely chateau overlooking a pastoral sweep of French countryside. There Paul arrives to visit, finding her off drugs and very pregnant. He stays for a time, and indeed connects quickly with Serge (Pierre Louis-Calixte), the young caretaker of the estate.

We have only fragmented information about Mousse's earlier life. Much can be guessed when she tells Paul that the chateau has been lent to her by a man she slept with when she was 16: “He thinks he's my father.” Whatever the real story is, that information helps explain her dispassionate approach to life. She's not cold, she's not hostile, but she has been wounded and is emotionally guarded. The camera spends a lot of time on her face, which is pleasant but not forthcoming.

She understands that Paul is gay. No big deal. Romantic formulas suggest Paul and Mousse stay together, anyway, but this movie signals that it follows no formulas. Its romanticism is carefully buried, although there are two dream sequences suggesting the ability of character to imagine ideal outcomes. Meanwhile, life goes on in a casual summertime way, with tea and coffee on the veranda, a trip to a disco in town, desultory conversation, landscape vistas, all in an idyll financed by the absent man who thinks he's her dad.

The film is by Francois Ozon, who is drawn to parents in awkward forms of love. His suspenseful "See the Sea" (1997) was about a mother staying at the seaside with a baby daughter, and how a woman traveler enters their lives; his strange "Ricky" (2009) was about a couple coping when their baby grows wings. “Hideaway” is deliberately more mundane, settled: It is about a situation that Mousse apparently accepts calmly.

There's an isolated scene. A man in a cafe boldly asks her to sleep with him. “You like pregnant women?” she asks. “Yes. Except for my wife. I couldn't sleep with her for nine months.” There's another movie there.

How this scene plays out has something to do with the rest of the film, and of that particular quiet urgency that many men feel about pregnant women. It's a heightened attention and may be the product of evolution. For a time in her life, a woman's pregnancy is the most important thing about her. That is the subject of “Hideaway.”

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

BY ROGER EBERT / October 27, 2010

Cast & Credits Lisbeth Noomi Rapace Mikael Michael Nyqvist Annika Annika Hallin Holger Per Oscarsson Erika Lena Endre

Music Box Films presents a film directed by Daniel Alfredson. Written by Jonas Frykberg, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson. In Swedish, with English subtitles. Running time: 148 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence, some sexual material and brief language).

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Lisbeth Salander makes a transfixing heroine precisely because she has nothing but scorn for such a role. Embodied here for the third time by Noomi Rapace, she's battered, angry and hostile, even toward those who would be her friends. Some of the suspense in the final courtroom showdown of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" comes from the excellent question of whether she would rather be found guilty than provide anyone with the satisfaction of hearing her testify in her own defense.

By the time she comes to what is essentially a sanity hearing, she has returned to the ranks of punk fashionistas, with the black leather pants and jacket, the boots, the studs and buckles, the spikes, the body piercings, the eyeliner that looks like protective armor and the stark black crest of her hair. She sits sullen and silent in the courtroom, as if saying, I care nothing for you, although I have spent hours working on my look in front of the mirror.

She is formidably smart and deeply wounded from childhood, as we know from the earlier two films in the Stieg Larsson trilogy. Worse, she can't leave her pain behind. Again in her life are her freakish, gigantic half-brother, Niedermann (Mikael Spreitz), and the psychologist who fabricated her incarceration in an asylum. And the murderous members of "The Section," a rogue killing unit within the Swedish national police, are determined to eliminate her once and all.

The outlines of her dilemma will be clear to those who've seen "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played with Fire," but this film has enough quick flashbacks to orient the first-timer. It begins literally when the second one ended, after the bloody confrontation in the barn with her father and half-brother. She's taken to the hospital with a bullet in her brain, and spends much of the film's first half in intensive care and refusing to speak.

That frees the director, Daniel Alfredson, to focus more time on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), the investigative journalist who collaborated with her in the first film and has become her fierce defender — and perhaps more, a man who loves her. Their mutual affection was an intriguing subtext in the first film, but has been on hold ever since, while Mikael continues his relaxed intimacy with his editor, Erika Berger (Lena Endre). There are said to be two more Larsson novels in various stages of completion, but even if they're not publishable, Lisbeth Salander is too good a character to suspend after three films, and my guess is there must be sequels.

The sequels need not fret overmuch about plot. These films are really about personality, dialogue and the possibility that the state has placed itself outside the law. That leads to an oppressive, doom-laden atmosphere that the characters move through with apprehension. We understand the basics of "The Section" conspiracy, we recognize most of the faces, but few of us could pass a test on exactly who is who. No problem; neither could Lisbeth or Mikael.

The tension — and there is a lot of it — grows from the danger that Lisbeth brings upon herself by refusing to act sensibly for her own welfare. She has such a burned-in distrust of authority that even a friend like Mikael gets closed out; Rapace takes a simple friendly "see you" and invests it with the effort it costs Lisbeth to utter. Her battle with herself is more suspenseful than her battle against her enemies, because enemies can be fought with and that provides release, but we spend much of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" straining against Lisbeth's fear and sending her urgent telepathic messages about what she should do.

These are all very well-made films. Like most European films, they have adults who are grown-ups, not arrested adolescents. Mikael and Erika, his boss and lover, have earned the lines in their faces, and don't act like reckless action heroes. They make their danger feel so real to us that we realize the heroes of many action movies don't really believe they're in any danger at all. Lisbeth is in grave danger, but in great part because of her damaged obstinacy, and that scares us more than any number of 6-foot-4 Nordic blond homicidal half-brothers.

So what has happened is that this uptight, ferocious, little gamine Lisbeth has won our hearts, and we care about these stories and think there had better be more. The funny thing is, I've seen the "real" Noomi Rapace on TV, and she has a warm smile and a sweet face. What a disappointment.

October 26, 2010 Monsters

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Monsters

SCIENCE FICTION:

United Kingdom, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-10-29

Running Length:

1:34

MPAA Classification:

R (Profanity, Violence)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

2.35:1

Cast:

Scoot McNairy, Whitney Able

Director:

Gareth Edwards

Screenplay:

Gareth Edwards

Cinematography:

Gareth Edwards

Music:

Jon Hopkins

U.S. Distributor:

Magnolia Pictures

Subtitles:

none

Who said science fiction films have to be expensive? According to multiple sources, the total production cost for Gareth Edwards' feature debut, Monsters, was south of $20,000. That's a remarkable achievement for a movie whose subject matter involves major military engagements between the U.S. armed forces and a bunch of giant aliens. Edwards gets around some of the financial difficulties by making this more of a road trip/character story than a traditional monster movie, but there are payoff scenes in which a fair amount of CGI is necessary. It's not top-notch, but it's good enough to be convincing in the circumstances, and far better than state-of-the-art special effects from a couple of decades ago. All-in-all, however, Monsters works not because of its representation of alien creatures or its somewhat derivative back story but because of the atypical manner in which it approaches the character-based narrative.

According to a series of captions that begin Monsters, an Earth-based space probe sent into the solar system to collect samples crash landed in Central America upon re-entry. Not long after, alien creatures began appearing near the crash site and a quarantined "infected zone" was established just south of the U.S. border, covering approximately half of Mexico. That was six years ago. Today, the Mexican and U.S. militaries continue to wage a war against the aliens with the purpose of keeping them contained. The protagonists of Monsters become caught up in this struggle when they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sam (Whitney Able) is in Mexico for unspecified reasons and is injured in an alien attack. Photojournalist Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is sent to her rescue by her father, who is Kaulder's boss. The two embark upon a difficult journey across northern Mexico to the United States that is complicated by a 48-hour time limit and an increased danger from the monsters, who are multiplying and spreading.

Like most road trips, the one in Monsters is more about the characters than it is about their journey. It's about the relationship that builds between Sam and Kaulder. Initially, they are wary co-travelers bound by a common goal. As time passes, they become friends and eventually fall in love. In fact, one could argue that the romantic aspect is more in the foreground than the monster movie one. Although Edwards' script occasionally makes cultural and societal observations (such as his point that Kaulder can get $50K for a picture of a child killed by a monster but nothing for a smiling little boy or girl), there are no overriding messages. There's almost certainly an allegorical element to the Wall - a massive structure built along the U.S./Mexico border designed to keep the aliens out - but it's not italicized in a way that comes across as preachy. It's also possible to view this plot element as pragmatic and logical under the circumstances.

As a result of its themes, approach, and/or style, Monsters recalls three other recent science fiction movies: The Mist, Cloverfield, and District 9. It's doubtful that any of these were direct inspirations, but the guerilla approach to making sci-fi well below the expected budget level is as evident in Monsters as it was in each of these. The crutch of relying too much on visual excess has been removed, forcing the filmmakers to concentrate on more interesting aspects like character development, dialogue, and narrative. Transformers doesn't need these things; Monsters does - and it's all the better for it.

The film's structure, which initially appears to be straightforward, offers a surprise that is only likely to be recognized late in the proceedings, if at all. (Possible Spoilers follow.) The movie's prologue is its epilogue. The opening scene, which features a military convoy being attacked, is in fact the event that follows the movie's final pre-closing credits sequence. It advances the story fractionally and forces a re-interpretation of what the ending appears to be. Unfortunately, this is likely to be frustrating to theatrical viewers who can't rewind the film, unlike those who see it on pay TV or DVD.

There is nothing "hard" about Monsters' science fiction. The difference between Edwards' take on the monster movie and what might be proffered by a director working with the backing of a big studio is that circumstances have forced Monsters to focus on something other than pyrotechnics, eye-popping visual effects, and complex action scenes. As a result, the production is more of a story and less of a faux amusement park ride. The instances of suspense and tension exist in service of the narrative, not the other way around. Edwards deserves credit not for having made a science fiction monster movie on a shoestring budget, but having made a good science fiction monster movie on a shoestring budget.October 27, 2010 Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, The

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, The

THRILLER:

Sweden/Denmark/Germany, 2009

U.S. Release Date:

2010-10-29

Running Length:

2:28

MPAA Classification:

R (Violence, Profanity)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

1.85:1

Cast:

Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Mikael Spreitz

Director:

Daniel Alfredson

Screenplay:

Jonas Frykberg, Ulf Ryberg, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson

Cinematography:

Peter Mokrosinski

Music:

Jacob Groth

U.S. Distributor:

The Music Box

Subtitles:

In Swedish with English subtitles

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third and final piece of the cinematic adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Millennium Trilogy, is an entertaining thriller. That said, it's the weakest of the films, falling a length or two behind The Girl Who Played with Fire, and considerably more than that with respect to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Admittedly, some of the problems are out of the filmmakers' control. By trying to remain reasonably faithful to the books, they are hamstrung by the weaknesses of Larssson's material, chief of which is that he died before he could satisfactorily wrap up the most compelling aspect of The Millennium Trilogy: the relationship between Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). After being effectively established in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, this is shunted to the side in both sequels. The most we get in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is a brief scene that is pregnant with unacknowledged and unresolved romantic tension. It's more than a little frustrating. Fortunately, the movie resolves most of the plot threads left dangling at the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire. Unlike The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which can stand on its own, the other two films need to be seen as a set. Neither is complete without the other.

There is a structural problem with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Like The Girl Who Played with Fire, the narrative keeps Lisbeth and Mikael physically separated for pretty much the entire time. Their interaction is largely electronic and/or through intermediaries. However, while the focus of The Girl Who Played with Fire is mostly on Lisbeth, who is interesting enough to carry a movie on her own, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest gives Mikael a lion's share of the screen time. And, although Michael Nyqvist provides an excellent portrayal of the crusading magazine editor, the character is a generic component of the traditional thriller/mystery genre. Lisbeth, played to perfection by Noomi Rapace, is the real reason to watch these movies - a truly original individual with more facets that the finest-cut diamond. Unfortunately, she's given far too little exposure in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, being stuck in a hospital bed for most of the movie's first third, then behind bars for the second third. Only in the final 45 minutes is she accorded equal treatment to Mikael.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest picks up at the exact point where The Girl Who Played with Fire ended - with a critically injured Lisbeth, who survived a murderous encounter with her father and brother (Mikael Spreitz), being taken to the hospital. The police intend to charge her with attempted murder and a shadowy group of government operatives, out to protect secrets that have been buried for decades, intend to exert their influence and have her committed under the care of Dr. Peter Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl), who "treated" her after her first attempt to kill her father, at age 12. As Lisbeth recovers from her injuries, Mikael and his cohorts at Millennium Magazine prepare an expose revealing all the details pertaining to the conspiracy against Lisbeth. This puts Mikael and his co-editor and lover, Erika (Lena Endre), in the way of those trying to bring down Lisbeth. Soon Mikael is faced with an ugly ultimatum: cease investigating on Lisbeth's behalf or prepare to suffer the consequences.

Pacing is an issue. Director Daniel Alfredson, who also helmed the second movie (enforcing the sense that The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are best viewed as a single, 4 1/2-hour production), does the best he can with an inherently non-cinematic structure. The first 50 minutes, which roughly correspond to the period in which Lisbeth is confined in the hospital, is slow going as new characters are introduced (some of these are individuals who had minor roles in the previous installments) and details of the conspiracy are unraveled. There's a lot of exposition and not a lot of action or character development. Things become more interesting once Lisbeth gains access to a computer but, even then, the focus is primarily on Mikael's attempts to unmask the people behind the conspiracy (he is aided in this goal by a government-appointed task force). Unsurprisingly, the most compelling segment of the film occurs when Lisbeth is on trial. There are enough courtroom theatrics to satisfy anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. Most of the action transpires during this portion of the movie, as well - including gunplay and a chase through an abandoned warehouse. Unlike in the previous chapters of The Millennium Trilogy, there's not a lot of tension or suspense. The narrative is too intent upon answering questions and sewing up plot holes to get the adrenaline pumping.

Nykvist, who has grown into his role over the course of the three films, gives his best performance here. Rapace is as mesmerizing as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, but her limited screen time makes it less evident. There are a couple of juicy villains. Dr. Teleborian replaces the reprehensible Nils Bjurman as the person whose comeuppance we root for most heartily. Mikael Spreitz's Ronald Niedermann is another choice bad guy - a blond sociopath who feels no pain (either physical or emotional) and appears solely devoted to killing Lisbeth. The scene in which he spies upon her while she's in the hospital is one of The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest's creepiest.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is an abject failure as a stand-alone motion picture. It will make no sense to someone without previous exposure to the characters and their circumstances, and is not made with a newcomer in mind. However, for anyone who watched and enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, this is required viewing. It’s a surprisingly neat wrap-up considering that Larsson purportedly planned for the saga to extend across another seven stories. The film's problems ultimately detract only a little from what The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest offers as the closing chapter to a unique and rewarding mystery/thriller trilogy.

'The Dark Knight Rises' in Gotham with no Riddler in sight By Drew McWeeny - Christopher Nolan also promises no 3D for the final film in his Bat-trilogy

Wednesday, Oct 27, 2010 2:20 PM

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Batman will return to the streets of Gotham City in Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight Rises' Credit: Warner/Legendary

If you've spent any time in the last few months reading articles about Christopher Nolan's planned third Batman film, you probably felt confident that the villain in the new film would be the Riddler.

After all, site after site after site reported breathlessly that Joseph Gordon-Levitt had been offered the role of the Riddler on the "Inception" set. And then when word came down recently that Tom Hardy was cast in the film, people began reporting how Hardy had beaten Levitt out for the role. It was reported so confidently and so often that it would seem to be accepted fact... right?

Thing is, no one ever verified that notion, and one of the reasons I try not to run links to every little bit of info during the early days on some of these high-profile sequels is because so much speculation gets mixed into what little original reporting is out there, and eventually, you're playing an Internet-wide game of telephone, and the loser is accuracy.

This morning, Christopher Nolan had a short talk with Geoff Boucher at the LA Times, and two concrete facts were reported as a result of that conversation. First, the film's got a title: "The Dark Knight Rises." Since that came from Nolan, I'd take that as official.

He also said he's managed to persuade Warner and Legendary that shooting IMAX sequences would be more interesting than shooting the film in 3D. More importantly, Nolan said that the Riddler is not the villain in the movie. And again... you can't really do better as a source than Nolan.

Of course, he didn't even hint at who the villain or villains in the movie will be, but once we know, we'll have a pretty good idea of the theme of this film. Nolan's been careful so far to build his movies so that the choices he makes for villain directly feed back into the theme of each film, and I'm sure that will be the case here as well.

The most entertaining thing about this morning's news has been watching fan forums already go ballistic. "WHAT? NO RIDDLER! BUT HE PROMISED!" This is why inaccuracy in reporting is a bad things, folks. Now you've got fans who genuinely think that Nolan decided to dump the Riddler from the movie, as if it was ever true that he was in it. That's amazing to me. And the knee-jerk reaction to the title has been equally hilarious. So many fans had already set their hearts on other titles that now the entire film is "ruined" for them.

I hope Nolan is able to keep a lockdown on information on this one, and I hope the details we do learn are just broad strokes type things. If we've only got one more film in this series from this director, why would we want to know everything right now? For now, a title is fine, and if he wants to tell us who isn't in the film, that's fun. I just hope fans keep some perspective here. The only reason you're this interested in a third film in this series is because he's done such a good job on the first two, and that should buy him some serious benefit of the doubt, don't you think?

Tony Scott wants to make Top Gun 2 all about the "computer geeks" by Sean O'Neal October 25, 2010

The recent announcement of a Top Gun 2 fueled almost entirely by corporate vanity certainly doesn’t scream “innovation,” but that’s exactly what director Tony Scott intends to do with it. In an interview with HitFix, Scott vowed that his return to what we can now call a franchise would be neither “remake” nor “reinvention,” but rather an all new movie examining the “the end of the era of fighter pilots”—specifically, the fact that RayBan-sporting flyboys doing mid-air acrobatics to a Kenny Loggins soundtrack have more or less been replaced by “computer geeks—these kids play war games in a trailer in Fallon, Nevada and if we ever went to war or were in the Middle East or the Far East or wherever it is, these guys can actually fly drones. They are unmanned aircraft. They operate them and then they party all night."

Scott seems to be basing all of those assumptions about what the modern-day Navy is like on a random encounter he had with a hungover pilot he met coming back from Vegas one time, but at least he says he plans to head down to Fallon soon to research said computer geeks in person. However, don’t get too excited yet: Scott says the sequel is not an immediate priority for him, meaning it’s still at least a few years away, giving Tom Cruise plenty of time to grow out his Tom Skerritt mustache.

Justin Timberlake sings "The Social Network": "The script was its own song, really."

BY ROGER EBERT / October 28, 2010

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If he hadn't been selling millions of records when Napster came along, Justin Timberlake thinks he might have been one of its users. Napster was a web service allowing music fans to rip and exchange their own recordings without observing the niceties of royalties and copyrights, and it inspired a celebrated court battle with users charged as thieves and pirates.

"When Napster hit the scene, I was 19 or 20," he told me. "I had mixed feelings about it because I was the same age as all of those college kids that ended up playing the role of defendants in court. Had I not been in the music industry, I probably would have used it. At the same time, I was watching friends in the industry who were songwriters and were forced take up new jobs. All they do is write songs. They don't have endorsement deals or sold-out shows. They were getting a small piece of the collective pie."

There is an irony, then, to be found in Timberlake playing the role of Sean Parker, the mercurial founder of Napster, in David Fincher's "The Social Network," one of this year's Academy Award front-runners. The movie is based on the story of Mark Zuckerberg, who launched Facebook as a Harvard undergraduate and soon saw it become a phenomenon. The real Parker had a similar experience with Napster, and materialized in Zuckerberg's life as a Svengali of the fast lane.

"The Social Network" is on all the lists of Oscar contenders, and Timberlake is often mentioned as a best supporting actor candidate. Justin Timberlake? The perennial Trending Topic on Twitter? Yes, and why not? In one of the best films of the year, he provides a crucial performance, and he does it with confidence, bravado and heedless energy. It's acting. It is also perhaps like nothing many Timberlake watchers expected, but there you have it: Many performers have talents we never see, because they stay within the parameters of their early fame.

For Timberlake, fame was not launched at the Actor's Studio or at Julliard, but on "Star Search," when he was 11. That led to stardom of sorts on the Mickey Mouse Club, and then big time when he became the lead singer of 'N Sync. Then he went solo and started winning Grammys and going platinum, and -- well, nothing at that point could have predicted his casting as Sean Parker in "The Social Network."

Parker is a difficult role. Mark Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg as a super-intelligent geek who likes to bash people in conversation. Parker sees him and raises him. This requires an actor with a lot of confidence and agility. Eisenberg, at 27, is very experienced. Timberlake, at 29, is new to the front ranks of feature films, with all due respect to "The Love Guru" and "Black Snake Moan." Yet he embodies the Parker role and sells it persuasively. His Parker is a devious manipulator with a private agenda and an instinct for personal openings. He's a spellbinder. The choice of Timberlake is not only good casting by David Fincher and his casting director, Laray Mayfield, but good casting out of left field.

The Zuckerberg-Parker exchanges are often in a rapid-fire tempo that evokes screwball comedies. I asked if that took a lot of rehearsal.

"Our rehearsal process was, in fact, all talking," he said. "We never once got up from the table. We would go through the scene, just reading it. Then David Fincher, [writer] Aaron Sorkin and the actors who were in the scene would just sit and talk about what our characters were looking to accomplish in each moment.

"For a character like Sean, who was so brilliantly constructed by Aaron, the overall goal was intact. His most convincing trait, as a value for me (and not without irony), was just how literally convincing he could be to a guy like Mark. And when you have the opportunity to do a large number of takes like David likes to do, the dialogue becomes such a part of you. It makes it easier to rattle off a few pages of poetry. Yes, I just referred to Aaron's dialogue as poetry."

I have an additional theory. Later in our e-mail exchange, Timberlake mentioned: "I come from a family of people that think that they are really funny. If it was up to my family, I would be doing comedies forever."

To be funny, you have to be smart, think fast, talk fast, and have flawless timing. Those are Sean Parker attributes. Maybe Timberlake began to form them doing standup in the family living room.

Judging by photos of the real Zuckerberg and Parker, Timberlake looks something like each of them. "But I sense the Parker role was closer to your inner rhythms," I said. "Wrong?"

"The script was its own song, really," he said. "The rhythm of this film was so established by Sorkin. He laid the foundation of this world of hyper-smart college kids. I can't think of a writer working today that could have done a more masterful job. If you're asking about which role I would have preferred? Parker. Hands down. The way that character was written was just too much fun.

"But I felt like these two characters probably suffered from the same fears and insecurities. They both invented something to connect with the world comfortably, too. Mark invented Facebook. Sean invented Sean Parker."

I gather no one on the movie met Zuckerberg. Did you meet, or did you already know, Parker?

"I met him briefly in New York. At the time, I hadn't been cast in the film but it was speculated that I might be playing the role. We spoke for a second and he seemed like a really nice guy."

I observed that Parker has dialog where he brags that he brought the music industry to its knees, and put record stores out of business. There's some irony in a multi-million album seller like Timberland saying this dialog, yes?

"To be honest, it really didn't hit me until I screened the film for the first time. When you are embodying a character, you believe every part of what they are feeling and saying and doing. It could have been the iPod that he invented. It was more important for me to find out why he was bragging about it, I felt. I think any bravado that came out of the character was a safety mechanism to hide all of the darker parts of him. But, in my personal opinion, I think it takes more than one person to bring down something like the music industry. Much like it took more than one person to make Facebook a billion-dollar company."

You were a gifted kid who basically overnight found himself a star and then a mogul. Same story with Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg. Were there Parker figures in your early career?

"The music industry is full of them. I'll leave it at that."

How Political Is the Rally for Sanity? Posted by James Poniewozik Friday, October 29, 2010 at 10:27 am 6 Comments • Related Topics: politics , jon stewart, rally to restore sanity, stephen colbert

Before anyone opines on The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear this weekend, it's worth noting that the thing hasn't actually, um, happened; there have been an awful lot of judgments made on an event whose content we don't even know yet. So I can only judge the event on the basis of what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have said about it (that it's a reaction to overheated political rhetoric, or for Colbert, a satirical embrace of it) and on the basis of the shows they've been producing nightly for years.

For instance: is this a joke, or are they serious about this issue? To which I say: yes and yes. Frankly I have to wonder if the people asking even watch Stewart and Colbert. They're not apathetic cut-ups who make goofy gags about headlines. They're satirists, which is to say they make jokes out of things they take seriously.

The other big question: is this a political rally? Well, yeah. But probably not in the sense the questioners mean.

There's a distinction between "political" (concerned with the issues facing the country and how we try to resolve them through the system) and "partisan" (attempting to help one specific party or candidate win). Increasingly in this country we don't recognize a difference between the two or believe that you can be the former without being the latter. (That's part of the point of the rally, really.)

Based on what Stewart and Colbert have said, though, the focus of the rally is the ugliness of political debate: the Hitler comparisons, the head-stomping, the conspiracy theories, the assumption that your opponent is also your enemy and must always be assumed to be acting in bad faith. In announcing the rally, Stewart said that the maybe 15% or 20% of Americans who act this way dominate the conversation and the media, crowding out the other 80% or so, who could probably agree on reasonable compromises but don't have time to obsess on partisan warfare. To paraphrase Yeats, the worst are full of passionate intensity; the best "have shit to do."

Now, you can call this idea Pollyannaish. (Or you could say that it's arguing a point everyone agrees on—yet it seems to have gotten plenty of folks worked up regardless.) And you can point out that Stewart and Colbert, liberals themselves, have been calling this kind of behavior out particularly in conservatives like Glenn Beck (who held his own Restoring Honor rally). But this concept is also pretty much the point behind Stewart and Colbert's shows and public appearances for years. Stewart blasted Crossfire for enabling partisan rhetoric in 2004; Colbert built an entire show on "truthiness," i.e., the idea that gut passion has overtaken intellect.

That's a political idea, plain and simple--it's about politics and how we conduct it. (Stewart himself has confused the point, by the way, telling Larry King that the rally is "not political.") But is the rally partisan, which is to say, held three days before the midterms, is it specifically intended to help out one side, presumably the Democrats?

I don't think so. I'm not a mind-reader. I can only go on what the hosts have said and done on their shows. Maybe Jon Stewart has some secret idea that collecting his fans in D.C. will rally the Democratic base and keep Nancy Pelosi holding her gavel. But if so, it seems an awfully dumb way to do it. Democratic activists have begged Stewart to cancel the rally, arguing that it would take the spotlight from non-comedic rallies, and that it would siphon off politically interest young people that the party usually counts on to volunteer and get out the vote. (Stewart's response, as I've noted: "Tough shit. I don't have to do their job.") And for every Daily Show fan the rally fires up, it could motivate two Glenn Beck fans who see a bunch of showbiz liberals laughing at them again.

My guess is that Stewart is clued-in enough to know that, but that hasn't stopped the speculation that he wants to make himself a political player. Part of the interpretation, I think, comes from the fact that the rally is now being covered by the political press corps, which is simply conditioned to automatically see all politics in a partisan frame. Political reporters spend 99% of their time covering partisans with partisan agendas. It's only natural that they can't see a point to holding a rally in Washington near the first Tuesday in November other than to influence an election.

Of course, rallies are defined by the people who show up. Statistically, Stewart's audience leans Democratic--that's why President Obama showed up--and their signs and rhetoric might be less moderate (in tone) than Stewart and Colbert's. (Some activist groups are even co-ordinating signs for their members to bring to the rally.) Certainly Democrats and sympathizers are going to try to glom onto the event to try to help the party; Arianna Huffington is busing people to the rally en masse, and others are trying to convince attendees to do phone banks and other get-out-the-vote volunteer work. (Though even if that happens, the rally could well keep as many or more people away from GOTV volunteering that they otherwise would have had time for.)

Stewart and Colbert and set the agenda, but they can't pick the crowd. Maybe the ralliers will be a group of well-behaved people out to have a high-mindedly good time. Maybe they'll turn out to be largely partisans out to make a point for their side before Election Day. Or maybe they'll include a rowdy minority--let's say 15% or so--who act out and get all the attention. In which case: point proven.

Jace Lacob examines AMC's success, speaking to the Mad Men channel's top executives as they dive headfirst into the horror genre with Sunday's The Walking Dead.

A cold wind blows through Hollywood Forever cemetery as AMC hosts a premiere afterparty for its newest series, The Walking Dead, an end-of-the-world zombie drama based on the comic book by Robert Kirkman. Inside the Cathedral Mausoleum, waiters splattered with fake blood weave in between plastic-draped corpses while smoke drifts across a post-apocalyptic campground.

The impressive scene is a far cry from AMC's low profile a few years back. Now available in 96 million homes on basic cable, the channel launched a Robert Duvall-starring Western miniseries Broken Trail to an astonishing 10 million viewers back in 2006, a record-setting run that signaled a new player had arrived on the scene. The channel followed Broken Trail's success with such network-defining series as Mad Men and Breaking Bad. With Mad Men, AMC became the first basic-cable channel to win a best series Emmy, which it has now done three years in a row in the outstanding drama category. (Breaking Bad's lead, Bryan Cranston, has the same three-year streak as best dramatic actor.) The Cablevision-owned network's estimated revenue for 2010 is $496 million, according to SNL Kagan.

Four years after Broken Trail, AMC is debuting its first in-house production, The Walking Dead, launching Sunday in the U.S. and in 120 territories around the world the following week, about the aftermath for the survivors of a global zombie apocalypse. It will be followed sometime in 2011 by serialized crime drama The Killing, an adaptation of hit Danish series Forbrydelsen, starring Big Love's Mireille Enos.

The morning of the Walking Dead premiere, the mood surrounding AMC President and General Manager Charlie Collier and Joel Stillerman, senior vice president of original programming, was anything but gruesome. Over breakfast at the hotel Shutters by the Beach in Santa Monica, Collier giddily showed off photos of the promotional campaign for The Walking Dead, in which zombies descended on major cities across the world, proudly pointing out a shot of zombies in front of London's Big Ben on his phone.

The show appears to be a shift in genre for AMC, known for its complex dramas, but the horror of The Walking Dead connects not only to the network's annual October programming block Fearfest—which, now in its 14th year, offers such films as 28 Days Later, Friday the 13th, and The Shining in the two weeks leading up to Halloween—but also to the network's general approach to programming. Collier and Stillerman maintain that their philosophy extends to all genres, the key connector being that AMC offers the best possible storytelling. Despite the kudos for its original series, the executives seem to see AMC as being primarily a movie channel with original programming, albeit one that offers the best of the latter.

"We are trying to create premium television on basic cable," said Collier.

For Collier and Stillerman, viewers aren't narrow in their tastes; those who like action movies also enjoy espionage flicks or comedies.

AMC

"We have this channel that is both challenging and yet more interesting by virtue of the fact that it is relatively inconsistent," said Stillerman. "The challenge is how to create original programming that picks up where [our films] leave off and extends the brand."

The shows that the network has on air span several types, from the 1960s New York of Mad Men and the Southwestern grittiness of Breaking Bad to the contemporary, politically charged paranoia of Rubicon. And now the (literal) horror and (metaphorical) humanity of The Walking Dead.

“We nurture projects like no one else,” Charlie Collier said.

Despite the rabid adoration of its cult audiences, AMC's shows have yet to break out for the masses, and not all of their offerings have been a smash hit with critics and viewers. (The Prisoner last year premiered to scathing reviews and shed viewers throughout its three-night run.) However, while Mad Men's devotees watching the linear broadcast of the most recent finale only numbered around 2.4 million, the show is consistently one of the top season-pass sellers on iTunes and attracts the highest concentration of affluent viewers of any show on TV, says Collier. (Rubicon, which ended its first season with 1.04 million viewers, is No. 2.)

At AMC, said Stillerman, smart business can overlap with "passion projects."

Name-checking the channel's two most well-known auteurs, he said: "There is no way Mad Men gets made with anybody else other than Matt Weiner. Vince Gilligan is every frame of Breaking Bad."

Looking ahead, AMC will make the move to original scripted Web series—they've just closed a deal this week for their first—and is open to doing more in-house production, as they did with The Walking Dead, for which Stillerman quickly set up AMC Studios, creating the logo himself on the fly. Each of their deals has been more progressive than the one before in terms of content ownership stakes. And establishing their own studio grants AMC full ownership of the projects they produce in-house, allowing them to further monetize their content via licensing deals, merchandising, and foreign sales. (The Walking Dead, for example, will air on Fox International Channels around the globe.)

About AMC's deal-making approach, Collier said: "What was so attractive about [The Walking Dead] is that it is a genre piece [and] horror travels well." Plus, it further expanded the caliber of talent that AMC is working with, which includes The Walking Dead writer/director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption). (There are others, too: Law & Order: SVU Executive Producer Neal Baer, has a drama project, Pushers, in development at the network; Hank Azaria is developing a hybrid live-action/animated comedy.)

It's been roughly a year since the pilot script for The Walking Dead landed on Collier's desk, a narrow window of time considering the long development process at many cable networks.

"We are nimble and not in the quantity business," said Stillerman. "It leaves you open to move quickly when you find the right one. We are also extremely flexible because we don't have a traditional studio partner. There are challenges involved with that, but it also means we are unencumbered."

Next year, AMC will follow up the six-episode first season of The Walking Dead with The Killing, written by Veena Sud (Cold Case) and based on a Danish television series that emptied the streets of Denmark during its high-rated finale. Stillerman refers to the series as "video crack," an addictive puzzle comprised of huge cliffhangers at the end of every episode, interwoven storylines, and a compelling look at how murder affects both the victim's family and the central detective on the case, who becomes obsessed with solving this crime.

"Our goal is always to do the best stuff and reach the broadest amount of people," Stillerman said. "A crime drama might have been out of the question three or four years ago, but now we can embrace it."

The fate of Rubicon, meanwhile, remains up in the air, though Collier indicated a decision will be made in the next two to three weeks. Despite garnering the highest-rated launch for AMC to date this summer, the conspiracy thriller had a hard time attracting viewers on a weekly basis. Still, don't count it out.

"We nurture projects like no one else," Collier said. "Season 1 has been a great success. I think it is a remarkable piece of television. Our job is to make sure we can continue to scale and fit it all in."

As much as AMC has grown over the last few years, confronting the hegemony of HBO and Showtime over "quality" cable programming, their continued growth brings with it some inherent struggles.

"The greatest challenge for us comes with managing change," Collier said. "Because once you have success, the drug is to replicate and continue to do the same thing."

"The amazing benefit of having Mad Men and Breaking Bad is pretty evident," added Stillerman. "The only downside, to the extent that there is one, is where do you go from there? You have to make sure that we are not the channel that used to have Mad Men and Breaking Bad… Over time, we would very much like to see AMC start to get the kind of credit that HBO got for being purveyors of the best original stories on television. That is a long-term proposition. It doesn't happen overnight."

"I think that will take us into other formats," said Collier. "It will take us into unscripted… A lot of things you would never have expected four years ago for AMC to be talking about. We can credibly go there with our head held high."

Right now, AMC programs its originals only on Sunday evenings, where it competes with the likes of HBO, Showtime, and the broadcast networks, however the channel could expand to other nights if the right projects come along.

"Absolutely," said Collier, though he pointed toward the high concentrations of household viewing on the night. "It has never been about quantity or trying to fill anything for us. It has always been about quality and trying to make sure what we do couples well with what we do at our core."

Besides, there's another upside to programming Sundays.

"Somebody has to save the planet from Desperate Housewives," joked Stillerman. "As long as they are on the air, we will be on Sundays."

Plus: Check out more of the latest entertainment, fashion, and culture coverage on Sexy Beast—photos, videos, features, and Tweets.

Jace Lacob is the writer/editor of Televisionary, a website devoted to television news, criticism, and interviews. Jace resides in Los Angeles. He is a contributor to several entertainment websites and can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

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'The Walking Dead' Review: A Zombie Tale Made with Brains by Maureen Ryan, posted Oct 29th 2010 1:00PM Filed under: Reality-Free, Fall TV, Stay Tuned

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A question recently fielded on Twitter: "'Walking Dead,' yea or nay? Wifey doesn't like gore, trying to convince her otherwise. First impressions? Suggestions to convince my wife?"

Thanks, Isaiah B., for ruining my week.

OK, I kid -- Isaiah is a frequent (and appreciated) Twitter correspondent whose TV preferences are largely aligned with my own.

Yet in this case, I'm with Isaiah's wife: I'm no fan of gore. For me, horror fare has to be firmly centered on the relationships, the characters and the metaphors for emotional turmoil, or I find a hiding spot behind the couch, fingers firmly pressed in ears.

So what should I tell Mrs. Isaiah about 'The Walking Dead' (10PM ET Sunday, AMC), which, thanks to the sure hand of skilled storyteller Frank Darabont, is unquestionably a cut above most scary fare? I've spent a few days wrestling with this question.

On the whole, I'd say 'The Walking Dead' worth a look, no matter what your genre preferences, but horror aficionados are more likely to enjoy this intense, blood-spattered tale, which, like all AMC dramas, is about as aesthetically well-crafted as a TV show can be.

It's an open question as to whether 'The Walking Dead's' characters, who are mostly types in the first two episodes, will become as compelling as they need to be to sustain our interest going forward, but the upside is, the first season of 'Walking Dead' is only six episodes long. If the characters end up being mere cogs in the plot machinery, it won't matter because they won't stick around enough (or perhaps live long enough) to grate.

But if my fellow non-horror people end up watching, I'm just saying, brace yourselves: 'The Walking Dead' is scary. The 90-minute pilot is enormously effective at creating tension -- almost too effective for a gore wuss like me.

As much fun as it is to get lost in zombie metaphors -- Are they a commentary on a too-pliant populace? Stumbling reminders of death and loss? Ambling avatars of the random pain and suffering that life inflicts? -- Darabont never forgets that that the main point of an undead saga is to supply suspense and well-timed bursts of bloody violence. Some of the action and plot twists have a wry cleverness, but this is no 'Shaun of the Dead.'

In the opening scenes of 'The Walking Dead,' a wounded sheriff named Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up in a hospital that is quiet -- too quiet, of course. He soon discovers that the country has been overrun by an illness that turned people into the shuffling, flesh-loving corpses of the title, and in his quest to find his family, he meets a few freaked-out survivors, and lots and lots of zombies.

If your idea of a good time is wondering when an undead person is going to pop out from the edge of the frame, then you'll probably eat up 'The Walking Dead' like a zombie scarfing intestines. Yet there's very little overkill in 'The Walking Dead'; Darabont knows that the way to induce dread is by making you wonder what lurks around the corner. And the fear here is tinged with melancholy; like 'Breaking Bad,' the visually striking 'Walking Dead' knows how to use space to indicate loneliness and isolation.

When you think about it, Grimes does have a good deal in common with Don Draper of 'Mad Men,' Walter White of 'Breaking Bad' and Will Travers of 'Rubicon': Like them, Rick is a bereft, determined man who has lost something important and refuses to give up on a quest that he thinks will save him, or at least achieve some security for his family.

Yet Rick has almost none of the complexity of AMC's other flawed leads, and over time, this may prove problematic. The only thing 'The Walking Dead' requires of its cast, in the early going anyway, is competence, and all the actors are capable of that. It's not clear that anything more will be required of them, though the pressure-cooker environment of the zombie apocalypse is certain to supply opportunities for dramatic confrontations among the mixed bag of survivors.

There are those who may prefer the intensity of 'The Walking Dead's' pilot, but for me, it was a relief when the second episode of 'The Walking Dead' dialed down the suspense and turned the show into a more recognizable "band of survivors on a mission" tale. If 'The Walking Dead' had sustained the first episode's level of tension indefinitely, the show would have lost me.

And though there isn't a Sawyer or a Hurley or a Ben Linus in the bunch, I'm willing to see if 'The Walking Dead' will supply a compelling version of something 'Lost's' producers jokingly promised that show's fans for year: A zombie season.

Fun fact: In this piece, I asked if readers thought it was

Review: AMC's 'The Walking Dead' By Alan Sepinwall - Zombie apocalyptic series gets off to a strong start thanks to Frank Darabont, then sags a bit

Friday, Oct 29, 2010 3:00 PM

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Rick (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up to a horrific new world in "The Walking Dead." Credit: AMC

When you ask the creative team behind AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which debuts Sunday night at 10, what differentiates their series from every other filmed zombie story, they’ll point to the fact that it is a series - that, like the Robert Kirkman comic books that inspired it, it is an ongoing, never-ending nightmare, as opposed to two hours of scares and out.

But an ongoing nightmare requires ongoing viewers, and therefore a show that stays strong as it goes along, if not one that gets better and better over time, and I’m not sold that “The Walking Dead” is that kind of show.

I will say upfront that I generally felt the same way about the Kirkman comics. Though I’m not a devout zombie fan overall, I enjoyed the first few collections, then started to find it monotonous and depressing and stopped. The comic has many fans who have been understandably excited about what the TV team - including Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”), Gale Anne Hurd (“Terminator”) and Kirkman himself - will do with the property, and I suspect they’ll be pleased, even though the series takes notable liberties with the comic, altering the story at points, introducing some characters earlier and inventing some new ones altogether.

Going into the show as someone without deep affection for either the genre or the source material, I still found myself riveted by the pilot episode, which will air in a 90-minute timeslot on Halloween. Written and directed by Darabont, it’s a master class in suspense filmmaking, of dread and atmosphere and grief.

British actor Andrew Lincoln is our lead as small-town Kentucky cop Rick Grimes, who’s wounded in the line of duty, goes into a coma and wakes up weeks later to find a world overtaken by zombies, with only small pockets of frightened and angry humans trying to stay alive without getting bitten by the “walkers.”

Lincoln’s Southern accent is pretty terrible, though no worse than most of his co-stars, and Darabont and company have wisely pared down the wordy dialogue from the comics. Rick spends much of the pilot alone and in silence, simply reacting with horror to what the world has become. Lincoln’s quite good in that mode, and a solid hero once Rick links up with a group of survivors on the outskirts of Atlanta.

Darabont knows when a moment needs to be goosed and when he simply needs to hang back and let us share Rick’s view of this terrifying landscape, full of empty cars, decaying corpses and, of course, many, many, many zombies. (The zombies were designed by acclaimed make-up master Greg Nicotero, and understandably look fantastic/disgusting.) He takes a less-is-more approach to the score by Bear McCreary, letting long stretches play out with nothing but the sound of the wind, the creaking of doors, or the shuffling of zombie feet.

It’s wonderfully creepy, and then Darabont turns on the pathos as Rick makes the acquaintance of Morgan Jones (guest star Lennie James of “Jericho” fame) and his son Duane (Adrian Kali Turner), who have suffered a horrible, seemingly unending tragedy as part of this zombie apocalypse. That subplot’s pretty much beat-for-beat from Kirkman, and it plays out beautifully. (Though James does upstage Lincoln in the process.)

Many of the zombie encounters in the pilot are one-on-one, as the focus is less on action than on conveying a feeling of loss. Rick fell asleep in one world and woke up in another. But as he gets closer to Atlanta, encounters an ever-increasing number of the monsters and then connects with other survivors, “The Walking Dead” becomes a more conventional, less interesting zombie story. The technical work remains impeccable (the second episode is directed by “Breaking Bad” veteran Michelle MacLaren, the third by Gwyneth Horder-Payton from “Sons of Anarchy”), but the story, the suspense and the characters (Lincoln’s co-stars include Sarah Wayne Callies, Jon Bernthal and Jeffrey DeMunn) all begin to feel familiar quickly - not just from the comic, but dozens of zombie and/or post-apocalyptic yarns.

I was encouraged that the character-driven third episode was stronger than the zombie action-heavy second, and perhaps the producers will be proven right - that the longer this saga goes on past these initial six episodes, the more it will set itself apart from the zombie canon.

But it’s also possible that there’s a reason there’s never been a zombie TV series before that goes beyond the technical difficulties of pulling it off. Maybe the zombie apocalypse is a horror that’s better off in brief glimpses than as a story with no end in sight.

Weekend Reading: How Jay Beat Conan (and NBC) Posted by James Poniewozik Friday, October 29, 2010 at 4:18 pm 4 Comments • Related Topics: bill carter, conan o'brien, jay leno, nbc

When the Jaypocalypse began to unfold at NBC last January, I doubt there was a person who covers TV who did not think: Well, there's another book for Bill Carter! Indeed, the New York Times TV-beat guy—who immortalized the Leno-Letterman fight for Tonight with The Late Shift—is coming out with a sequel of sorts (The War for Late Night), and Vanity Fair has an excerpt.

There are lots of juicy bits, but the big takeaway: the guy with the best contract, wins.

There's been a lot of talk about who and what was responsible for the implosion: Jay's ratings were bad at 10 p.m., Conan's were bad at 11:35 p.m., NBC had made a lot of terrible decisions. But the way it played out, Carter explains, had more to do with ontract stipulations than ratings figures. The affiliates, furious that Jay's show (designed to cut NBC's costs) was costing them 11:00 news viewers, demanded NBC pull Jay or they would pre-empt him. NBC realized Jay had to go.

But Jay had worked out an "unprecedented" pay-and-play contract that would cost NBC immensely (Carter doesn't specify the amount here) if they just cut him. Conan did not (presumably his $40 million-ish penalty was much smaller), and he also did not have a contract guaranteeing the 11:35 p.m. timeslot. When Conan refused to move Tonight to midnight, NBC crunched the numbers and picked Jay.

I'll let you read the excerpt for the many tasty details. But just to name one, Conan reportedly asked NBC executives more than once, "What does Jay have on you?" Here, we have at least a partial answer.

Postscript: And Jay's ratings in the advertising demographic, after all that drama and money? Currently running below Conan's.

Steven Johnson: 'Eureka moments are very, very rare'

Where do good ideas come from? Not as we like to think, with a sudden flash of genius, says writer Steven Johnson. He tells Oliver Burkeman that collaboration is key

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Oliver Burkeman guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 October 2010 20.30 BST Article history

Steven Johnson . . .'Good ideas are built out of a collection of existing parts.' Photograph: Peter Matthews for the Guardian

Let's start with the invention of air conditioning. This is only one of approximately a zillion topics addressed by the science writer Steven Johnson during the course of lunch at an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan; some of the others include Darwinian evolution, the creation of YouTube, the curiously perfect population density of the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the French Revolution, the London cholera epidemic of 1854, the first computer, The Wire, and why 9/11 wasn't prevented. But air conditioning provides a useful way to introduce Johnson's current overarching obsession – the mysterious question of where good ideas come from – because it encapsulates how we generally like to think about inventors and inventions. One night in 1902, an ambitious young American engineer named Willis Carrier was waiting for a train, watching fog roll in across the platform, when he had a sudden flash of insight: he could exploit the principle of fog to cool buildings. He patented the idea, protected it fiercely, put his new invention into production, and made a fortune. In 2007, the still-surviving Carrier Corporation generated sales worth $15bn. As eureka moments go, even Archimedes might have had to concede that Carrier's was impressive. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

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For Johnson, though, what's really interesting about that story is how unusual it is: although the eureka moment is such a cliche, big new ideas almost never get born like that. "It's weird," says Johnson, ignoring his carpaccio of beef, and launching into an engaging quasi-lecture that effortlessly expands to dominate most of the rest of the meal, "but innovation is one of those cases where the defining image, all the rhetoric and all the assumptions about how it happens, turn out to be completely backward. It's very, very rare to find cases where somebody on their own, working alone, in a moment of sudden clarity has a great breakthrough that changes the world. And yet there seems to be this bizarre desire to tell the story that way."

Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, is an attempt to sketch out a radically different theory, which is in keeping with his personal policy of upending received wisdom in as all-encompassing a fashion as possible: one of his most popular works to date was entitled Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. His latest book should further entrench his position in today's army of commercially successful, male, fortysomething writers of sweeping, occasionally grandiose ideas books (commander-in-chief, Malcolm Gladwell; high-ranking generals, Clay Shirky and the authors of Freakonomics). Except that, if anything, it's even more audacious, since in principle he seeks to explain the origin of all their ideas, too. Oh, and the origin of life. And some other things.

At the core of his alternative history is the notion of the "adjacent possible", one of those ideas that seems, at first, like common sense, then gradually reveals itself as an entirely new way of looking at almost everything. Coined by the biologist Stuart Kauffman, it refers to the fact that at any given time – in science and technology, but perhaps also in culture and politics – only certain kinds of next steps are feasible. "The history of cultural progress," Johnson writes, "is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time."

Think of playing chess: at any point in the game, several ingenious moves may be possible, but countless others won't be. Likewise with inventions: the printing press was only possible – and perhaps only thinkable – once moveable type, paper and ink all existed. YouTube, when it was launched in 2005, was a brilliant idea; had it been launched in 1995, before broadband and cheap video cameras were widespread, it would have been a terrible one. Or take culture: to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn't yet been learned. And all this applies, too, to the most basic innovation: life itself. At some point, back in the primordial soup, a bunch of fatty acids gave rise to a cell membrane, which made possible the simplest organisms, and so on. What those acids couldn't do was spontaneously form into a fish, or a mouse: it wasn't part of their adjacent possible.

If this seems completely obvious, consider, Johnson says, how it explains the otherwise spooky phenomenon of the "multiple" – the way certain inventions or discoveries occur in several places simultaneously, apparently by chance. Sun-spots were discovered in 1611 by four different scientists in four different countries; electrical batteries were invented twice, separately, one year apart. (Similar things happened in the earliest days of the steam engine and telephone.) People have tried to explain this using vague terms such as the "zeitgeist", or of certain ideas just being "in the air". But there's a simpler possibility, which is that the innovation in question had simply become part of the adjacent possible. Good ideas, as Johnson puts it, "are built out of a collection of existing parts", both literally and metaphorically speaking. Take the isolation of oxygen as a component of air, which was another multiple. It couldn't have happened before the invention of ultra-sensitive weighing scales. But it also couldn't have happened before the birth of the idea that air is something, rather than nothing, and that it might be made up of gases.

What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn't to fetishise the "spark of genius", to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to "be creative", or to blabber interminably about "blue-sky", "out-of-the-box" thinking. Rather, it's to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe's 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that "good ideas are networks". Or as Johnson also puts it: "Chance favours the connected mind."

Another surprising truth about big ideas: even when they seem to be individual flashes of genius, they don't happen in a flash – though the people who have them often subsequently claim that they did. Charles Darwin always said that the theory of natural selection occurred to him on 28 September 1838 while he was reading Thomas Malthus's essay on population; suddenly, the mechanism of evolution seemed blindingly straightforward. ("How incredibly stupid not to think of that," Darwin's great supporter Thomas Huxley was supposed to have said on first hearing the news.) Yet Darwin's own notebooks reveal that the theory was forming clearly in his mind more than a year beforehand: it wasn't a flash of insight, but what Johnson calls a "slow hunch". And on the morning after his alleged eureka moment, was Darwin feverishly contemplating the implications of his breakthrough? Nope: he busied himself with some largely unconnected ruminations on the sexual curiosity of primates.

Johnson, who lives with his wife Alexa Robinson and their three sons in Brooklyn, has written seven well-received books and launched three notable web startups, including the pioneering web magazine Feed, gives around 50 lectures a year, and writes plenty of high-profile opinion columns, all of which he has accomplished by the not-exactly-ancient age of 42. (While we're on the topic, he also has an enormous 1.4 million followers on Twitter, far in excess of superstars from Kanye West to Sarah Palin to Hugo Chávez to the Dalai Lama.)

I'm not sure whether it heightens or quells that feeling to learn that part of his secret isn't soul-destroying workaholism, or amphetamines, but rather working methods that directly echo his arguments about creativity. For many years he has collected thousands of short quotes, along with his own writing, in a computer program called DevonThink, which uses artificial intelligence to identify connections between them. "I can put a quote in and ask it to show me things that are related to this – which is literally a way of exploring the adjacent possible," he says. "Half the time it'll suggest something completely irrelevant, but amid that noise there's always some crazy little new connection that I hadn't thought of."

Unlikely connections are a characteristic of Johnson's business ventures, too: the hyperlocal news site Outside.in grew from thinking about neighbourhoods as networks because of their role in The Ghost Map, his book about the spread and eventual defeat of London's 19th-century cholera epidemic. This was eventually traced to a baby's nappy that contaminated a well on Broad Street – not the most auspicious beginning, you might think, for a site full of restaurant recommendations and reviews of yoga classes. But such is the power of serendipity.

A certain kind of businessperson, I suspect, will buy Where Good Ideas Come From in order to learn to how to come up with a killer business idea, bring it to market, and clean up financially. They may find themselves slightly alarmed, therefore, by a sequence of striking graphics in which Johnson demonstrates that the vast majority of major innovations since 1800 have come from outside the free market – from universities and other environments where profit wasn't the overwhelming motivation. The urge to hoard, protect and directly profit from good ideas can work against the sharing-and-recombining ethos that the adjacent possible demands. And it's often the case that those who do attain vast wealth have done so by finding ways to exploit the creativity of the non-market world. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is so rich today only because Tim Berners-Lee developed the web as a non-profit venture. (And a non-profit venture, incidentally, that had no eureka moment either. Johnson quotes Berners-Lee as saying that interviewers are always frustrated when he admits he never experienced one.)

There's a sense, of course, in which this way of looking at the world is itself a "multiple": Johnson's argument has plenty in common with Gladwell's Outliers, and with books by Shirky and others on the power of amateur creativity, harnessed by the web. But Johnson distances himself from the most extreme version of that view, which is that individual gifts count for nothing – that every blog-commenter has as much of a contribution to make as every Booker winner, or that the "hive mind" is always in the right. It's not that creative individuals don't matter; it's that connectedness makes us more creative.

Politically speaking, none of this is rightwing in any traditional sense: it's a rejection of America's cherished belief in the primacy of individualism and free markets. But the focus on grassroots connectedness isn't really left-wing, either, "if leftwing means you're enamoured of large state interventions in society". A philosophy of innovation that rejected both of those "might be called anarchism", Johnson says, then looks slightly surprised at himself. "Huh. I'm not sure I'd want to be associated with that word, though."

Idea Churn

One of my design coworkers, who will remain nameless in order to preserve his dignity, told me a dirty little secret: video game designers really aren’t that clever. He told me that they just keep tossing out idea after idea and turning them over and over until something good comes out of it.

I then told him a dirty little secret about writers and other creative professionals: We do the exact same thing.

One of the best things I’ve learned about brainstorming and idea generation is that it’s always worthwhile to write down the first idea that comes into your head, but only so you are never tempted to use it. Anything you’re trying to think of an idea for something, the obvious idea is almost never the right answer. Even if you’re intentionally going for something iconic, it’s always better to put some form of twist on it. The line between iconic and cliché is incredibly fine.

I’ve come to think of it as idea churn. It’s technically a form of brainstorming, but it violates a key rule. When you’re brainstorming, you’re not supposed to judge anything that comes out of it – it’s only later when you’re harvesting the ideas that you make judgment calls on how valid the ideas are. The reason behind this is that it frees people up from thinking that ideas are good or bad, and any scrap of inspiration might lead to something cool later on.

In idea churn, though, you’re pre-judging some of the ideas. When you sit down, you’re accepting that the first handful idea are going to be shit, so you’re only writing them down so you can get them out of the way and dig deeper into the concept. It’s a way to allow yourself to go through the obvious and cliché ideas and recognize them as such before you dig deeper into the concept.

For example, let’s say I wanted to write a story about a vampire. If I were to sit down and do idea churn, the first few examples might be something like this: Main character was made a vampire against their will Main character is a mortal that looks like the vampire’s long lost love Vampire lives in a lonely castle Vampire comes from Eastern Europe

Many of those ideas are extremely overdone. However, by putting them into the first part of the churn, I can get them out of my head and start digging down into other, more interesting ideas.

Another side benefit of the churned idea list is that you can look at them and find ways to subvert the stereotypes. Looking at the list above again, maybe there’s an interesting idea in which the vampire comes from a different, but equally exotic, part of the world. Maybe the main character doesn’t resemble the vampire’s long lost love, but a hated enemy. Taking a portion of an old idea and twisting it is an easy and powerful way to come up with new and interesting ideas.

'The Walking Dead' - 'Days Gone Bye': The never-ending nightmare begins By Alan Sepinwall - Frank Darabont writes and directs a haunting pilot to the zombie apocalypse series

Sunday, Oct 31, 2010 11:30 PM

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Rick (Andrew Lincoln) in "The Walking Dead." Credit: AMC

"The Walking Dead" debuted tonight. I offered a pre-season review on Friday, and now I have specific thoughts on the pilot episode, coming up just as soon as I respect the weapon...

"Wake up." -Rick

In the pre-season review, I expressed some concerns about the later episodes and my lack of affection for the source material (zombies in general and Robert Kirkman's comic in particular). But those reservations can't take away how fantastic I found the pilot to be, as Frank Darabont gave us a scary, mournful, haunting look at the nightmare that is the zombie apocalypse.

What I like so much about the pilot is the stillness and simplicity of it. Rick wakes up to a wrecked world, but in his small Kentucky town, there are more corpses than walkers. Until he makes it to Atlanta at the pilot's end, he doesn't have to spend a lot of time running and hiding. There's time to consider what's happened, and what to do, and what aspects of pre-zombie life Rick and his new friends Morgan and Duane want to hold onto. (Do good manners still matter if you're very likely to turn into a drooling, shuffling monster any day now?) There's even time for Rick to pause on his journey to Atlanta to put the legless zombie woman out of her misery.

As the title suggests, "Days Gone Bye" is about loss. The world Rick knew is gone. His wife and son might be as well, though he doesn't believe so - and we learn(*) that he's right. Morgan has lost his wife, Duane his mother - and the worst part of all is that she's gone in spirit but not body, and that body turns up every night to haunt them both. The thing about zombie stories is that they're relentless, and here Darabont (leaning very heavily on Kirkman and Tony Moore's work in the early comic issues) showed that they can be that way while also being quiet and slow

(*) One of the few missteps I think Darabont made was the order of the transition from Rick's partner kissing his wife at the makeshift camp to Rick looking at their photo in the car. I think the stomach punch works better if we've just seen the picture before we see the camp, rather than after.

Lots of great, dark imagery in this one (again, much of it from the comic), whether Rick coming upon the "God forgive us" house or the image of Rick alone on horseback traveling down a half-empty, half-wrecked highway(**) on the way into Atlanta. And while I love the work of composer Bear McCreary, I'm pleased that he and/or Darabont decided to keep the use of score to a minimum, as it makes the world Rick wakes up to seem all the eerier. (This early on, background music would just be a reminder that we're watching yet another zombie movie.)

(**) Though shouldn't the fact that all the abandoned cars were on their way out of town have warned him to maybe not go in there?

Things get busier once Rick gets to Atlanta and finds himself trapped inside a tank in the middle of a zombie block party, and I found myself missing the stillness of the earlier sequences. But this is the world of the show, and in a way, Rick's time in Kentucky is a respite - a chance to catch his breath, and heal, and come to grips with what happened while he was asleep, and brace himself for his long and dangerous journey towards the family he hopes is out there.

Now things get messy, fast. And your mileage may vary on which mode works better for the show.

Some other thoughts:

• The main title sequence had a tough act to follow in the terrific fan-made credit sequence by Daniel Kanemoto, who animated panels from the comic and scored it to "Fresh Blood" by Eels, and unfortunately it couldn't match it. On its own, it's fine, and I like the McCreary score over it; I just think what Kanemoto did is cooler.

• Another small misstep: I thought the fakeout under the tank, where it looks like Rick is about to blow his brains out, when really he's just climbing into the hatch in the tank's underbelly, was a little cheap and unnecessary. (And if the idea was that Rick really was thinking of doing it until he realized he had an avenue of escape, that didn't come across very well.)

• Damn, Lennie James was good as Morgan, wasn't he? I don't know that he blew Andrew Lincoln off the screen as much as Fienberg suggested on our podcast, but that was a crucial role - Morgan has to convey the sense of the world's loss to Rick, and the audience - and James nailed it. Neither man (nor Jon Bernthal or the rest) can do a particularly convincing Southern accent, unfortunately, but what can you do?

• The song as the camera pulled away from the tank stalemate: "Space Junk by Wang Chung, of all things.

Finally, a note on comics vs. TV, spoilers, etc.: while I'm sure many of you have read the comics, just as many (if not more) haven't, we're going to do our best to treat the TV show as its own entity, in the same way Darabont, Hurd and company are doing. I may mention on occasion that the show has deviated from the comic in some way, but it'll always be brief and not the focus of a review. If the comic readers want to discuss it further in the comments, feel free, but only on the condition that you not reveal anything about what happened later in the story.

So, for example, if you were to say "I find this new character's presence unnecessary" or "I like how the show put a twist on the this story went in the comic," or anything else that doesn't betray knowledge past the present tense for the TV characters, that would be fine. But saying, "I don't like what happened in this episode because it's going to prevent (Plot Point From Year Three of the Comic)" or "I'm getting impatient waiting for Character X to turn up" is not okay.

Got that? Should be easy, but sometimes it winds up getting messy.

With that in mind, what did everybody else think?

What is the Proper Hostess Gift? Episode 134: November 1, 2010 General | Events & Holidays

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by Richie Frieman Aside from winning the lottery or discovering you own stock in Google, nothing can brighten up your day more than seeing an invitation to a party in the mail (unless it was from Google, inviting you to a party in your honor as the new CEO… but don’t bank on it). When going to a party, it’s key to show proper manners towards the lovely host or hostess who kept you on the “Yes” list, rather than the “Don’t Invite” list. So what is the proper gift to bring? It’s a conundrum many people face when wanting to show the proper gratitude, so that’s why in today’s article I will answer this question once and for all. But before I tackle this topic, I wanted to mention that the podcast edition of this article was sponsored by Go To Meeting. Use Go To Meeting to hold your meetings over the Internet and to give presentations, product demos, and training sessions right from your PC. For a free, 45-day trial, visit GoToMeeting.com click the try it free button and enter the code: Podcast. Bringing a proper gift to a party will not only show you have a fine hold on etiquette, but it will also make sure you are invited back. So here are my top three tips for bringing a proper hostess gift. Proper Hostess Gift Tip #1: Realize it’s Not YOUR Party Before you walk out of your house--gift in hand--look at the gift and ask yourself whether you really considered what the hostess likes and not just what you like. Always remember, it’s not your party… but you can cry if you want to, since you will feel like doing just that when the hostess looks at your tray of fried pork sausage bites and nearly vomits. Why? Oh, that’s right, she’s a vegetarian! How long have you known her for? What, the ten fan pages on Facebook about freeing caged chickens and PETA wasn’t hint enough? Proper etiquette always points to knowing you are catering to your hostess and their audience--not your own. If you decide to bring food, which is often a good choice--keep in mind what they would want to serve. Even if you don’t like vegan veggie dip, it shows that you were thinking of them and that you care. You don’t even have to like what you brought as long as your hostess does. Plus, once you get back home you can dive into your twice-fried beef jerky snacks. Proper Hostess Gift Tip #2: Remember It’s a Gift I know, you went out of your way to find the rarest wine in the city and you can’t wait to taste it. But nothing says rude like walking into the room, handing over a gift, and then quickly opening it yourself. All of your good manners in giving such a nice gift will be completely ruined once you start drinking like you were Tom Hanks in “Castaway” after seeing ice water for the first time. Let the hostess present your gift to the party. Allow your hostess to open the gift and serve it. You can by all means partake in the gift, but just don’t be first. It’s proper etiquette to let others enjoy your generosity. The Proper Hostess Gift Tip #3: Keep It Appropriate

The quickest way to make your name live permanently on the “Do Not Invite List” is to bring something so inappropriate it invites gasps or stares. Case in point, a couple years back my friend and his girlfriend were throwing a party. Another friend, who was not exactly a big fan of said girlfriend, thought it would be so funny and slick to show up with the book, “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Needless to say he did not receive any laughs from his friend or his friend’s girlfriend when the gift was opened. What Is the Proper Hostess Gift? So, what is the proper gift to give to your host or hostess? Simply put, arrive with a gift that shows the utmost gratitude and kindness--despite what you personally may or may not like. By no means am I saying you have to show up with a bottle of Cristal or a $100 box of rare German chocolate. But a nice box of cookies from the local bakery will thank someone better than a package grabbed at the drug store. As I mentioned earlier, you’ll want to think about what your host might like. Do they love sweets? Bring over a box of gourmet candy you found at the mall. Do they like to cook? Grab a fancy marinade or jar of flavored salt from a store like Williams-Sonoma. The gift you bring might depend on the party as well. If you’re going to a laid back Super Bowl party, a great tray of snacks is always a perfect choice. When showing up to a nice dinner party, grab a bottle of wine—a good go-to gift—and an extra special touch never hurts, so crack open the wallet and spend the additional $2 to buy a nice bag too. Even better would be to find a rare wine that the liquor store recommends--maybe something in season right now or one that just came out. Liquor stores are always getting new brands in and they can recommend the best for the party and your budget. A good hostess gift doesn’t have to break the bank. You can buy something nice—and thoughtful—without spending a fortune. After all, nice has no price tag. Do you have a story about how a host or hostess present that you brought or was given to you? Post them on my Modern Manners Guy Facebook page so we can all have a laugh with you. As always, if you have another manners question, I love hearing from you, so please drop me a line at manners@quickanddirtytips.com. As well, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @MannersQDT. And of course, check back next week for more Modern Manners Guy Quick And Dirty Tips for a more polite life. Was this Tip Helpful?

What Is a Straw Man Argument? Episode 247: November 2, 2010 Word Choice

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by Mignon Fogarty Political ads and analysis are reaching a fever pitch, so it seems like a good time to talk about the phrase “straw man.” What does it mean when two people are debating and one accuses the other of putting forth a straw man argument?

The podcast edition of this article was sponsored by StyleEase Software. Get 15% off StyleEase for APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian Style Software at www.styleease.com/ggpodcast.html (or, with the coupon code: ggpodcast) What Is a Straw Man Argument? I always think of the Straw Man from the Wizard of Oz, but that's not where the term comes from. In its simplest definition, it's the name of a logical fallacy, which means that if you carefully dissect the argument or statement, it doesn't make sense. Debaters invoke a straw man when they put forth an argument--usually something extreme or easy to argue against--that they know their opponent doesn't support. You put forth a straw man because you know it will be easy for you to knock down or discredit. It's a way of misrepresenting your opponent's position. It's as if you took a flaming scarecrow, threw it onto the debate floor, yelled “Look, it's my opponent's dangerous straw man,” and then you appeared to save the day by dousing the flames with water. All while your opponent mutters, “That's not my straw man. What just happened?” It can be annoyingly effective because in response you may be lured into clarifying what your position is not instead of talking about what your position is, and studies have shown that when you repeat a lie, even if you are repeating it to refute it, the repetition can reinforce the misinformation in the minds of some people (1). How Does the Straw Man Argument Work? A straw man argument can be annoyingly effective because in response you often have to spend time clarifying what your position is not instead of what your position is. Here's an example. Let's say you believe genetically engineered crops should be more regulated, and your opponent believes genetically engineered crops should be less regulated. Your opponent could use the straw man technique by saying something like “If we take away farmers' ability to grow genetically engineered crops, if we eliminate that option, people will go hungry, nay, people will starve. Unlike my opponent, I choose to use the technology available to us and save lives.” In that statement, your opponent has argued against eliminating genetically engineered crops instead of against simply increasing regulation. He's put up a straw man--no crops at all, people will starve--so he can knock it down. Another Straw Man Argument Example Here's another example. Maybe you're arguing with a friend about global warming. You think the government should raise fuel efficiency standards to cut down the amount of C02 we release over the next 20 years. Your friend thinks cars have nothing to do with it, and as you argue, he says something like “Our cities are built so that we have to drive cars. Your solution will kill the economy. How would people get to work without cars? It'll never work.” At that point you probably start twitching and can hardly wait to shout “When did I say we had to get rid of cars? That's not what I said at all!” You're twitching because your friend has thrown out a straw man argument. He's responding to an extreme version of your proposal that's easier to shoot down than your real proposal. He's arguing against the extreme idea that we need to get rid of all cars because it's easier than arguing against the moderate idea that we need to raise fuel efficiency. Watch for the Straw Man Argument in Political Debates Now you know what a straw man is. Watch out for them in the debates and political ads.

References

1. Vedantum, S. “The Power of Political Misinformation.” The Washington Post, September 15, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375.html (accessed October 22, 2010)

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Midterm Media Do the Wave Posted by James Poniewozik Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 8:16 am 11 Comments • Related Topics: news media, politics,

Video: MSNBC wasted little time reacting to the reaction at the polls last night.

"Wave," "tidal wave," "tsunami"—the terms for the midterm results in last night's TV coverage were limited only by the English language's number of terms for something really big from an ocean. (The land-based lobby really needs to get its act together if it wants "earthquake" and "landslide" restored to their historical place in 2012.) But as the election played out—in very broad strokes anyway—largely as anticipated, with Republicans taking the House in a big swing and Democrats holding on narrowly to the Senate, the coverage through the night was largely and exercise in reiterating analysis that had been previewed for weeks and months.

The early part of the night, of course, belonged to cable news. (While the networks largely went into reruns, ABC ran an original episode of Dancing With the Stars. Spoiler alert: good night for the Palins there too. Update: To be fair, NBC did join coverage earlier, after an all-new Biggest Loser.) Fox News, for all its image as the Republican-friendly network, actually seemed to have the most reserved coverage in tone of the three big cablers, going with a more reserved set and less flashy graphics (granted, by cable news standards) than its competitors. A whiteboard was even employed.

The channel, of course, had the advantage of having commenters on its payroll, like Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, who were very active players in the election, and their (relative) reserve seemed in keeping with the decision by GOP leadership to avoid overt celebration. (Reportedly, balloons were forbidden from the House victory party.) Palin did, at one point, inadvertently echo the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity by noting that, in the changed Washington, "the train is leaving the station." (A peace train? A crazy train? A love train? She did not specify.)

Credit where due, Fox also had a more, well, balanced panel much of the night than its competitor MSNBC. Holding forth from left of center for Fox were the recently-high-profile Juan Williams and Democratic political guru Joe Trippi. MSNBC's main lineup, on the other hand, was basically its center-to-left lineup of nightly hosts: Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell.

And for the night, MSNBC embraced the role of the voice of opposition to the new House leadership. (And the new House leadership returned the favor. Rep. Eric Cantor couldn't resist needling Matthews with how happy he was to be on MSNBC, especially "on a night like this.") Repeatedly and assertively, Maddow grilled Republican guests on what specific cuts they planned to meet their deficit-reduction pledges, especially as they call for an extension of Bush tax cuts for the upper-income that would cost an estimated $700 billion. Maybe not surprisingly for a winning election, not many such potentially uncomfortable specifics came.

And CNN? What CNN cannot deliver in partisan appeal, and has not been able to deliver in successful new programming, it tried to make up for in visual clutter. With a mob of panelists hunched around what looked like the world's most garish blackjack table, CNN's screen was flooded with screens, computer graphics and glowing red and blue from every available surface, while the cameras inadvisedly tried to shake things up with motion-sickness inducing closeups and tilted angles.

While there were not many showy innovations like 2008's holograms—John King was back with his magic wall to repeatedly show how red the House map had become—there were attempts at new visual signatures, like a new attempt to graphically break down percentages with graphs that looked like stacks of glowing Legos. (On Comedy Central, Jon Stewart likened the graphics to Tetris, while Jon Oliver spoofed the graphics-for-their-own-sake with a greenscreen suit that made him "become" Rand Paul.) I remember the morning after what CNN's coverage looked like; I have no lasting impression of what anyone said.

To be fair, CNN was not the only network with odd graphics. NBC (and MSNBC's) Chuck Todd was again paired with his peculiar and seemingly purposeless "virtual Capitol" hologram. But by the time the networks joined cable and rolled out their coverage, with the broad strokes of the night already established, their work seemed more like a mop-up operation, focused on framing the returns for the morning after.

And what will that frame be? From the results this morning, it appears that the Republican gains in the House will exceed those in the 1994 midterms, but the question is whether the media impact of them will be as pronounced. On the one hand, we simply have more media to amplify election results than we did then. On the other hand, 1994's Congressional switch came as much more of a stunner, with GOP gains in the House more than doubling most pundits' predictions.

So will the media gauge the Republicans' win by its size, or by its size vs. expectations? As Nate Silver blogged at the New York Times, there was often a tone in the coverage that last night was a split decision—the GOP took the House but not the Senate—even though the Democrats had a sizeable loss in the Senate, and the Republicans may have a legitimate gripe if their win is portrayed as less significant simply because it could theoretically have been even bigger.

But we'll see. The interpretation is still forming, and if there's one thing we know about tsunamis, it's that they leave you with a lot to wade through afterward.

Fall TV revisited: What new shows have you stuck with? By Alan Sepinwall - In an underwhelming fall season, have any rookies stood out?

Wednesday, Nov 3, 2010 10:16 AM

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"Boardwalk Empire" has been one of the fall's few new highlights, and it's on cable. Credit: HBO

Because of election coverage, last night was a pretty slow night for scripted network TV. And since I'd already seen all my Tuesday cable shows in advance via screeners, and since the Knicks game was canceled due to a false alarm about asbestos (typical freakin' Knicks; just as they're starting to improve, it looks like the arena itself is toxic), I decided to do an inventory of the new network shows and figure out which ones I still cared about.

And the answer is none.

There are some I intend to keep checking into from time to time to see if they've improved ("No Ordinary Family," "Running Wilde") or because they're just good enough that I don't mind having them on while doing other things ("Hawaii Five-0," "Raising Hope"), but there aren't any I'm attached to, and none I would probably be sticking with at all if this wasn't my job.

But that shouldn't be a surprise. I came into September saying this wasn't a good network development season, that the clear two best rookies of the fall were on cable ("Boardwalk Empire" and "Terriers," both of which I still love), and that the only network newbie I was really invested in was "Lone Star" - and we all know what happened with "Lone Star." And while my taste certainly doesn't overlap with the majority of Americans (see the ratings for "Terriers"), I haven't been alone in my apathy, as there hasn't been a real break-out hit among the new crop.

We're at a point in the season where most of the decisions have been made about which shows are already dead ("Outlaw," "My Generation"), which will be around for a while ("Blue Bloods," "Mike & Molly") and which are just running out the string until their networks can find something better to replace them with ("Undercovers," "Running Wilde"). So I'm curious what new shows, be they network or cable, you guys have picked up and intend to stick with for as long as they're around (or until they take a turn for the worse, quality-wise), and why you're a fan of that particular show or shows.

As always, no judgment here, folks. If somebody sings the praises of a show you find to be an abomination, you can note your disagreement without attacking the other commenter as history's worst monster.

To NSFW or not to NSFW? (now SFW) via Roger Ebert's Journal by Roger Ebert on 11/9/10

This entry is safe for work.

I hesitated just a moment before including Miss June 1975 in my piece about Hugh Hefner. I wondered if some readers would find the nude photograph objectionable. Then I smiled at myself. Here I was, writing an article in praise of Hefner's healthy influence on American society, and I didn't know if I should show a Playmate of the Month. Wasn't I being a hypocrite? I waited to see what the reaction would be.

The Sun-Times doesn't publish nudes on its site, but my page occupies a sort of netherland: I own it in cooperation with the newspaper, but control its contents. If anyone complains, I thought, it will be the paper, and if they do I'll take it down. You dance with the one that brung you. But no one at the newspaper said a word, even though they certainly saw the page because the same article also appeared in the Friday paper. Hefner was in town for the weekend for a nostalgic visit to his childhood home, and a screening at the Siskel Film Center of the new documentary about his life . He's a local boy who made good.

At first no one at all objected to the photo, even though the entry was getting thousands of hits. It went online early on Sunday afternoon. But Monday was a workday, and a reader asked if it had occurred to me to label it NSFW ("not suitable for work"). The thought may have crossed my mind, but come on, would anybody be surprised to find a nude somewhere during a 2,200-word piece on Hef? It wasn't like I was devoting a whole page to it; I embedded it at a prudent 300 pixels. Like this:

&nbsp &nbsp Sorry. After learning that the mere presence of this photograph could get you fired and my blog put on a restricted list, I have removed the "prudent 300 pixels" and linked the photograph here. &nbsp &nbsp

Then other readers started wondering about a NSFW warning. They weren't objecting to the photo; indeed, no one ever did, even some readers who felt Hefner had been a pernicious influence on the world. Feminist readers, some well known and respected by me, spoke of his objectification of the female body, his misuse of the Male Gaze, and so on. But no one objected to the photo itself. No, they explained that they read the column at work ("during lunch break," of course) and were afraid a supervisor or co-worker might see a nude on their monitor. I asked one of these readers if his co-workers were adults. Snark.

As a writer, it would have offended me to preface my article with a NSFW warning. It was unsightly -- a typographical offense. It would contradict the point I was making. But others wrote me about strict rules at their companies. They faced discipline or dismissal. Co-workers seeing an offensive picture on their monitor might complain of sexual harassment, and so on. But what about the context of the photo? I wondered. Context didn't matter. A nude was a nude. The assumption was that some people might be offended by all nudes.

&nbsp &nbsp This was a tiny version of this photograph. When will we grow up? &nbsp &nbsp

I heard what they were saying. I went in and resized the photo, reducing it by 2/3, so that it was postage-stamp 100 pixel size (above) and no passer-by was likely to notice it. This created a stylistic abomination on the page, but no matter. I had acted prudently. Then I realized: I'd still left it possible for the photo to be enlarged by clicking! An unsuspecting reader might suddenly find Miss June 1975 regarding him from his entire monitor! I jumped in again and disabled that command.

This left me feeling more responsible, but less idealistic. I knew there might be people offended by the sight of a Playmate. I disagreed with them. I understood that there were places where a nude photo was inappropriate, and indeed agree that porn has no place in the workplace. But I didn't consider the photograph pornographic. Having grown up in an America of repression and fanatic sin-mongering, I believe that Hefner's influence was largely healthy and positive. In Europe, billboards and advertisements heedlessly show nipples. There are not "topless beaches" so much as beaches everywhere where bathers remove swimsuits to get an even tan.

At Cannes you see this on the public beach, and pedestrians nearby on the Croisette don't even stop to notice. Ironically, the only time you see a mob of paparazzi is when some starlet (on the Carlton Hotel pier say), is making a show of removing her clothes. Then you have a sort of meta-event, where paparazzi are photographing other paparazzi photographing this event. It's all a ritual. The clothes come off, the photographers have a scrum, everyone understands it's over, and the paparazzi leave, sometimes while the starlet is still standing there unadorned. In Europe, people know what the human body looks like, and are rather pleased that it does.

America has a historical Puritan streak, and is currently in the midst of another upheaval of zeal from radical religionists. They know what is bad for us. They would prefer to burn us at a metaphorical stake, but make do with bizarre imprecations about the dire consequences of our sin. Let me be clear: I am not speaking of sexual behavior that is obviously evil and deserves legal attention. But definitions differ. Much of their wrath is aimed at gays. I consider homosexuality an ancient, universal and irrefutable fact of human nature. Some radicals actually blamed it for 9/11. For them the ideal society must be Saudi Arabia's, which I consider pathologically sick.

When we were making "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," I got to know Cynthia Myers and Dolly Read (above), the two Playmates in the film, and have followed them through the years. They have good memories of the experience. I am in touch with Marcia McBroom, the actress who played the third of the movie's rock band members. She is a social activist, loves the memory of her Hollywood adventure, and recently sponsored a benefit showing of BVD for her Africa-oriented charity, the For Our Children's Sake Foundation. These women looked great in the 1970s and they look great today, and let me tell you something I am very sure of: We all want to look as great as we can.

Now back to the woman in the photograph. Her name is Azizi Johari. She went on after her centerfold to have some small success in motion pictures, most notably in John Cassavetes' "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie." Today she would be in her 50s and I hope is pleased that such a beautiful portrait of her was taken. A reader sent me a link to Titian's 16th century painting "Venus of Urbino" (below), and suggested to me that this was art and Miss Johari's photograph was not. I studied them side by side. Both women are unclothed, and regard the viewer from similar reclining postures on carefully-draped divans. I looked at them with the Male Gaze, which I gather that (as a male) is my default Gaze. I want to be as honest as I can be about how these two representations affect me.

Let us assume that the purpose of both artworks is to depict the female form attractively. Both the photographer and the painter worked from live models. Titian required great skill and technique in his artistry. So did the photographer, Ken Marcus, because neither of these portraits pretends to realism. Great attention went to the lighting, art direction and composition of the photograph, and makeup was possibly used to accent the glowing sheen of Miss Johari's skin. I would argue that both artworks are largely the expressions of imagination.

For me, Miss Johari is more beautiful than Venus. She strikes me as more human. She looks at me. Her full lips are open as if just having said something. Her skin is lustrous and warm. Venus, on the other hand, seems to have her attention directed inward. She is self-satisfied. She seems narcissistic, passive, different. Johari is present. She seems quietly pleased to suggest, "Here I am. This is me." Wisely she avoids the inviting smile I find so artificial in "pin up" photography. She is full of her beauty, aware of it, it is a fact we share. Venus is filled by her beauty, cooled by it, indifferent to our Gaze. If you were to ask me which is the better representation of the fullness of life, I would choose Johari.

Of course abstract artistic qualities are not the point of either work. The pictures intend to inspire a response among their viewers. For men, I assume that is erotic feeling. Women readers will inform me of the responses they feel. Homosexuals of both sexes may respond differently. They will tell me.

For me? Miss June is immediately erotic. I regard first of all her face, her eyes, her full lips and then her breasts, for I am a man and that is my nature. I prefer full lips in women, and hers are wonderful. I admire full breasts. Hers are generous but manifestly natural. The female breast is one of the most pleasing forms in all of nature, no doubt because of our earliest associations. I dislike surgical enhancements. As my friend Russ Meyer complained in the early days of silicone, "It misses the whole principle of the matter."

Miss Johari's arms and legs are long and healthy, she is trim but not skinny, she is not necessarily posing with her left arm but perhaps adjusting a strand of hair. I find the dark hue of her skin beautiful. Photographs like this (she was the fifth African-American Playmate) helped men of all races to understand that Black is Beautiful at a time when that phrase came as news to a lot of people. In a blog about her, I find she was "the first black Playmate to have distinctly African features." Another entry could be written about that sentence.

As for Venus of Urbino, she has no mystery at all. I look at her and feel I know everything, and she thinks she does too. She gives no hint of pleasure or camaraderie. If you tickled her with a feather, she would be annoyed. Miss Johari, I imagine, would burst into laughter and slap the feather. I can see myself having dinner with her. To have dinner with Venus would be a torment. My parting words would be, "This bill is outrageous! I wouldn't pay it if I were you!"

Of course these are all fantasies. I know nothing about either model. That is what we do with visual representations of humans; we bring our imaginations to them. It's the same with movies. The meaning is a collaboration between the object and the viewer. That is how we look at pictures, and how we should. If it seems impertinent of my to compare the photograph with the painting, the best I can do i quote e. e. cummings: mr youse needn't be so spry

concernin questions arty

each has his tastes but as for i i likes a certain party

gimme the he-man's solid bliss for youse ideas i'll match youse

a pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues

Now as to the problem of the workplace. I understand there will be pictures on a computer screen that will be offensive. I get that. Why will they be offensive? Perhaps because they foreground a worker's sexual desires, and imply similar thoughts about co-workers. Is that what's happening with the blog entry on Hefner? Is anyone reading it for sexual gratification? I doubt it. That's what bothers me about so many of the New Puritans. They think I have a dirty mind, but I think I have a healthy mind. It takes a dirty mind to see one, which is why so many of these types are valued as censors or online police.

The wrong photographs on a screen might also suggest a blanket rejection of the values of the company. Some corporations require an adherence to company standards that is almost military. Sex has a way of slicing through all the layers of protocol and custom and revealing us as human beings. But lip service must be paid to convention.

We now learn that the recent Wall Street debacle was fueled in part by millions spent on prostitution and drugs. We have seen one sanctimonious politician and preacher after another exposed as a secret adulterer or homosexual. I don't have to ask, because I guess I know: If an employee in the office of one of those bankers, ministers or congressman had Azizi Johari on his screen, he would be hustled off to the HR people.

I haven't worked in an office for awhile. Is there a danger of porn surfing in the workplace? Somehow I doubt it. There is a greater danger, perhaps, of singling out workers for punishment based on the zeal of the enforcers. And of course there is always this: Supervisors of employee web use, like all employees, must be seen performing their jobs in order to keep them.

There is also this: Perfectly reasonable people, well-adjusted in every respect, might justifiably object to an erotic photograph on the computer monitor of a coworker. A degree of aggression might be sensed. It violates the decorum of the workplace. (So does online gaming, but never mind.) You have the right to look at anything on your computer that can be legally looked at, but give me a break! I don't want to know! I also understand that the threat of discipline or dismissal is real and frightening.

I've made it through two years on the blog with only this single NSFW incident. In the future I will avoid NSFW content in general, and label it when appropriate. What a long way around I've taken to say I apologize.

Ask Mo: Answering Your Queries on 'Caprica,' 'Chuck,' 'Walking Dead' and More by Maureen Ryan, posted Nov 2nd 2010 6:20PM Filed under: Reality-Free, Stay Tuned

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From Harvey: I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about 'Caprica' and the way the cancellation was handled. I can't remember ever being this [angry at] a network and I don't know if there's any point to even trying to save the show or if I should just move onto the boycott idea. ...Basically, what I'm asking is, do you think that there is any good will left at Syfy to wrap up the story (because we know that the season ends with a cliffhanger)?

Mo says: I got a lot of questions and tweets about 'Caprica' during the past week, some of which contained a certain amount of strong language.

I get it: I understand that it hurts when a show you really like gets canceled, and it's very rare for a cable show to get pulled from the schedule before it completes airing the episodes in its current season. I'm sure that for 'Caprica' fans, the sudden yanking of the show adds to the sting.

Having said that, I'm not sure what Syfy was supposed to have done, given 'Caprica's' abysmal ratings. It may have been better for Syfy to refrain from dividing up season 1 episodes into two chunks, but that strategy has worked fine for any number of other shows. Again, it's not a gambit I'm particularly fond of, but if the audience is there, they'll find the show.

And sure, it would have been nice if all the episodes had aired, there's no question about that. But some shows go off the air and the remaining episodes go into a vault and are never seen again. At least hardcore 'Caprica' fans can get those episodes on DVD (and the network did say in a statement that those unaired episodes would air some time next year). Cold comfort, I'm sure, but it's better than never seeing those episodes.

The unfortunate fact is, the tiny audience for 'Caprica' did not make a second season financially viable. Apparently there are cliffhangers at the end of the show's first season, but many shows have gone off the air with plot threads unresolved. It is, sadly, how the TV business works sometimes. I'm betting fans of 'Lone Star' would have counted themselves lucky to get more than a dozen hours of that show before it got axed.

Several people asked whether I thought 'Caprica' would get a wrap-up movie. I have no knowledge of what Syfy executives are thinking on that score, but I'd speculate that they don't see a pressing need to spend more money on a project that didn't do well for them.

My two cents: I think 'Caprica' had a ton of potential and I'm sorry that potential was never fully realized over the course of the 14 hours that aired on Syfy. I truly hoped the show would overcome the problems that had hobbled it in the first half of its season, but the first two episodes of the second half of season 1 did not allay my concerns.

Though I'm able to let go of 'Caprica' much more easily than fans of the show, I've been there. I've been very disappointed in the untimely ends of shows I loved (HBO executives promised 'Deadwood' wrap-up movies long after the show ended. That was unwise and only made the death of a great show even more difficult to accept). It's a general hazard of watching and loving TV -- sometimes we get kicked in the teeth.

From The Hoobie: I was wondering if you had any thoughts on whether 'The Walking Dead's' staggering premiere ratings could help 'Rubicon' get renewed or could hurt its case. It's always hard to mind-read a TV network, but do you think after its monster hit, AMC will be more willing to sustain a struggling show or less willing?

Mo says: I'm torn, but I'm leaning toward the latter answer. I'd like to think that the success of 'The Walking Dead' would make AMC feel expansive and perhaps more likely to cater to the passionate (if small) 'Rubicon' audience. But the fact is, the success of 'The Walking Dead' may tell AMC that it should investigate certain kinds of genre projects in future, not try to sustain a ratings-challenged show with an audience that was unlikely to grow. Ryan McGee and I talked about this more in the first 20 minutes of the most recent 'Talking TV' podcast; check that out for more on this topic.

From MsShelley02: When will Olivia finally come home on 'Fringe'?

Mo says: I can't answer that specifically, but I spoke to 'Fringe' executive producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman recently, and they spoke at length about where the next set of episodes will go. Please stop back here Thursday for much more 'Fringe' intel!

From Keith Wayne Smith: On 'Boardwalk Empire,' why is the prohibition officer in the post office?

Mo says: It's the only Federal building in town, so Agent Van Alden and his partner have taken temporary space there during their investigation of the city.

A few queries from Keith Evans:

1. Please say it ain't so: Is 'Nikita' is up for cancellation? My wife and I love the show.

2. Is 'Detroit 1-8-7' in peril?

3. When is 'The Cape' coming on!? Tired of waiting through all this dreck.

4. What are your thoughts on 'Undercovers'? Again, it's one of the "family time" shows [for my wife and me], plus it has African-Americans leads and we like to joke that they are us.

Mo says: Here are your answers, in rapid-fire fashion:

1. The CW gave 'Nikita' a full-season order, for a total of 22 episodes. It appears to be doing just fine.

2. Things don't look great for 'Detroit 1-8-7.' The most recent Renew/Cancel Index on TV By the Numbers predicted that the show would likely be canceled.

3. No idea on 'The Cape': NBC has it slotted in at 'mid-season,' which could mean anywhere from January to March or beyond.

4. I've seen a few episodes of 'Undercovers' and despite the fact that the cast is very appealing, the storytelling and characterizations left a lot to be desired. It's been disappointing in any number of ways. I certainly had hoped for more substance and spark from a project in which J.J. Abrams was involved.

From Billy Somerville: What are your top five British TV shows?

Mo says: I know I'm forgetting some great shows, but here's my Brit-TV Top 5, off the top of my head: 'Doctor Who' [old-school and new school], 'State of Play' [2003 miniseries], 'Brideshead Revisited,' 'The Office' [UK], 'Prime Suspect.' I have to mention one more: 'Pride and Prejudice' [1995 miniseries] -- I'm a sucker for a really good costume dramas, especially when Jane Austen's novels are involved. [Edited to add : 'Monty Python's Flying Circus.' This list is like the TARDIS -- bigger on the inside than it first appears.]

From Kimmer: If you could offer one piece of advice to a new showrunner, what would it be?

Mo says: As tempted as I am to say, "Don't give Mo Ryan an aneurysm," I'll try to make my reply a little more broad than that.

My chief advice would be: Be passionate about the story you are telling. If you're not excited by it, chances are nobody else will be.

From Long Hong: Given that 'Chuck's' ratings numbers are still stable compared to other new NBC dramas, I want to believe that there [could be] one more season of 'Chuck'. If 'Chuck' were to get one more season, where do you think the show should stop? Is 'Chuck' sustainable for more than five seasons?

Mo says: I'm a fan of 'Chuck,' obviously, but I am not sure I necessarily want it to continue beyond four seasons (as you no doubt know, NBC has ordered a total of 24 episodes for the show's fourth season). I'm approaching season 4 as if it's likely to be the show's last.

From a practical standpoint for the network, the audience for 'Chuck' is loyal, to be sure, but it's not very big, and each year, the running costs of a television show increase. It might not make economic sense for the show to continue past season 4.

On a creative level, when 'Chuck' is firing on all cylinders, I absolutely adore its mixture of humor, heart and nerdtastic action. But when the show isn't at its best, it can be quite frustrating, as we learned last season. And now, even though Chuck and Sarah are together, some weeks 'Chuck' insists of amping up the problematic aspects of that relationship rather than just letting us enjoy the ride and the lack of will-they-or-won't-they angst. In some episodes, the action, the plotting and the Buy Morian antics are inspired; other weeks, not so much.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fan and I'll continue to watch 'Chuck' until the show reaches the end of the road, whenever that is. If it were to get a fifth season, I wouldn't be upset about that in the slightest, unless I began to think the show was really running out of gas toward the end of season 4.

But at this stage, I'm just enjoying the Mama Bartowski story, enjoying the oustanding cast, and delighting in what the show does well when it's really cooking. I'm not worrying too much about whether it has a future beyond next spring. And if it did end next spring, well, I'll count myself lucky to have witnessed a frequently enjoyable four-season run.

From Chris: What are you top five scripted TV shows of all time?

Mo says: Are you trying to kill me? Even asking me for my top 20 would melt my brain. I can't restrict myself to five. Pass!

From Sanford Sklansky: I was wondering if ABC Family is going to finish showing 'Friday Night Lights.' We were around the sixth episode and they just took it off the air.

Mo says: I'm afraid ABC Family found that 'FNL' reruns didn't perform well for them; the show is gone from that network, presumably for good. I'd recommend catching up with this very fine show via DVD.

From Jon Delfin: Why is there no outrage at BBC America for the way they chop chunks out of U.K. shows for U.S. airing? With the exception of 'Luther' and some (not all) episodes of 'Doctor Who,' we miss as much as 20 percent of the programs. Are we just supposed to be grateful for the leavings we get?

Mo says: There isn't more outrage because a relatively small number of people watch BBC America, and, of those who watch its shows, only a few are even aware that U.K. programs are cut to fit U.S. running times. It's unfortunate, but I'm certainly glad the network had the sense not to trim 'Luther.' That would have been disastrous. As for the cuts made to other shows, we can certainly lament that they occur, even as we acknowledge that our irritation will have zero effect on those who decide the shows need whacking. (Jon also noted that PBS has made some cuts to 'Sherlock,' which I hadn't been aware of. That's a shame but I am enjoying 'Sherlock' quite a bit in any event.)

From Adam Mehr: My question concerns checking back into shows after you have given up on them for whatever reasons. I was thinking about this subject the other day as I found repeats of both 'Ugly Betty' and 'Grey's Anatomy' on the tube. I was a huge fan of both in their first couple seasons, but I wrote off Ugly Betty somewhere in its third season as I found myself bored and not really enjoying that hour of TV anymore. However, I read from some TV critics and bloggers that the show really found its footing again in its fourth season, and I am so glad I checked back in because they were some of the most enjoyable hours of TV that I watched last year.

As for 'Grey's Anatomy,' I checked out during its fourth season as the show annoyed me for often than not. I have not jumped back into my old weekly 'Grey's Anatomy' viewing habit, as the show still can be frustratingly irritating, but every now and again, the show hits all the right notes, and I find myself very compelled and emotionally engaged.

Anyway, are there any shows you rediscovered and came to fully appreciate them again? Do you ever feel inclined to write about a show like 'Ugly Betty' or 'Grey's Anatomy' if it has a somewhat powerful episode? Or in some cases, is there too much damage to be undone (i.e. 'Nip/Tuck')?

Mo says: A great question. When it comes to eliminating a show's Season Pass on my TiVo, I rely on something I call The Ratio. That refers to the ratio of good episodes to bad, repetitive or otherwise frustrating episodes. When the ratio dips below a certain point -- say, a third or more of the episodes are very irritating in some way or another -- I generally check out.

Once I check out, it's very hard for me to check back in. This job involves ongoing triage -- there are always new shows I'm trying to add to my weekly viewing roster. If a show is not cutting it enough of the time, it will have to make way for something newer or that has more potential. And if I miss a season or two of a show, I generally don't jump back on board fully, though I may catch an episode here or there.

With shows that I used to really like, such as 'Grey's' or, when it was on, 'Ugly Betty,' I generally try to check back in once in a while, just to see where things stand and see whether I have the same set of likes and dislikes that caused me to drop the show in the first place. I don't tend to write about those drop-in visits; I'm not sure the thoughts of someone who hasn't been following a show closely are all that useful to more committed fans of a program.

And as I said, once I drop a show, it stays mostly dropped, though the length that I'll stick with a show varies. I tried so long, with so little reward, to stick with 'Heroes.' Out of respect for its great past, I'm trying to stay with 'The Office,' though it dipped under The Ratio some time ago. Stupidly, I got sucked into 'Nip/Tuck' for the first parts seasons 4 and 5, because creator Ryan Murphy cannily started those seasons with episodes that almost had me convinced that he cared about the characters and the audience, not just tiresome, self-indulgent, 'can you top this' stunts. I was wrong, every time. My bad.

From Alison: There seem to be thousands of aspiring actors in Hollywood, but we see the same ones pop up across shows all the time. Is that because 95 percent of the aspiring actors are no good, or because of the way the industry works?

Mo says: I imagine there are some politics involved -- connections and all that -- but generally speaking, the same actors appear again and again because producers, executives and casting agents know that the actor in question can deliver the goods on a consistent basis (if they're a nice person too, that doesn't hurt). There's a ton of fear, if not panic, involved in the creation of TV shows, which are multi-million dollar enterprises. If an actor is known for being reliable and doing good work no matter what the pressures, that actor will get hired again and again, even if some of their past projects weren't that great. There's just a security factor in knowing an actor has appeared on a show before and has been reliably good.

This isn't a question, but Carl Brand had some inspired contributions to a question that Ryan and I discussed on the most recent 'Talking TV with Ryan and Ryan' podcast.

The question: If you could take any character on any show and put them in another show just for fun, who would it be?

Here are Carl's answers:

• Walter Bishop from 'Fringe' on 'Iron Chef.' Both shows have a manic lab feel to me and Walter Bishop on anything would be a home run.

• Michael Scott from 'The Office' taking the Donald Trump role on 'The Apprentice.' Maybe rename it 'The Temp'?

• Bunk and Lester Freeman from 'The Wire' on 'Cougar Town' as they all like to imbibe.

From Vana1970: What do you do to relax when you have to watch TV for a living?

Mo says: Thanks for asking! If there's anything I've learned from this job, it's that I need to take breaks from it in order to avoid feeling burned out. TV is a lot of fun to write about, but there's also a lot of TV coming at you all the time, and it's easy to feel like you're constantly behind the eight ball.

I do the normal things that most people do in their free time -- I read as much as I can, hang out with my family, travel and try to take time off with no computer access (at least one week of the year, I need to be unhooked from wifi. Surprisingly, sedatives and/or restraints are not involved). I also garden a lot in the spring and summer, and I really enjoy what I call my "art therapy" -- making gifts and objects that I generally give away as presents (I recently learned book-binding. This will be a great job skill for the future, I'm sure!). With gardening and other artistically inclined pursuits, I get to stop thinking in words and start thinking in images, which is incredibly relaxing and helps recharge my batteries. And it doesn't involve sitting in front of a glowing box, which is a nice change of pace.

Thanks for all the questions, and look for the next Ask Mo in about two weeks!

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November 02, 2010 Megamind

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Megamind

ANIMATED:

United States, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-11-05

Running Length:

1:36

MPAA Classification:

PG

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

1.85:1

Cast:

(voices) Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt, David Cross

Director:

Tom McGrath

Screenplay:

Alan Schoolcraft & Brent Simons

Music:

Lorne Balfe, Hans Zimmer

U.S. Distributor:

Dreamworks Animation

Subtitles:

none

[Seen in "standard" (non-IMAX) 3-D.]

Megamind is largely what one might expect from an animated movie featuring a number of notable comedians in voice roles: an amusing diversion. A soft satire of superhero films (one that's less clever than either Pixar's The Incredibles or Universal's more recent Despicable Me), Megamind falls into the second tier animated category. It's not on the same level as Pixar's best but is a perfectly acceptable family feature with a lively pace and sufficient cartoonishness to engage children while not boring their accompanying parents to death.

Superman references abound from the beginning, as little Megamind (voice of Will Ferrell) is sent to Earth in a space capsule to escape a dying planet. Later, there's a more explicit nod to the 1978 movie as Will Ferrell performs a credibly fatuous Marlon Brando impersonation (adults will get this; kids will not, but it doesn't matter). Megamind, who has blue skin and a big head, isn't the only alien to arrive on our planet. At the same time, the boy who will grow up to become Metro Man shows up in a superior capsule. He's a clean-cut, all-American kid whose adult version has the squarest jaw imaginable and sounds like George Clooney (even though his voice is provided by Brad Pitt). Megamind becomes the supervillain arch-nemesis to Metro Man's superhero. Their battles, which often begin with Megamind capturing TV news reporter Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey), typically end with Metro Man carting Megamind off to jail. Then, suddenly one day, one of Megamind's schemes works and Metro City loses its hero. After a brief period of exultation, Megamind comes to a stunning realization: without Metro Man, there's little point to his existence. The ying to his yang is gone; there's no more salt to his pepper. So he sets about creating a new superhero out of a schlub cameraman named Hal (Jonah Hill). Hal, however, is a shallow, self-absorbed individual and the experiment doesn't go as planned - imagine giving the abilities of a god to a creepy, introverted dweeb.

It's evident from the content that Will Ferrell either had an uncredited hand in writing the script or did a fair amount of ad-libbing. Some of the comedy and more than a few of Megamind's lines have the comedian's fingerprints all over them (such as the frequent mispronunciation of words). Obviously, given the PG rating, none of the humor is off-color, but it is frequently sophomoric and, as such, generally works within the context of an animated movie. In general, Megamind's comedy is effective although not hilarious. This is more a movie of smiles than belly-laughs. The "dramatic" elements, such as Megamind's conversion from villain to hero, provoke little emotional reaction. That aspect prevents Megamind from ascending to the upper echelon of animated motion pictures.

The images are composed to titillate the eye. A dark, rain-drenched scene is breathtaking in both detail and impact. The 3-D is innocuous. The movie does not suffer from blurring but there is a reduction in the vibrancy of colors. The 3-D occasionally calls attention to itself by hurling something in the direction of the viewer but, for the most part, it's unobtrusive enough not to be a distraction. Since it neither enhances nor detracts from the experience, why pay the surcharge? The movie should play equally well in 2-D (if it can be found playing in 2-D).

Megamind will succeed at the box office. It has been assembled by Tom McGrath, who made Madagascar and Madagascar 2, both of which were popular with families. If anything, Megamind boasts a smarter, sharper screenplay and doesn't play as aggressively to the youngest potential members of the audience. The voice acting by Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt (sounding, as mentioned above, like a puffed-up George Clooney), Tina Fey, and Jonah Hill is top-notch; the music (mostly '80s heavy metal) is well-selected; and the style is clean and uncluttered. It's a pleasant if unspectacular animated motion picture that will appeal to a variety of viewers.

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ReelThoughts: October 31, 2010 "The True Day of Horror" Commentary by James Berardinelli

I don't think I was aware of the existence of Halloween until I was three or four years old. All I can remember about that first night was dressing up in a costume and being escorted into the night by my father. It was all rather bewildering and I recollect crying through part of the experience, although I did end up with a nice little stash of candy for my troubles. Back then, Halloween was about trick or treating, and it was for kids. Today, while trick-or-treating still exists, it has been (understandably) neutered because of safety concerns. A few razor blades in candy bars will do that. Now, Halloween is mostly about parties and it has been converted into a "holiday" that's as much for adults as for children. It's more festive than scary. Like vampires, transformed from vile living dead monsters to objects of romantic love that sparkle in the sunlight, Halloween has lost its bite. Never fear, however. The true day of horror is racing toward us. This year, it will fall on November 2. It's called Election Day - when all souls wander zombie-like into polling places and elect the bloodsuckers who will feast upon the public jugular for the next few years.

For those who worry this is going to turn into a Roger Ebert-like column extolling the virtues of one party while blasting those of the other, fear not. This will be non-partisan. I'll be blasting both parties because, although the rhetoric is different, the actions are not. Talk is cheap, as they say, and that's all anyone in Washington or on the campaign trail seems to be doing. The government is, if not broken, at least close to it, and I haven't got a clue how to fix it. All solutions seem to rely on a utopian philosophy or a belief that human beings are essentially good. I gave up on bedtime fairy tales a few decades ago. Anyone for a benevolent dictatorship?

I first became aware of politics and the political process during Watergate. My memories of that time are fragmentary, but I recall sitting in the car (in a gas line) and hearing a news report about how serious things were looking for the President. A few years later, in November 1976, I found watching the election results to be strangely compelling, even though I didn't have a horse in the race, so to speak. To a 9-year old, there wasn't a difference between Ford and Carter, except that one had a better set of hair and a more genteel accent.

By the mid-'80s, however, I was as "into" politics as someone not yet of voting age could be. Bucking the trend that most high school-age kids lean to the left, I was very much Ronald Reagan's boy. In 1984, I watched the Reagan/Mondale debates. I remember being disappointed by Reagan's stiff performance during the first one - he looked like an old man. All the commentators were shocked at how poorly The Great Communicator communicated. Things were different during the second debate, however. The charismatic, appealing Reagan had returned, flashing the easy smile and speaking in a grandfatherly tone. I never had a chance to vote for Reagan, which I surely would have done. I didn't turn 18 until September 1985 - by then, he was in the first year of his second term. I voted twice for his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, and once for Bill Clinton before my disillusionment with politics led me to give up entirely on the whole voting process.

Recently, I have heard complaints that election campaigns have become "too negative" and that we've reached a new nadir when it comes to mudslinging. Those who make such comments either have short memories, haven't studied history, or both. United States election politics have seen darker, more unpleasant times than this. The true low point was probably around the time when Abraham Lincoln was running for his first term, but there have been plenty of others. The difference between now and 150 years ago or 100 years ago or 40 years ago is that media saturation has never been what it is today. Elections in the newspaper age could be run more negatively than those in the Internet age without a concern that even the smallest of dirty tricks would go global.

What has changed, however, is that the people no longer elect a government - they only think they do. The politician who runs for election is never the one who shows up on the job. His true constituents are not the men or women living in his district (however big that might be), but the corporations who put him in office. Eisenhower coined the term "military-industrial complex" and the nascent fears he voiced in that 1961 farewell address have come to pass: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Locally, there's a candidate running right now who has a great message. He's going to reduce taxes, balance the budget, start paying off the debt, and create jobs. He doesn't give any details about how he's going to do this, so I have deduced he is a wizard. It's pretty obvious that in order to reduce taxes and work on the debt (both of which are highly desirable things), there are going to have to be some serious cuts elsewhere. Is he going to eliminate Social Security and Medicare (good luck with that)? Is he going to pull our military forces out of all foreign countries and slash the defense budget (even less likely)? Or is he going to truly eliminate all graft (stop laughing)? The point is, he talks a good game, but what will happen if he gets elected? Absolutely nothing. Check back with me in two years if you doubt this. I have lived in New Jersey for most of my adult life. I have seen governors come and go. All of them promise that their #1 goal if they get elected is to reduce property taxes. Yet, for as long as I have been paying them (since 1994), the only direction in which they have gone is up. There have been a few largely meaningless band-aids, such as a $400 rebate to defray a $10,000 bill, but those usually come and go only in election years. It's easy to promise the moon, but a lot harder to build the hardware to deliver on that promise.

I didn't vote in the last election. Right now, some of those reading this are tsk-tsking and shaking their heads. Good citizens vote, right? And how can one hope to change the status quo if he/she doesn't make his/her voice heard? Hey, I used to believe in that doctrine, too. Then I sat down and thought about it and came up with some disturbing conclusions. First and foremost, I realized that my single vote really doesn't count. Had I voted in 2008, regardless of whether I had selected Obama or McCain, nothing would have been different. Even in my local elections, my absence from the polls was meaningless. A counter-argument to this philosophy is that if enough people feel like this, the absence of such a large bloc of votes could make a difference. This is true, but I'm responsible only for myself, not for an amorphous and ill-defined "bloc." Besides, true differences between D's and R's are window-dressing. They're all beholden to the same masters, and those aren't the citizens who pull the levers.

Voting is not a responsibility, as some would have us believe. It's a right. And I choose not to exercise that right because, in my view, it's an act of futility. Yes, that's cynical - but it's also pragmatic. And, although the dictionary doesn't show those two terms as synonymous, they often are in the real world. The choice not to vote is every bit as valid as the choice made in the voting booth. It’s not because I'm lazy or ill-informed. (In fact, I am probably more aware than a majority of the electorate about the so-called positions of most candidates.) It's an abstention. It's checking an invisible box for "none of the above." Give me a candidate I can believe in and I'll vote for him. I felt that way about Reagan, but maybe that was just the naiveté of youth.

So, if I don't "participate" in the process of putting people in office, what do I do? Should I move to another country? No, I'm comfortable where I am and I still believe that, as corrupt and self-serving as our current political system is, it's better than that of many, many countries. I do not feel oppressed and, until I do, moving isn't a consideration. So I sit back and watch elections much as I would any spectator sport - curious about the outcome, but not truly invested. "Change" is a common buzzword in campaigns today - the Democrats used it in 2008; the Republicans are using it in 2010. All the word means is replacing a group of experienced bums with a group of inexperienced ones. True change will likely never happen because the deck is stacked. The members of the military-industrial complex will never allow a genuine maverick to become a major player. The candidates we get are typically second rate. (What kind of gifted individual would want to run for office in the first place?) So we're presented with a choice between a rotting fish head and a decomposing pig's foot. We grimly hold our noses and pick one rather than turning away and vomiting.

Bottom line: my proposal is to change Election Day to October 31. Then we'll put some of the dread, gloom, and horror back into Halloween, where it belongs.

November 01, 2010 127 Hours

A movie review by James Berardinelli

127 Hours

THRILLER:

United States/United Kingdom, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-11-05

Running Length:

1:34

MPAA Classification:

R (Violence, Sexual Content)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

2.35:1

Cast:

James Franco

Director:

Danny Boyle

Screenplay:

Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy, based on the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston

Cinematography:

Enrique Chediak, Anthony Dod Mantle

Music:

A.R.Rahman

U.S. Distributor:

Fox Searchlight

Subtitles:

none

Danny Boyle doesn't believe in doing the same thing twice. After the rousing success of the romantic fantasy Slumdog Millionaire, he has switched not only gears but continents to tell the true story of Aron Ralston in 127 Hours, an "action film with a guy who can't move." The film's similarities to Buried are striking in that both movies rely primarily on the performance of the lead actor and both challenge the audience's stamina to stay with a character under trying circumstances for 90 minutes. The level of tension in 127 Hours does not reach the intense level achieved by Buried, but it contains a scene so disturbing in its blistering, realistic gore that some will be forced to turn away. 127 Hours is unflinching in its depiction of what constitutes the "will to live."

The rest of this review assumes that the reader is at least cursorily familiar with the real life story of Aron Ralston, whose ordeal was the subject of numerous news stories in May 2003 (as well as subsequent network TV and cable documentaries). Those who don't recognize Ralston's name and/or don't recall the news reports may find my discussion of the film to be highly "spoiler-ish."

As is suggested by the title, 127 Hours covers a period slightly longer than five days lasting from the end of April to the beginning of May 2003. Maverick adventurer Aron Ralston (James Franco), 27 years old at the time, ventures into Utah's Blue John Canyon to do a little climbing and exploring. The film's first fifteen minutes, which are bright and colorful with glorious landscape shots accompanied by A. R. Rahman's throbbing score, serve the dual purpose of introducing us to the cocky main character and showing off the setting. Aron encounters a pair of lost female hikers (played by Amber Tamblin and Kate Mara, in what amount to cameos) and helps them find their way to their destination before he continues on his own. It's not long, however, before a mishap results in him tumbling down a shaft and becoming trapped at the bottom when a boulder crushes his arm against a tunnel wall and becomes lodged there. He tries everything within his power to free himself but the tools at his disposal are limited. As his supply of water dwindles, Aron realizes he may die here.

As with Buried, 127 Hours remains with the protagonist for the entire running time, never flashing to scenes of concerned friends or relatives wondering where their loved one is. There are a few brief flashbacks early during Aron's ordeal and, as dehydration and fatigue begin to take their toll on his mental state, he experiences dreams and hallucinations. The film, attempting to get into the character's mindset, represents these as parts of a half-crazed reality. Aron, who has a camcorder with him, records a video diary of some of his thoughts and experiences, with the hope that whoever finds his body will return it to his parents. (In real life, the videotape exists. Although it has never been shown publicly, Ralston allowed Boyle and Franco to view it as part of their preparation for making the movie. That, along with interviews and his autobiographical book about the experience, provides the narrative's basis.)

James Franco, who is on screen for nearly every frame of the film (often in close-up), gives the performance of a lifetime, overturning his reputation as a dramatic lightweight. He carries the movie. For more than an hour, we're down in a hole with Aron, and the tautness and intensity of Franco's performance keeps us engaged. It's his interpretation of the character that gets us to the point where we understand why Aron chose the path of self-amputation as the sole route of survival.

Needless to say, that scene is difficult to watch, and Boyle doesn't truncate it, turn the camera away, or do anything to lessen its impact. We see Aron break both bones of his forearm then use the dull penknife of a cheap multi-utility tool to saw away at the soft tissue. It's a bloody and unpleasant scene. There have been walkouts at some screenings and many have closed their eyes or turned away. Although less gruesome than the goriest images in some horror movies, the "reality" of this scene makes it more difficult to watch (in much the same way that it's almost impossible to view a fingernail be ripped off in a motion picture, even though it's a relatively simple special effect).

Although 127 Hours bears little resemblance to Slumdog Millionaire, it is made by largely the same crew. Boyle wrote the screenplay with Simon Beaufoy. Anthony Dod Mantle did some of the camerawork. And A.R. Rahman, the famous Indian composer, wrote the score. It's a testimony to the talents of these men that, if not revealed, one would not guess the connection between the films.

Boyle succeeds in documenting Aron's ordeal and in chronicling the difficulties he faced while in the hole: wild extremes in temperature, physical and mental fatigue, numerous failed attempts to free himself, and the anguish of waiting for death. His eventual act was part courage and part desperation, and many viewers will wonder (while hoping never to have to learn the answer) if they could do something equally extreme in a similar situation. The movie tosses in a little philosophy (about predestination) that doesn't resonate and some black comedy that does. One thing almost entirely absent (at least for those who know the basics of the story) is suspense. Not only do we know that Aron is going to survive but we're aware of how he's going to do it. So watching 127 Hours becomes not an exercise in finding out how things end but in studying the details of what went on during those five long days. Labeling the movie as a "thriller" or an "action" film could be deemed misleading because of this. Regardless, Boyle has made a singularly intense motion picture that tells in narrative form the same tale that has been related in TV documentaries. This is a fascinating story of determination and survival that deserves to be told. It is ultimately uplifting but it's tough going to get to that point.

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Review: 'Due Date' genuinely funny, but oddly unlikable By Drew McWeeny - Familiar material played darker than you'd think makes for uneven comedy

Monday, Nov 1, 2010 10:20 AM

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Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. co-star as exasperated travel companions in the new comedy 'Due Date,' in theaters everywhere this Friday. Credit: Warner Bros/Legendary

It's more "Starsky and Hutch" than "The Hangover."

That may seem like I'm bagging "Due Date" right off the bat, but it's more a case of setting expectations at the right level. There are a number of big laughs in the film, and both Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis show up ready to play. It's a film that has problems with connective tissue, though, and what you're left with is thin, a sort of rough draft of what might have been a much better movie.

One surprise up front that probably shouldn't be: don't expect the warm fuzzies to be the main goal of the movie. This is in many ways the exact model of what studios want from a comedy these days, but because of the darker notes that Todd Phillips can't help but play, the film is basically "Planes, Trains, and Sociopaths." It's strange, because Robert Downey Jr. has the ability to make you like almost any character. It's been his gift since the beginning of his career, and the reason he was the exact right person to cast for "Less Than Zero." He played a moral vacuum in that film, a piece of human garbage, and yet you can't stop watching him. Zach Galifianakis has a very different comic gift, the ability to play straight-faced eccentric with real authenticity. It's easy to be weird. It's hard to make weird feel real and also be funny. The entire point of doing this sort of a road movie is to pick two personalities that are going to clash in an interesting way, and that hopefully are compelling.

You may not care about any of my complaints. If you look at the trailer and you immediately start laughing at the idea of weird Zach making Robert Downey Jr. super-angry over and over, then this is probably the holiday film for you. The things that bother me are the things that would make this a movie that really sticks, like some of the best precursors in the genre. When you think of "Midnight Run" or "Planes Trains & Automobiles" or "Vacation", you think of how much you like the characters, and how much fun it is to watch frustrating things happen to them. When I think of "Due Date," the frustration is real, not the comic tension that is intended. There are some basic story issues that just don't work for me. I don't understand why the circumstances here end up pushing these two people together, and why Downey's character doesn't make better choices. Because of that, I'm not sure I buy the basic conceit of the film. And the moment you start thinking like that, the entire enterprise is in danger of deflation.

It's not fair to blame the faults of the final film on the screenplay credited to Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel & Todd Phillips, because the way the film's edited, it feels like there are things that were shot that are just gone because they cut the film to emphasize laughs, not narrative. At the beginning of the film, Peter Highman (Downey) is on a business trip doing something that's never really spelled out, so there's no urgency to explain why he had to travel the week his wife is supposed to give birth. In a matter of moments, he runs into Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis) at the airport, gets into a thing with him on the airplane, and they're both suddenly put on the government's No Fly list. In about six minutes or so. And then they have to have a reason to travel together, and it's handled in such a "let's get this out of the way" manner that you'll either go with it or start checking out right there. I had a problem with how offhand and barely present Michelle Monaghan is as Peter's wife. If we don't know what he's trying to get home for, and if we don't get at least a little sense that it's important to him, then again… how are we supposed to invest in him getting there or not?

There are some funny supporting players, as there need to be, punctuating the travel and giving Peter and Ethan more complications to overcome. Juliette Lewis and director Todd Phillips play a pot-dealing couple in Alabama, Danny McBride shows up as a guy working at a Western Union office, Jamie Foxx is an old friend of Peter's… and that's about it. Considering how tough things are for these two, it's mainly the two of them who keep complicating things for themselves. And they are legitimately rough on each other, with Peter coming across as a borderline lunatic for much of the film's running time. There are some dark laughs there, but because the film doesn't commit to being as dark as, say, the work of Jody Hill, it's like the film doesn't mean it, and it always pulls back.

Technically, the film's good-looking, and I like that Phillips shoots comedy in a full 2.35:1 ratio. Lawrence Sher is one of those guys who has perfected that slick, pretty mainstream look that says "big-budget studio movie," and there's a particular look that studios think of as "comedy," which Sher knows exactly how to do. "I Love You, Man," "The Promotion," "Dan In Real Life," "Legally Blonde," and "Garden State"… think about how each of those has a certain kind of big bright primary color palette and a wee bit of the soft focus so everyone looks their best. Next year's "Paul" is his, as well, and looks very much like exactly the sort of thing he does best. He and Phillips do strong work together, and with Sher working on "The Hangover 2" now, I'm guessing they'll keep working together.

Because Downey's character is so extreme and because he pushes things so far in the film, it would make sense if Ethan was misunderstood and genuinely likable and winning, a la "Planes, Trains & Automobiles." But he makes some awful choices, and he's so aggressively dumb about certain things, that he's hard to root for as well. It left me feeling stranded, and I think the biggest thing the film gets wrong is the way it imagines Ethan. Galifianakis is able to play a wide range of comic characters, and if you watch him in "The Hangover" versus "Bored To Death," that's not remotely the same guy, especially in this second season. Zach is capable of doing really subtle funny work without playing a freak, but it seems like that's what "Due Date" wants. Sure enough, he plays it that way even in moments where it didn't seem like Ethan would go that far or be that oblivious.

It's a shame. "Due Date" is one of those films that seemed like a home run on paper as soon as it was announced, but it feels like that's about the hardest work that was done on the film, that initial announcement. Your mileage may vary, but for me, "Due Date" feels like a long trip in the wrong seat, uncomfortable while it's going on, and afterwards, all I remember is the disappointment of the destination, no matter what my reaction along the way.

"Due Date" is in theaters everywhere this Friday, November 5, 2010.

Review: 'Megamind' casts Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill in smart superhero comedy By Drew McWeeny - Dreamworks Animation finishes off a best-ever creative year with another winner

Tuesday, Nov 2, 2010 5:30 PM

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Will Ferrell and Tina Fey give voice to Megamind and Roxanne Ritchi in the new Dreamworks Animated superhero comedy 'Megamind,' in theaters this Friday. Credit: Dreamworks Animation

There are very few riffs on the big superhero icons that have yet to be played. Within the officially licensed playgrounds of characters like Superman and Batman and Spider-Man and the Hulk and Wonder Woman and the like, they've played every variation on the theme imaginable, and that doesn't count all the unofficial ways people have digested and re-digested this material and these archetypes. Post-modernism has given rise to a rich tradition of taking these characters and intentionally inverting the basic ingredients to see what will happen.

Which is a long way of saying "Megamind" isn't particularly cutting-edge in terms of the way it plays with the DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor, but it is smart about it. Director Tom McGrath and screenwriters Alan J. Schoolcraft & Brent Simons start with some very familiar origins, and from those very first moments, they're playing with expectation. Megamind is launched as a baby from a dying planet, his spaceship programmed to take him to Earth. On the way through space, though, he encounters another spaceship with another baby, and that's the spaceship that lands in the perfect place, with the perfect parents, with the perfect baby inside eventually growing into the beloved hero Metro Man. Megamind's spaceship lands inside the walls of a prison, where he is raised to be a criminal. He embraces his identity early on, hating Metro Man for all of his advantages and for the way he's beloved. Their lifelong rivalry falls into a pattern that should be familiar to anyone who ever read a comic book. Megamind kidnaps Metro Man's girlfriend Roxanne Ritchi, Megamind threatens the city, and Metro Man saves the day. Over and over and over.

So what happens if Megamind wins? What happens if he does the unthinkable and actually kills Metro Man? What happens to Evil without Good to bounce off of?

That set of questions frames the rest of the running time, and although I would describe "Megamind" as a superhero comedy, this isn't a film that just goes for the laugh at the expense of everything else. Will Ferrell's performance as Megamind is oddly touching, and he reveals the vulnerable insecurity that fuels much of Megamind's "evil." His one consistent relationship is with a blue alien fish that lives in a bowl on top of a robot body, Minion, and David Cross does nice work in support of Megamind. Once Metro Man is gone, Megamind is forced to explore his feelings about the oft-kidnapped reporter Roxanne Ritchi, voiced with a healthy sense of skepticism by Tina Fey, and there's a better love story told between the two of them in the film than in 90% of what passes as "romantic comedy" in Hollywood. When Megamind realizes that he has to have an adversary, the way he solves that problem adds a very different wrinkle to the idea of who's a hero and who's a villain.

Dreamworks Animation has had an exceptionally strong year for a studio that has traditionally produced slick but disposable movies. The "Shrek" franchise, the studio's signature series so far, isn't going to have much of a shelf life thanks to the way it manages to be absolutely of the moment, from the soundtrack to the pop culture references to the guest casting in the sequels. I just don't see kids 20 years from now feeling a connection to the material or the style of a film like that. This year, though, Dreamworks has turned out movies that feel more self-contained, more like real movies than joke machines. "How To Train Your Dragon" and "Megamind" suggest that the studio has turned a corner, and that they're finally easing up on the non-stop connections to the larger pop culture in favor of fundamentally good storytelling. What an innovation.

Technically, the film's very striking, and the 3D print I saw made great use of the immersive quality of 3D, particularly during the big superheroics in the film. There's one other character I've barely mentioned, played by Jonah Hill, and that's because I'm determined not to be as revealing as the ad campaign, ruining the film's narrative reveals. Hill's character has the greatest evolution over the course of the film, and he does really strong work at each stage of the character's transformation. The fact that the film flirts with some real darkness in terms of character and content was a surprise, but it feels organic, and it's handled just right, never tipping too far.

Overall, "Megamind" is a rock-solid example of how to take familiar material and wring new life from it, and the film's sense of humor should appeal to both hardcore fans of the genre and to general audiences alike, a tricky balancing act that not many films get right. "Megamind" may not be as punk-rock rude as "Kick Ass" or as genre-defining as "Watchmen" or as transgressively filthy as "Super," but in its own way, "Megamind" manages to be both commentary and comic book, and I have no doubt audiences will eat it up.

"Megamind" opens Friday, November 5, in theaters everywhere.

Mad Men's Matthew Weiner making a stoner comedy with Jack Black and Matt Dillon by Sean O'Neal October 25, 2010

Mad Men director Matthew Weiner probably recognizes that he has certain expectations for his first feature film, none of which he seems particularly interested in meeting. The current master of the slow-burn, stylized dramedy and the pregnant pause seems to be harkening back to his sitcom days (where Weiner worked on shows like Becker and Andy Richter Controls The Universe) for his upcoming You Are Here, which concerns two thirtysomething slacker potheads. Said potheads are forced to grow up a little when one of them loses a father, then inherits his general store, country home, and millions of dollars worth of Amish farmland, which undoubtedly makes for all sorts of humorous culture clashing. Things become even more comically complicated when both of them start to fall in love with their father’s “younger bohemian” widow.

How else could this project be even less like Mad Men? Perhaps with the casting of Matt Dillon and Jack Black as the slackers, who are said to be replacements for previously attached stars Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis—which would certainly make for an interesting flowchart of Hollywood actor types. Save room on there for the transition from Jennifer Aniston to Renee Zellwegger, who’s said to be stepping in as Black’s stuck-up sister. And finally, an offer is reportedly out to Rachel McAdams to play the widow. If she balks, who do they slide down to? Elizabeth Banks? « Back to the A.V. Club home

Olympia

B by Keith Phipps October 26, 2010

Bryan Ferry Olympia Astralwerks Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

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In 1982, Roxy Music released Avalon. It would become the group’s studio swan song, but those paying only casual attention could be forgiven for thinking the Avalon moment lasted much longer. Often imitated, rarely equaled, the album established the sound of soft-rock seduction for the rest of the decade by dropping Bryan Ferry’s world-weary vocals against warm synths and the most romantic woodwind work of Andy Mackay’s career. Among the imitators: Ferry himself, whose solo albums, with a few digressions, have felt like attempts to recreate the Avalon sound. The latest, Olympia, is no exception. If anything, it feels like an even deeper retreat, as signaled by opening notes that sound like an Avalon outtake.

That’s not necessarily a complaint, though. As Avalon simulations go, this is one of the finest, and one given added credibility by guest appearances from other Roxy members, even the long-absent Brian Eno. The lush, louche “You Can Dance” opens the album with a pulsing bit of last-call desperation whose spirit spills over into the Eno-guesting “Alphaville.” Those hoping Eno’s appearance would revive the art-rock experimentation of Ferry’s early days will be disappointed. In fact, guests from Scissor Sisters to Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour to Flea to Jonny Greenwood to Nile Rodgers all get absorbed into the after-hours spirit that’s become Ferry’s comfort zone. Still, it’s one he still inhabits better than anyone else, as evidenced here by highlights like a cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song To The Siren” and the album-closing “Tender Is The Night,” which sends out a heartbroken message of love accompanied by a yearning piano and half-tuned radio noise. In moments like these, Olympia makes Avalon sound almost within reach.

Let's Change The World With Music

B+ by Noel Murray October 26, 2010

Prefab Sprout Let's Change The World With Music Tompkins Square Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

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The new Prefab Sprout album sounds stubbornly, gloriously out of step with the times, because it’s not “new” at all. After recording the classic Jordan: The Comeback in 1990, Prefab Sprout frontman Paddy McAloon demoed an ambitious concept album linking the history of the world, divine providence, and the healing power of music. The project went uncompleted—largely because the band’s label wasn’t interested—but with McAloon suffering some recent health woes, a concerned friend urged him to start emptying his vaults. And so: Let’s Change The World With Music, a record produced and performed in McAloon’s home studio almost 20 years ago (given a new mix by Calum Malcolm). Newcomers to Prefab Sprout may find it overwhelming; McAloon expresses fealty to music both as an abstract concept and as a specific transformative force in people’s lives, hailing gospel, Nile Rodgers, and “the unnerving, unswerving Irving Berlin.” The songs are more synth-heavy and beat-driven than usual, but still graced with McAloon’s angelic voice, puckish wit, and constantly evolving arrangements. Is the lush sound and painfully sincere sentiment a little over the top? Yes, of course—it’s Prefab Sprout. But when McAloon sings about how to lead a virtuous life on the thumping, joyous “Ride,” or sums up our existence on the lithe, jazzy “Earth, The Story So Far,” it’s easy to believe what he says of himself in “The Last Of The Great Romantics.” Out of touch? No, in command.

ABC gives full-season orders to pretty much everything it's got left by Sean O'Neal October 26, 2010

ABC has issued full-season orders to its freshmen series No Ordinary Family and Better With You, while also ordering more episodes of Detroit 1-8-7 and Brothers And Sisters. Noticeably absent from the network’s announcement was any mention of legal drama The Whole Truth, which has become the only remaining new ABC show—besides the already canceled My Generation—to not get a pickup. It was a bold experiment building a show around lawyers, so there’s no shame in failure.

"The Rocky Horror Glee Show" F

by Todd VanDerWerff October 26, 2010 Glee "The Rocky Horror Glee Show" season 2 , episode 5 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

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Sometimes, I miss the Will Schuester of the Glee pilot.

Do you remember that guy? That was a guy you built a TV show around. He was a man chasing his memories of the good times back in high school. He was a man who was trying to inspire kids to create great art because he never had. He was a man who had to give up a job that maybe wasn’t his dream job but was certainly a job he loved because his wife was pregnant. He wanted to be a dad, but he also wanted to be a kid again, and the divide between those two halves of himself was downright poignant. Especially in the original cut of the show’s pilot, the one that I don’t believe ever aired, he was an essentially tragic figure, holding on way too hard to something he should have let go of long ago. The show realized this was kind of creepy, but it also realized that he could be a sad little man and still create an environment where his kids felt free to be themselves.

By and large, that Will Schuester is completely gone from the show. You’ll catch glimpses of him here and there, particularly in last season’s finale, but the show seems uninterested in him as anything other than a mouthpiece for whatever any writer on the show is trying to say that week. The recent, rampant ads on Fox about how “Will Schuester is trying to make the world a better place!” increasingly strike me as outright lies, not just vague advertising platitudes. Will hasn’t been even a ghost of a good person for something like 25 episodes now, and the few times the show does anything interesting with him – like when he found out Terri’s pregnancy was fake – have been drowned out by everything else the show does with the character.

I suspect the big beef against “The Rocky Horror Glee Show,” a singularly flat and affectless episode of television and the worst hour this show has ever produced, is going to be that everything in it is deeply implausible. Somehow, Will is almost able to pull off a production of The Rocky Horror Show in a small-town Ohio school, while only cutting a few items for content, and he does it all in just a week. At the same time, Sue becomes obsessed with shutting him down because episode writer Ryan Murphy sees the character less as a person and more as a bludgeon and because, for whatever reason, she immediately becomes obsessed with the idea of winning a local Emmy. All of this didn’t bother me. So long as the characters on this show are consistent (which, admittedly, is sometimes a tall order for this show), inconsistency in plotting doesn’t bother me (as it wouldn’t on other TV comedies). Part of the fun of Glee is that it will do anything for an audience reaction.

My big beef against “The Rocky Horror Glee Show” is that it tries to have things all ways, for all people. It tries to be a tribute to the original Rocky Horror Show for the musical’s fans. It tries to be a standard, Ryan Murphy episode of Glee for those who have a casual relationship with the show but really like Glee. It tries to be a primer on the musical itself for those who’ve never seen the stage show, though it mostly just gives up on this after the first 20 minutes or so. The way it tries to have things all ways is the most egregious thing wrong with the episode: It grounds everything in the character of Will and in his pursuit of Emma, and it pretends we care about this as much or more than whatever it is the kids are up to. Furthermore, it takes Will’s pursuit of her and finds it deeply romantic, when it’s really just kinda creepy.

The basic idea is this: Emma’s favorite movie is The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Why? Dunno. The episode half-asses an explanation, but I wish they’d just left it out. Will, abruptly realizing yet again how little he knows about the woman he ostensibly loves, decides to put on the show for the population of Lima, somehow mustering the wherewithal and resources to mount a full musical without anybody much caring at all. There’s some argument over who should play Frank N. Furter, but the role ends up going to Mercedes. (Kurt refuses it; Mike Chang’s parents refuse it for him.) Sue gets wind of all of this and tries to shut the show down, finally succeeding at “protecting the children” or whatever (and actually making some good points about how art that has as its sole aim pushing the envelope often ends up pretty bad). Finn, appearing as Brad, doesn’t want to strip down to his underwear. Sam … er … CHORD OVERSTREET! is an asshole for no apparent reason. A bunch of stuff happens in a mostly formless middle, then Will makes a series lowpoint speech about how everybody is an outcast, including the original Rocky Horror fans AND the glee kids. It’s a muddled, terrible message, particularly in an episode that seems to have an uneasy relationship with ACTUAL outcasts, transsexuals. (About which more in stray observations.)

I bag on Ryan Murphy a lot in these reviews, but I do think the guy is capable of coming up with great moments on this show. I think “Wheels” is a good episode (though much of that could be credited to journeyman TV director Paris Barclay), and “Mattress” has the aforementioned confrontation between Will and Terri, a moment as raw as anything the show has ever done. Murphy’s also the best writer on the show’s small staff at coming up with completely bizarre one-liners or stock characters that then become amusingly awesome, like Sue or Brittany. But the simple fact of the matter is that Ryan Murphy is one of the most powerful men in television right now. He could be making any kind of show he wants, and what he’s choosing to make is a half-assed, attention deficit disorder-ridden show about whatever the hell pops into his brain at that moment. Consistency isn’t important to me. If Murphy wants to make a show that’s a grand series of giant, musical climaxes, I think he should go for it. But there’s nothing in his career that suggests he has anything like the tenacity or the vision (to crib a word from Matt Zoller Seitz) to just up and go for it.

I try to only hand out F’s to episodes I genuinely believe to be the worst of a show’s run. An F, I think, should go to that episode that represents a nadir the show will never visit again. And I certainly hope “The Rocky Horror Glee Show,” which has always seemed like an idea Murphy just kinda tossed off at Comic-Con (seriously, check the original quote) and then felt obliged to make, is the series’ lowpoint. As an episode of Glee, it fails because it doesn’t bother to ground any of the action in anything other than a funhouse version of these characters. (OK, Finn’s worries come close, and I’m tempted to bump this up to a D- for that storyline alone, but we must press on!) The Will and Emma storyline is a complete mess, misplacing what made either of the characters enjoyable in the first place. It fails as a Rocky Horror tribute because it misplaces a lot of the show’s charm and messages, in favor of flat recreations of some of the musical numbers. And it fails as a bridge between those two audiences because it mostly just gives up trying to satisfy either. I still think Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan are making a fantastic television show. I still think Ryan Murphy is capable of doing so. But the show Murphy makes is increasingly holding the other shows hostage, and it’s time for all involved to cut bait with these ridiculous theme episodes and get back to what made the show lovable in the first place.

Stray observations: My wife has never seen Rocky Horror, and she was utterly lost throughout this episode. The episode uses the stage show as an end unto itself, something we’re supposed to care about because the characters do, but it largely misrepresents the stage show at the same time, creating a weird disconnect that must have been jarring for those unfamiliar with the original property. I would have bumped this up to a D if “Time Warp” hadn’t sucked so much. I’ve seriously never seen a more lifeless version of that song, and I’VE SEEN THE DREW CAREY SHOW VERSION. About transsexuals: Obviously, one of the most subversive things about the original show is that it features as its – arguably romantic – lead a transsexual. But Glee would have trouble addressing this issue without it taking over the show and making it no longer “family fun” or whatever, so it mostly just decides to toss in some jokes about transsexuals and call it a day. It’s more offensive than if the show had simply ignored the whole thing to begin with. This episode even fails as a Halloween episode. Normally, the sight of people in crazy costumes would be enough to melt my heart just a bit, but not here. Not now. (I also have a soft spot for high school musicals, but this failed to work on that level as well.) I’m working on researching just how much each of the show’s three writers brought to the show at its initial stages, especially by reading my way through the original pilot script (sans Kurt and Sue) and the original MOVIE script. I’ll hopefully have some thoughts on this in the next review I do. Despite it all, I think Rachel and Finn as Janet and Brad is pretty good casting. So is Kurt as Riff Raff. Oh, and Santana as the lips was pretty cool. Honestly, this could have worked if it had just gone all out and done a straight-up Rocky Horror tribute. It probably wouldn't have been GOOD, but it wouldn't have been BORING. You can all thank Myles McNutt for the horrifying screencap. "I have no idea what's going on in this script, and it's not in a cool Inception way." "None of this is plausible!"

October 27, 2010 : Savage Love by Dan Savage October 27, 2010

Illustrations by Misako Rocks!

I love reading your column and never thought that I would have a reason to write to you, but to my pleasure and chagrin, I realized today that I could use your help.

I am a 23-year-old woman. I have been with my boyfriend for three years, and we have lived together for two. We have a very healthy sex life, and the longer we are together, the better it gets! There is just one problem: He wants me to get really raunchy with his come when I am blowing him. I guess it’s called an “oral creampie.” Anyway, he wants to shoot on my face with my mouth open, he wants me to let him come in my mouth and then let it drool back out on my chin or his cock, all kinds of things in that vein. I would LOVE to do that for him—but when it’s go time, I freeze and can’t bring myself to do it, and end up swallowing his come instead.

Honestly, I think the thought of come bothers me. I can swallow it, because once I do, it’s gone and I don’t have to worry about it—but with this, I have to play with it and run it all around in my mouth. I need to know how to embrace his come instead of fearing it, so our sex life can continue to grow instead of stagnate on this one thing. HELP! Frozen Creampie

According to Urban Dictionary—the final authority on all sex definitions these days—an “oral creampie” isn’t anywhere near as involved a process as your boyfriend makes it out to be.

“While receiving a blowjob,” says Urban Dictionary, “the alpha male peaks to orgasm—while the male is in the midst of ejaculation, or cumming, the female continues the act of oral sex without removing her lips and/or mouth from the alpha males penis—thus, causing the male to cum inside the females mouth, and possibly down her throat while she is still sucking the males penis.”

You gotta love how the alpha male—no blowjobs for you beta males—“peaks to orgasm” all by himself. He isn’t brought to orgasm thanks to the determined efforts of a giving partner. No. A blowjob is something alpha males do for themselves. There he is, our alpha male, peaking to orgasm all on his own, when suddenly a woman trips and falls face-first into his lap.

Anyway, FC, it looks like you’re doing the oral creampie already: You’re blowing him; you’re swallowing. Your boyfriend is asking you for what we’re going to call “more.” And this isn’t something he’s asking you to do “when [you’re] blowing him,” but after you’re done blowing him. Because once he comes, FC, the blowjob is technically over. Emission accomplished. So he’s asking for a blowjob-and-then-some, an above-and-beyond-the-call post-blowjob indulgence.

A couple of thoughts…

Presumably, your boyfriend eats your pussy. And when he does, FC, he gets your vaginal secretions all over his face—it’s smeared all over his chin and cheeks and nose and lips. It’s applied gradually, in layers, like a varnish. There’s a big difference between your secretions and his—he comes all at once, in a few massive splats—but if he’s eating your pussy, FC, he’s already doing a slo-mo version of what he’s asking you to do for him.

But even so, FC, your boyfriend has to recognize the above-and-beyond nature of the request he’s making. He’s getting head—good, enthusiastic head, too, as evidenced by all the alpha orgasms he’s peaking. And there you are, only too happy to swallow—even if your true motive is to dispose of his semen as quickly as possible. It seems to me that 1) your boyfriend shouldn’t push this oral creampie thing too hard, and 2) you shouldn’t feel too bad if you can’t bring yourself to do this for him anytime soon.

Your inability to do this one thing—this one above-and-beyond thing—shouldn’t be allowed to “derail” an otherwise excellent sex life. Your sex life can “continue to grow” even if this particular act won’t be scratched off the boyfriend’s bucket-o-come list anytime soon. Do the stuff you enjoy, try new things, continue to grow together. And maybe play with his come a little bit along the way—masturbate him sometimes, or let him masturbate himself, and run your fingers through his come—and perhaps your fears and inhibitions will decrease and one day you’ll be able to enjoy his juices (a word I hate in this context) just as much as he enjoys yours.

And he does enjoy yours, right? Because if he isn’t eating your pussy, FC, then you shouldn’t even be blowing him, much less feeling guilty about not gargling with his come after you’re done.

I grew up in a shitty conservative town with a batshit crazy mother and a philandering father who, despite leaving my mom when I was 2, went on to be a pretty good dad and definitely the only moderately stable parent in my life. I wanted his love and approval. I went to law school and married a guy who was, essentially, my dad. They became best friends. Very shortly into the marriage, I fell in love with a woman, realized I’m a total homo, and got divorced. I’m still with the same woman, and I’m no longer suicidal over my internalized homophobia. Yay.

My dad didn’t exactly support my decision, but he has made an effort to get to know my girlfriend, and isn’t acting quite as crushed as I know he was when I came out and divorced my husband.

However, he continues to have a relationship with my ex-husband. This enrages me. I felt like he sided with the ex at every turn during our separation and divorce, and now I feel like he’s incapable of understanding my feelings. I’m still friendly with my ex, although I have tremendous guilt issues over not having figured myself out before dragging him into a marriage. My dad’s point is that his friendship with my ex has nothing to do with me.

Am I just being a petty bitch, or is he being an insensitive asshole? Angry Lesbian Daughter

Petty bitch or insensitive asshole, petty bitch or insensitive asshole, petty bitch or insensitive asshole—does it have to be one or the other, ALD?

Your dad bonded with your ex while you were married, and didn’t regard the divorce as your ex’s fault. Perhaps your dad took your ex’s side because he couldn’t see that the divorce wasn’t entirely your fault, either. You were a victim, too, ALD—victimized by the homophobia you had internalized. The homophobic culture that rendered you incapable of recognizing that you were a lesbian before you dragged your ex into a doomed marriage is ultimately to blame—that doesn’t mean you bear no responsibility—and if your dad couldn’t see that at the time and was insensitive, then yeah, he owes you an apology.

But you brought your ex into your dad’s life, your dad bonded with him as a son-in-law, and it’s unfair of you to demand that your dad cut all ties to your ex. That’s controlling, irrational behavior—a.k.a. petty bitchery—and you should apologize to your dad for it.

You have a right to your feelings, of course, and if your dad’s relationship with your ex makes you uncomfortable, it makes you uncomfortable. In this era of divorce, remarriage, and blended families, rest assured that you’re not the only person in the world with an ex who’s still, for better or worse, part of the family.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage. Got problems? mail@savagelove.net « Back to the A.V. Club home

Interview Connie Britton

by Genevieve Koski October 27, 2010 Article Tools

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For its first two seasons, Friday Night Lights was the little show that could, repeatedly dodging cancellation in spite of floundering ratings, much to the delight of the series’ small but fervent fan base. Then, miraculously, a shared-rights deal between NBC and DirecTV buoyed Friday Night Lights through three more seasons. In that time, FNL has used the fictional town of Dillon, Texas and its intense relationship with high-school football as a jumping-off point for human drama both outsized and intimate, much of it centering on the family of Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife, Tami (Connie Britton). Plotlines and actors have come and gone as the show’s high-school characters have aged out of the series, but Chandler and Britton’s onscreen relationship has endured, providing FNL with its foundation and heart. Before the fifth and final season’s October 27 DirecTV première, Britton spoke with The A.V. Club about playing Tami and saying goodbye to Friday Night Lights.

The A.V. Club: Has Friday Night Lights wrapped filming on the final season?

Connie Britton: We did. We wrapped a couple months ago, actually.

AVC: What was it like saying goodbye to the show?

CB: Oh my gosh. I’m still not over it. In fact, I saw Jason Katims, our show runner, last night, and he was saying how he’s been editing the final two episodes, and he says they’re just so great. I’m sure they are going to be major tearjerkers. He said he’s just been dragging it out because he doesn’t want to say goodbye to the show. He’s in the editing bays, and we used to have several different editing bays, and then every day it’s like, one editing bay disappears and one editor disappears, and then the next day, they take a couch out. He said literally, they’re basically just sitting on the floor, watching this stuff on these monitors, and he’s like, “Okay, I think I’ve just got to let it go and let it be over.” It’s just such a big deal.

But in Austin [where Friday Night Lights is filmed], because we had what ended up being two weeks of a lot of really hard work—the cast and the crew traveled because we shot in different locations, and did really hard work and debaucherous goodbyes. But the last scene we shot actually ended up being in this big open Texas field at sunset, so that was kind of a perfect way to go. And everyone, all the people from L.A., all the writers, Peter Berg, who created the show, all the producers all came in, we all gathered around in this beautiful open field while the sun was setting, and watched the last scene be shot. There was not a dry eye in the house. It was pretty great.

AVC: Season four was the first one where Friday Night Lights wasn’t on the bubble for renewal. Then this season was a predefined endpoint of the series. Did that affect the atmosphere on the show, not having the specter of ratings and renewal hanging over your heads?

CB: Yeah, you know, I think it was really nice for everybody to feel like we—it’s always good in life to have some sense of what’s going on, even when you don’t. It was actually really nice. This is a very rare luxury on a show, to have an endpoint, because—I guess that happened for The Sopranos too—we knew going into the season that we were really going to be building an arc toward the end, and there was something sad about that. We kind of went into the season knowing the end was looming ahead, but at the same time, it was nice to have a sense of that, and in the last three episodes, maybe even the last four, you can sort of feel the show ramping up to its ending. It was a very palpable, tangible thing, and a lot of the old original cast members came back, and it was great to have the opportunity to honor the show in that way, and really be able to honor the characters and the town and all that in a way that felt thorough and real. It was actually kind of a gift to have it that way, even though of course we were all like, “But maybe…” Even at the end, when we knew. Our show was so The Little Engine That Could that we were always just thinking that we were defying all the odds, so even at the end of our fifth season, we were all still thinking, maybe…

AVC: Last season, there was a lot of change on Friday Night Lights, with the move to East Dillon and all the new characters. It almost felt like a reboot. Did you have that feeling at all when you were filming it, that you were going down a very different road?

CB: Yeah, totally. That was actually a very stark change for everybody. I think people were really pleased with how it came out, but having all those new characters come in… Certainly for my character, for Tami, it was a very big change, because of the way they structure the show. All the new characters were basically at the new East Dillon High School, and Tami was at West Dillon. So for Tami, it was actually a little bit alienating. But all in all, I think it’s a real testament to just what Friday Night Lights is, and to the nature of the show, that we were able to authentically graduate all these characters who were supposed to graduate from high school and move on in their lives, and authentically bring in new characters, who now we can follow their stories. To me, that is such a great example of the fact that Friday Night Lights really is just about this town and this community and these people, and how their lives interrelate via this football team. And it’s kind of great, because I certainly think it was a challenging thing for the writers to do, to be able to pull that off.

AVC: You, Kyle Chandler, and Aimee Teegarden are pretty much the only main characters left from season one. Do you have an upperclassman mentality, where you feel a responsibility or ownership over the show and its history?

CB: Yeah, I think we really do. Particularly Kyle and I really have a sense of leadership in terms of the show and the cast. And I really attribute that to Pete Berg, because from the very beginning, when we started the first season, after the pilot had been picked up, he really empowered all of us. He empowered everyone in the cast to have a sense of ownership in the show and a feeling of like, “This show is yours.” His quote was always, “Nobody pushes us around,” because we knew we’d be having a lot of visiting directors and people coming in and out and whatever, and he charged us to really own it, to own the show, and to maintain the quality of it. And I think Kyle and I, having been sort of the old people… [Laughs.]

AVC: The parental units.

CB: Yeah, we’re the parental units, and we sort of have a strong love for the show, of course, but also a very strong sense of how that show works, and a strong appreciation for how that show works, and I think our crew absolutely does too. I think our crew really values that we’re there, and our leadership and all that. So it’s really just worked so well. Because it’s a very unusual circumstance. Our show runner is in L.A., and we’re in Austin. And we have a producing director, this guy named Michael Waxman, and he was really great to kind of maintain the look and the style of the show, but it was important for Kyle and I to keep the status quo. New actors would come in, and we would say to them, “Hey, listen, don’t put all this pressure on yourself, don’t feel like you have to do this a certain way, just go in there and have fun.” You know, all those good things. We’re cheerleaders.

AVC: Fans of the show always talk about how realistic and inspiring the Taylors’ marriage is. How much of that relationship is in the script, on the page, and how much did you and Kyle work out between the two of you?

CB: It’s a great combination of both. Kyle and I would typically get our script and we’d get together at our favorite coffee place and talk it over and go through every scene, and say “Okay, here’s what we want to be happening in this scene.” And so we’d do that, and sort of get a sense for how we wanted it to be. Then once we’d get on the set, we would know what the idea of the scene was, and then we’d get into the situation on the set—we don’t really usually rehearse, we’d kind of just drop into it—and then we’d let the scene happen and see what ended up happening. Sometimes we would do the scene verbatim, and sometimes we would say, “Here’s what’s really happening, here’s what needs to be communicated in this scene,” and we would just let it roll and see what happened. And I think the writers really entrusted us to do that, and really counted on us to do that. They knew that they would write a scene and then we would take it and run with it, and make it as real as we could, and find spontaneous moments that may not have been written in so clearly.

AVC: Those spontaneous moments between you two, the little looks and such, I think that’s what really makes it special for people.

CB: Yeah, and I think that’s something too about the way we shoot. The fact that we have three cameras rolling at all times, the fact that we don’t rehearse, we don’t have marks, so there’s not a lot of hyper-preparation, and “You’ve got to be standing there when he says that line,” and you keep shooting the same moment over and over again because you’ve got to shoot it from all angles. We don’t work that way, since we’ve got three cameras going at all times, so we can just walk into a scene and something spontaneous can happen, and I think that’s what audiences really appreciate, because it makes the audience feel like they’re being invited into something very intimate and real. And that’s exciting. People really appreciate that. I’m always really amazed whenever I run into fans of the show and how passionate they are about it. And I really believe it’s because we allow them into these lives we’re creating in a very real and sort of intimate way.

AVC: You’ve mentioned the non-rehearsed, improvisational nature of the way you shoot. Did it take any adjustment for you as an actor to get into that groove?

CB: Oh no, I love working like that. Also, Pete Berg was the one who created this particular style that we used in Friday Night Lights, and he actually did it in the movie—I was in the movie Friday Night Lights as well. But it’s always my favorite way to work, when you’re working with somebody who’s the writer as well as the director, because you feel like they’re creating it on the spot, and as an actor, that’s exciting for me. I like to have things thrown at me, and to have things feel sort of spontaneous and unpremeditated. It’s an exciting way to work. I’ve always actually really been drawn to that style. In fact, even with Ed Burns, who I have done three movies with—and my first movie, The Brothers McMullen—it’s the same. Not the same, but he works in a similar way, in that as he’s sitting behind the camera, he’s working with you and you feel like you’re creating the story and letting the story unfold. It’s really an exiting way to work.

AVC: It’s not really seen a whole lot in drama, that level of improvisation.

CB: It’s interesting, actually, because so many people in the comedy world love our show. And people who have that improv-comedy background, the Tina Feys and the Amy Poehlers, and all those people who I’ve been fortunate to run into, they’re always like, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we love your show so much!” And it’s always surprising to me, because I like to think that Tami’s funny, but I don’t think our show’s a comedy. [Laughs.] I think they really have an appreciation for the improvisational aspect of it, as well as the reality aspect of it, because I think great comedy comes out of real authenticity.

AVC: What’s so funny about Tami to you?

CB: [Laughs.] Well, she’s a Southern woman. For me, it was really important right from the get-go. I was really excited to play this Southern woman, and one thing I’ve really noticed about women in the South is a sense of humor. They get through the day a little bit by keeping it light. It’s a very powerful tool for the Southern woman, I think, because they’re living in a relatively conventional culture in a relatively conventional world, so they have to be creative about how they can get what they want, or act out, or empower themselves.

AVC: In season five, Tami’s moved to East Dillon as a counselor, breaking the show’s last tie to Dillon High. Are Dillon and the Panthers going to be a factor as we move forward?

CB: It’s pretty much East Dillon. But West Dillon is always lurking in the background. It’s very interesting to me, because West Dillon quickly became very demonized. Post season four, West Dillon will be representing, you know, the establishment assholes, and it’s sort of like, “Well guys, it’s a small town.” So there is sort of this rivalry that seems to be very alive and well and actually sort of growing in season five, but I think we focus much more on East Dillon.

AVC: Are you at all disappointed that Tami is no longer principal? Do you think that was a good fit for the character?

CB: That was a tricky one, because it was a tricky move story-wise. I was always a little bit like—the whole line of reasoning behind her losing her job as principal but being able to be a counselor at East Dillon High School, where the whole abortion thing happened, was always a little bit dicey to me. But at the end of the day, there’s always something interesting about a character having to drop down a couple pegs, but at the same time, wanting to do that. In a way, it was an active choice for her to make that move, because she wants to help kids. So we got to play with that a little bit in the beginning of the season, where she’s sort of in the school, but is definitely a big fish in a little pond that doesn’t really want her that much. [Laughs.] So there was some fun stuff to play with that, for sure.

AVC: Based on the first two episodes, it seems like Tami’s very vulnerable this season, with Julie leaving for college and her feeling out of place at her new job.

CB: I think so, yeah. I think that was sort of the idea. She definitely has been put through the wringer a bit, and she has these ideals, and she wants to try and live up to them, but she’s put in a tricky position. So I do think she’s vulnerable, and I think the ground feels a little bit unstable beneath her.

AVC: A running theme on the show is that Coach and Tami are really well-loved by the kids, but they’re often at odds with the adults in Dillon, going back to the JumboTron, even.

CB: Yeah. [Laughs.]

AVC: They both have an “I know best” mentality that doesn’t always go over well with parents and the school board. Do you think that’s a character flaw they share, that they have a minor hubris?

CB: You know, it’s funny, I never thought of them having hubris. My sense was always that they were trying to relate to everybody and get along with everybody. But that’s actually an interesting point. I don’t think they’re honestly holier-than-thou at all. I think it’s sort of the difficulties of television that we ended up only seeing them probably in relationships with grown-ups who are somehow beneath them in some way. That’s interesting. That was never a thought I had, or a conscious choice by either Kyle or me.

AVC: It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just another facet to the characters. They seem to always know best, but they don’t always go about it in the most delicate manner.

CB: That’s always an interesting conflict. It’s great to play a character that even in their sort of perfection, they’re imperfect. [Laughs.]

AVC: You and Kyle Chandler finally got nominated for Emmys this year.

CB: Yeah, I know, isn’t that crazy?

AVC: For fans, that was a real “finally!” moment. What was it like for you guys?

CB: It was thrilling, and it came at just the right time. The nominations came in about maybe three weeks or a month before we were going to wrap the show, and we were right at that place of feeling like things were winding down, and it was starting to feel a bit melancholy, and people having to think about saying goodbye. When those nominations came in, it sort of shot adrenaline through everybody, because Kyle and I and Rolin Jones, who was nominated for writing, we really looked at it like it was an acknowledgment of the show. When I found out I was nominated, my first question was, “What about the show?” Actually, my cousin who called to tell me I was nominated said that Kyle was nominated, so I already knew, but then I was like, “Well, what about the show?” But we really looked at it like it was an acknowledgment of everybody. It was really just a wonderful gift for all of us to have as we were winding down, and it was nice that we all got to celebrate it together, and it didn’t just sort of come in a void after the show was long over or anything like that.

AVC: How did you celebrate? I’ve read how the Friday Night Lights cast likes to go all-out with its parties.

CB: Yeah. [Laughs.] It was a lot of that. In Texas, you do a lot of tequila drinking, a lot of going out into fields and enjoying it. And then there are quieter celebrations. Kyle keeps saying we still need to sit down with a bottle of whiskey and talk over the past five years, because it’s so much to process, and we certainly haven’t processed it yet. « Back to the A.V. Club home

Newswire Conan O'Brien will not be denied his Masturbating Bear by Sean O'Neal October 27, 2010

Among the copious stories teasing out what will and won’t be a part of Conan O’Brien’s new TBS talk show (and don’t worry—with its Nov. 8 premiere approaching, we’re definitely on the downward slope), one question has persisted: What of the Masturbating Bear? While it would seem that Conan’s go-to self-pawing punchline would be just one of many recurring characters locked away by NBC, anyone who saw the Pleasuring Panda’s debut on the Legally Prohibited tour knows that Conan refuses to take the network’s claims to a big bear jerking himself off seriously.

In a new Rolling Stone interview (excerpted here), Conan swears, “I won't be denied my Masturbating Bear!” while saying that “If there's something we did for a long time that we've established as ours, we'll figure out a way to do it.” In fact, he’s practically daring NBC to do something about it: “What I really wanna do is be sued over the bear and then appear in court with the Masturbating Bear. 'Your Honor, this bear can't help himself!’” This suggests that you could see all manner of just-slightly-tweaked variations on familiar Conan characters—Whoremasterbot 5000 and The Rude, Tangential Phrase Supplier, perhaps.

Star Trek: The Next Generation "Sarek"/"Ménage á Troi" A-

by Zack Handlen October 28, 2010 Star Trek: The Next Generation "Sarek"/"Ménage á Troi" season 3 , episode 23-24 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

A- av club rating A- reader rating based on 6 ratings

"Sarek"

Or The One Where A Vulcan Cries

After Deforrest Kelley's cameo way back in "Encounter at Farpoint," there hasn't been any cast cross-over between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. This makes sense from a story perspective; the majority of the crew of the original Enterprise were human, and given that TNG takes place roughly a hundred years after they where in their prime, well, they're probably all dead now. Except for Kirk, who's stuck in the Nexus, and Scotty, who's stuck in some transporter buffer somewhere. Yeah, you heard me: your precious Uhura? Wormfood. Sulu? Daisy pushing. Chekov? Nothing can kill the Chekov.

This is probably for the best. Given the lumpiness TNG experienced at the start of its run, trying to become its own show while still clinging to the legacy it was intended to carry on, guest spots would've been distracting at best, painfully sentimental at worst. Still, it's not like we haven't heard mention of Kirk and his adventures before, so now that the series has hit its stride in the third season, it's a fine time to make some direct connections to the past. "Sarek" features the return of Mark Lenard to his most famous Trek role, as Sarek, Spock's Vulcan father, a brilliant ambassador who's recently passed the two centuries mark. That's long in the tooth, even for a Vulcan, and now, on the eve of what everyone keeps insisting is the most important negotiation of his entire career--Sarek isn't feeling so well. That he's feeling at all, is, you'll understand, a bit of a problem.

While Sarek was never a recurring character on TOS, appearing only in one episode (as well as one episode of the animated series--most people these days probably remember him from his few scenes in The Search For Spock), he left a significant impression on the franchise; Spock is one of the mythology's central figures, and that grants Sarek a great deal of importance simply for existing. And yet, nobody ever really remembers Spock's mother, Amanda Grayson. Maybe it's because we're all sexist bastards, but it probably more that Sarek was so clearly and immediately defined in his first appearance ("Journey to Babel," second season) that he became impossible to forget. He's the epitome of the stern, demanding paternal male, representing all of Spock's insecurities and concern over his identity. Sarek is the Vulcan ideal that Spock spent his life struggling to achieve, and because of that, Sarek was a constant presence, whether or not he was physically present. Plus, Mark Lenard is very, very good in the role.

So it's nice to see him back here, especially considering that he gets to play off Patrick Stewart for a decent chunk of his screentime. Both men bring such immense dignity and presence to their roles that it there's something electric to the episode even before the story kicks in. Sarek is a name familiar to Trek fans, and Picard and Riker's discussion at the start of the show about how honored they are to host the Vulcan on the Enterprise, and what a big deal the talks with the Legarans are, sets the stakes firmly in place so that when things do start to go south, we understand why this is all so important. Although man is there a lot of direct, expository dialog, both in this scene and throughout the episode. I'm not sure if that's unusual for the show, or if I'm just randomly noticing it in this episode, but two-thirds of Picard's lines just exist to clarify obvious facts. (My favorite was, to paraphrase, "Sarek is a Vulcan, losing control of his emotions must be very bad for him." Er, you think?) Stewart sells it, but it's the sort of thing that once you realize what's happening, you can't ignore it.

Sarek comes aboard the ship with his own entourage, including his current wife, Perrin (I guess Sarek has a taste for the human ladies?), a Vulcan named Sakkath, and a human named Ki Mendrossen. Mendrossen attempts to protect Sarek from the rest of the ship, but it doesn't do much good. The ambassador is clearly on edge (there are few explanations for a snippy Vulcan, and none of them fill one with confidence), and his one attempt to attend a public performance, held in his honor, ends with him fleeing the room in tears. A human crying at a symphony? Not a big deal. But when a Vulcan does it... Even worse, the rest of the crew seems to be affected by the Vulcan's bad mood. Wesley and Geordi nearly come to blows, a fight breaks out in Ten Forward, and Beverly Crusher slaps her son for--no reason at all. (How awesome is it that so much of the rage is focused on Wesley?)

One of the strengths of this episode is how quickly the bad feelings are accepted as a problem, and how Beverly and Deana combine forces to efficiently and immediately figure out what's causing it. This isn't a mystery storyline; we know right off that Sarek is the cause of these disturbances, even if we don't know how, and instead of having Picard and the others dance around the issue for half an hour, they jump to the same conclusions. Why wouldn't they? They have the same information that we do: Sarek is behaving strangely, and the bad vibes didn't hit the Enterprise until after Sarek arrived. Ergo, he's got something to do with it. Beverly theorizes that Sarek is suffering from Bendii Syndrome, a disease which hits Vulcans late in life, destroying their emotional control and subjecting them to fits of passion, most often in the form of intense anger. (I love how much sense this makes. Remember the Pon Far? The price the race pays for their stoicism is that every so often, the feelings break out, and when they do, they destroy all logic and structure in their wake.) Deanna adds that the reason members of the crew are feeling the same rushes that Sarek experiences is due to the Vulcan's innate telepathic ability. We later learn that the reason the hits are so random is that Sarek's companion, Sakkath, has been using his own telepathic abilities to suppress Sarek's emissions. But now they they're on a ship, and the ambassador is suffering from too much stress for Sakkath to handle him.

There's a beautiful simplicity to this concept, an elegance that makes the tragedy at the heart of the episode all the more powerful. Bendii Syndrome could be viewed as a stand-in for Alzheimer's Syndrome, or it could be representative of any of the hundreds of indignities which await us all in old age (unless science solves everything before we grow up. So get on that, Science). It's resonant because the science fiction aspect isn't used to obfuscate the horror of what's happening. The Syndrome is robbing Sarek of that part of himself which he considers the most valuable, his discipline, and it's doing so in a way that leaves him naked not only to those closest to him, but to anyone who stays in the room with him for more than a few minutes. There's a lot of talk about how crucial it is that talks with the Legarans go smoothly, but really, that's not where the drama of this episode comes from. We never see the Legarans, we're never that invested in the outcome, apart from hoping Sarek will succeed. This is really about a great individual, dying by inches.

Of course they find a solution in time: a mind-meld between Picard and Sarek, which gives Sarek Picard's stability and control, and forces Picard to endure the rush of a lifetime's worth of pent-up emotion in just a few hours. Like I said, we don't see the talks with the Legarans, and the climax of the episode is actually spent with Picard struggling against Sarek's passions, as Beverly sits nearby and tries to comfort him. It's remarkable work, a level of naked, raw intensity that we rarely get on TNG, and in the hands of a lesser actor (basically anyone else in the ensemble), this could've been ridiculous. But Stewart doesn't hold anything back. I think I'm something of a sucker for this kind of acting, so I'll be curious to hear what others thought of it. For me, the scene works, and it makes the final scene of the episode so much more poignant. Sarek has done his job, but his disease remains uncured. Maybe someone will find a cure. Until than, he can take some comfort that his legacy remains intact. Hopefully, that will be enough.

Grade: A

Stray Observations: Geordi to Wesley: "Compared to you, every male on this ship is an expert on women!" Beverly to Troi: "I slapped Wesley." (I would like this on a T-shirt, I think.) It's great how, once Bevery and Deanna explain to Picard what they think is happening, Picard is determined to resolve the issue, regardless of the threats Mendrossen makes to his career. It's less showy that Stewart's acting later on, but more critical to the character: once he's determined the best course of action, Picard is implacable. Spock is only mentioned once by name, during Picard's melt-down at the end. "I will take my leave of you now, Captain. I do not think we shall meet again." Although the episode listing says otherwise...

"Menage a Troi"

Or The One Where Lwaxana Troi Has Aural Relations With A Ferengi

This could have been so much worse.

TNG can feel very dated at times, but you can't really hold that against the show; all visions of the future have a way of revealing their present, and at its best, the series is able to achieve a level of universality and relevance that makes questions of timeliness irrelevant. Even when that's not the case, it can be fun to see the show try and translate current events into a fictional context. (It's also fun to laugh at the costumes.) While you'd think that these episodes would be the ones to date the fastest, watching the show now, it's the comedy eps that feel the most of their time to me. Many of the jokes are older than the hills, but the gender relationships and plotting are always stuck in that curious era when women were nominally empowered, but still playing out the same tired roles as wives and mothers on most shows and movies. (So much has changed, right?)

But for once, I'm not here to rant; I just think it's amusing that on a show set three hundred years into the future, the best hook they can come up with for a Lwaxana Troi/Deanna Troi relationship is that Lwaxana thinks her daughter should be married, with children. Then again, maybe that's a standard parental thing, and "Troi" never treats Lwaxana's wishes as anything but ridiculous. What's more annoying is that Deanna, in an episode that should be at least as much about her as it is about her mother, is as useless as ever. She gets kidnapped by the Ferengi, along with Riker and Lwaxana, and it's Riker who gets them out of their cell, and it's Lwaxana who uses her (gah) feminine wiles to convince the Ferengi captain, DaiMon Tog, to release the other two. Deanna basically hangs out, loses her clothes, and senses whatever her mother is going through.

That aside, this is the least obnoxious hour we've spent with Lwaxana and her endless supply of upsetting dresses, because her antics are more driven by good intentions than by the writers mistaken belief that shrill, sexually aggressive women in their later years are inherently hilarious. I'm still not a huge fan of the character, but watching "Menage," I can see her as something more than a bad idea. She has understandable motivations, and she's even sympathetic and likable by the end. Barett's performance is more natural than it has been in the past, too. We've had a lot of great episodes this season, and while this one is definitely not great, it's as much an indicator of the show's overall improvement as, say, "Yesterday's Enterprise" was. What has been problematic at best, disastrous at worst in the past is here just a mildly pleasant, occasionally eye-roll-inducing diversion.

All right, so there's a trade conference on Betazed, and the Enterprise is involved. For the first time ever, the Ferengi have been allowed to participate in the conference, and they do their best to repay this goodwill by kidnapping three people (including a Starfleet officer), and then attempting to hack into Lwaxana's brain to figure out how her empathic abilities work. As always, the Ferengi are tiresome, cartoonish villains who don't really belong on this show; everyone else gets some modicum of dignity, but the Ferengi act like refugees from an '80s cartoon show. They're played for laughs as greedy, foolish, and pathetic, until they need to be just threatening enough to pull the story along. And did we really need another episode where a Ferengi lusted after a woman outside his species because she stood up for herself? Lwaxana shouts, "Get away from me, you're disgusting," and the Ferengi takes this as a signal to increase his efforts. That's not funny. In fact, it's pretty damn creepy, and the only reason it's not unbearable to watch is that Tog is too goofy to take seriously.

Tog decides to kidnap Lwaxana after she continually spurns his advances, and when he makes his move, Riker and Deanna happen to be standing by (they'd been kissing, which is the first sign we've had in a while that their relationship is still in flux), so Tog grabs them as well. On the Ferengi ship, Riker does his hero bit and gets him and Deanna free, while Lwaxana manipulates Tog by some ear rubbing. It's inoffensive, and silly, and not very much of anything at all.

There is one plotline in the episode that has weight to it: Wesley has finally been accepted into Starfleet Academy, and he's leaving the ship to start school. Wesley's come a long way since the first season, and while I'm not sad to see him go, I don't hate having him around. (He made an easy punchline.) There's some talk about how Wesley can't be sure he'll be assigned back to the Enterprise once he finishes school, and Geordi mentions that Picard might not even be captain of the Enterprise anymore by then. It's a low-key piece of realism that reinforces how this is just a job for these people, a major part of their lives, but still just a part. Initially, it seems that Wesley's departure will be handled with a similar off-hand tone, as he leaves while the bridge crew is working to track down Riker and the others. There's no big emotional scene, and that would've been a surprising, and smart, way to handle the exit. Instead, Wesley figures out how Riker's sending his message at the last minute, and misses his ship to the Academy in order to help rescue the others.

I suppose I should accept that TNG's view of humor and my own aren't ever going to really converge, but I can give "Menage" this much: the finale made me laugh. Lwaxana trades herself to Tog in exchange for Riker and Deanna's release, and in order to get her back, Picard has to convince Tog that he's a former lover of Lwaxana's who will murder anyone who touches his beloved. So he starts quoting Shakespearean sonnet in full, Patrick Stewart oratory mode. It's amusing, anyway. Lwaxana's willingness to sacrifice herself for her daughter made her a little more likable, and she doesn't spend the whole episode badgering Picard. Also, she never hits on a holodeck character. Small victories, but I'll take what I can get.

Grade: B

Stray Observations: Yes, I know Wesley will be back. Let me dream. Next week, we end the season with "Transfiguration" and "The Best Of Both Worlds, Part One." « Back to the A.V. Club home

Other Shows Red: Werewolf Hunter C+

by Rowan Kaiser October 30, 2010 Other Shows Red: Werewolf Hunter season 1 , episode 1 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

C+ av club rating D- reader rating based on 4 ratings

Red: Werewolf Hunter airs tonight, October 30th, at 9pm on SyFy.

Felicia Day is “Joss Whedon hot.” That is, she belongs to a certain specific class of actors and actresses who have benefited from being involved with Whedon projects. It's not that Day, Amy Acker, Jewel Staite, Alyson Hannigan, Enver Gjokaj, or James Marsters aren't perfectly good-looking people on their own. It's that Whedon has a gift for writing strong characters who manage to match the acting talents of the people portraying them, which makes them seem attractive as characters as much as looks. The passionate Whedon fan base fills in the rest.

Day got her start as a Potential Slayer in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though her role was relatively unmemorable. It did start her professional relationship with Whedon, which eventually led to her starring role in the web sensation Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. This, combined with her increasingly well-known World of Warcraft-based web series The Guild, raised Day's profile tremendously. Thanks to her legitimate love of nerdy pursuits like MMRPGs and her girl-next-door attractiveness, she's become something of a nerd sex symbol. This isn't the worst niche in the world, and Day has exploited it well: The Guild's “Do You Want To Date My Avatar?” video has over 13 million views on YouTube.

The presence of Felicia Day as the star of Red: Werewolf Hunter is pretty much the main reason we're covering this otherwise ordinary-looking SyFy monster movie. After all, we're all geeks here, right? And so it was that I went into Red: Werewolf Hunter with very few expectations, and I'm unsurprised, if slightly disappointed, to say that those expectations were met.

Day plays Virginia “Red” Sullivan, who brings her fiancé Nathan (Kavan Smith) to visit her family, deep in rural North America. There, she introduces him to her two brothers, the smartass Jake and the hardass Marcus, as well as her wise grandmother (unnamed in the film). The smartass/hardass/wise character traits are just about the extent of their character development. Nathan, on the other hand, is defined early on when he answers his cell phone during a vacation, and Virginia complains that he had promised to keep it off during their vacation. And as we all know, in movies, excessive cell phone use means that someone is kind of a jerk. Nathan doesn't grow much beyond continuing to be a bit of a jerk. Virginia's character is defined almost exclusively through her concern for the others, particularly Nathan.

The Sullivan family are an old family of werewolf hunters, who have lived with a nearby pack of werewolves in an uneasy truce for several years. That calm is broken by the ascendance of the werewolf Gabriel, who has the ability to shapeshift anytime, not merely during the full moon. He seizes control of the pack and a nearby abandoned town, in addition to biting Nathan. Red's werewolf mythology includes the twist that if the werewolf sire is killed before the next full moon, then the person with the bite won't turn into a werewolf, adding some measure of tension to the proceedings. The problem is, Day and Smith have no real chemistry, and give us no real reason to care about their relationship.

As for Day herself, she does demonstrate more range than the naif/badass she usually plays. She struggles with showing vulnerability (one supposedly romantic kiss is especially frightening), but she's much more believable in her family interactions. She's also got a lot of walking around in black clothes, looking badass to do. If you liked her character in Dollhouse, most of Red will be pleasantly familiar.

All this character and plot development is handled economically within the first twenty minutes or so, leaving the duration of Red for the titular werewolf hunting. From this point on, characterization comes to a halt, and the dialogue turns into little more than barked orders and exposition. Some of the ensuing action sequences are tense and well-done, but the film is over-reliant on its soundtrack to cue that tension. The late-90's industrial rock-style soundtrack ranges between laughably excessive, such as when it veers into straight-up metal in the first big werewolf fight, and laughably bad, repeating the same theme constantly during every preparing-for-the-fight scene.

Red: Werewolf Hunter is a difficult movie to grade, although it's fairly easy to recommend or not. If you're looking for some unchallenging pre-Halloween action/horror, it's fairly fun to riff on. If you're expecting anything more than that, though, you may want to watch Ginger Snaps again. And if you're a fan of Felicia Day looking intense while wearing leather jackets, then it's practically your Citizen Kane. « Back to the A.V. Club home

Sawbuck Gamer November 1, 2010

by Anthony John Agnello, Steve Heisler, Scott Jones, Samantha Nelson, Tasha Robinson, John Teti, and David Wolinsky November 1, 2010 Article Tools

Email Print Share More Sawbuck Gamer December 13, 2010 November 22, 2010 October 4, 2010 August 30, 2010

Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch Creator: CutmanMike Platform: PC (Mac and Linux releases forthcoming) Price: Free Considering how long ago the Doom modding community yielded such classics as Simpsons Doom and Star Wars Doom, it’s commendable that Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch has been able to summon so much buzz. Then again, it isn’t too shocking: It’s freaking Mega Man in a FPS. More specifically, bosses from the first Mega Man through Mega Man 6, plus 50-some weapons and power-ups, are all brought into the third dimension for your online fragging pleasure. FPSes have come a long way since Doom, so there’s no cover system, barely a jump, and no sign of modern-day trappings. But 8-Bit Deathmatch has been so lovingly woven together that it still comes together as a nice throwback experience. There’s a single-player campaign, but the action is really best experienced online against strangers… A-

Game Dev Story Creator: Kairosoft Platform: iPhone Price: $3.99 Game Dev Story almost plays like an eye-opening cautionary tale intended for oblivious or callous game critics. It’s a business sim that lets you run your own game company for roughly two decades, from the heady days of PC gaming up through the console-dominated modern era, all in adorable tongue-in-cheek fashion. The end goal is to maximize profits, and although you know what happens to the thinly disguised systems after they launch (the Wii here is called the Whoops), you can also alter the future by creating your own system. It all depends how cutthroat and/or experimental you want to be with your staffing and output, thanks to a wide variety of jobs, title types, and genres. Are you willing to ditch that enterprising young coder you started with, once a ridiculously talented one inquires about a job based on your company’s success? Will you be a slave to trends and pump out whatever’s popular at the moment, or will you color outside the lines and try your hand at a swimming-detective or racing-spy game? It’s entirely up to you, and like the real-world industry, you’ll likely shake your head at dismissive reviews of your games where the arbitrary grade doesn’t seem at all in line with the snippet of text. Really, the only thing missing is a series of mini-games that let you try the crazy-fake games you make… A

Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode 1 Creator: Sega Platforms: iPhone, PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 Played on: iPhone Price: $9.99 ($14.99 on other platforms) When will companies learn that the iPhone’s touch-screen capabilities are not meant to have traditional controller schemes grafted onto them? It almost always winds up being clunky, and the lack of tactile feedback results in drifting and inaccurate handling. This is especially pronounced in the first episode of Sonic 4, an entry meant to usher in a new celebration of the Sonic series’ roots. (It ditches Tails, Knuckles, and all their other sneaker-wearing mammal ilk.) The first episode succeeds at bringing the glory days back, but falls short of making an enjoyable or fully playable game. The physics rarely make sense: There are tons of sudden bottomless pits in sequences where Sonic is careening around at unbelievable speeds and finesse is impossible. The speedy hedgehog, for some reason, is saddled with patient platforming reminiscent of Castlevania clock-tower levels. All of this is compounded by the too-close camera, made even worse on the iPhone’s small screen. Sonic’s disapproving title-screen finger-wagging is appropriate… D

Notebook Wars Creator: Francisco Ferreres Platform: Browser Price: Free Imagine a bored kid scrawling planes and gun turrets in a notebook during some endless junior-high class. Now imagine that scrawled combat coming to life. That’s the central gimmick of Notebook Wars, a top-down scrolling shooter in which the sprites are planes childishly drawn in colored pencil, moving across graph paper to attack each other. Visually, it’s an entertaining game, and it’s largely enjoyable to play as well, with enough going on to keep players busy. It’s essentially a slowed-down version of a bullet-hell game, with tons of enemies, plus achievements to earn, money to gather, upgrades and new weapon slots and superior planes to buy, level ratings to earn, and so forth. It’s all pretty basic, but it’s a cute, absorbing meat-and-potatoes example of a mini shooter. There are some problems—the upgrade system is buggy and tends to temporarily overprice purchasable items or downgrade purchased items, and the very few bosses are easy to dodge and defeat, but take tedious eons to wear down. Still, Notebook Wars provides a nice balance of challenge and choices. Even with high-level weaponry, players likely won’t be able to kill everything on a level-appropriate board, so prioritizing dangerous or big-money targets becomes part of the strategy… B-

The Trader Of Stories: Bell’s Heart Creator: Pastel Games Platform: Browser Price: Free At its core, The Trader Of Stories: Bell’s Heart is a standard point-and-click mystery game, where you hunt out interact-able items and figure out how to use or combine them to complete a story. But while the gameplay is standard, the aesthetic is outstanding. Mellow, haunting music and beautiful artwork turn the story into a rich children’s picture book with a dark story about love, betrayal, and death. Your job as a traveling trader stuck in a small town is to assemble the town’s story from memories the residents can be prompted to reveal. Talking to them gives you literal pieces of a puzzle in your storybook, revealing an image and assembling a fable-like history. Some of the gameplay options are mighty odd—players have to pick up anything not nailed down, including other people’s hair and personal property, and eventually a mind-controlled person will become an item in your inventory as well—and the whole thing could stand to be longer and more convoluted. But as a bite-sized exploration game, it’s polished and pretty, with an appealingly winsome, melancholy style… B+

Chase Goose 2 Creator: Hideous Platform: Browser Price: Free If you didn’t play the original Chase Goose, don’t worry. Everything you need to know is right there in the title. Once again, you take control of an innocent little goose and aid its escape from an enormous chomping monster that’s perpetually gaining on the poor bird. Essentially, this is Canabalt with far more button presses: To run, you have to alternately mash the left and right arrow keys, and press the keyboard key specified in an onscreen prompt when you near a ledge. It starts off simply enough (and thankfully, the font is much clearer and crisper than in the original), with players having to tap “v” or “b.” Before long, you’ll have to solve short math equations to take the next leap, and eventually, the instructions get purposefully vague—unless you happen to have all your Japanese lucky numbers memorized. It’s a workout for the hands, and like Canabalt before it, it eventually becomes impossible… B+

Road Of The Dead Creator: Evil Dog Platform: Browser Price: Free One of the trashiest games never released stateside is D3’s Zombies Vs. Ambulance, an obscure Japanese survival-horror game which challenged gamers to drive—or, more accurately, plow—an ambulance through encroaching zombie hordes. Road Of The Dead is a decent approximation of that experience. With zombies on the loose, instead of holing up in your home, you instead decide to get behind the wheel of your flashy car and drive to freedom. The object of the game is to reach checkpoints as your car threatens to disintegrate around you. Burning wrecks, roadway obstructions, panicked pedestrians, limping zombies, and the military all obscure your path. Your worst enemy, however, is the game’s tricky, unresponsive control scheme. Trying to find the gas, brake, and handbrake keys on the keyboard is next to impossible during frantic driving sequences. Still, if you’ve ever wondered what a zombie looks like as it meets the front bumper of a speeding sportscar, then you’ve found a fine way to pass a lunch hour. Just don’t expect to have much appetite for the lunch… B

Cut The Rope Creator: Chillingo Platforms: iPad, iPhone Played on: iPhone Price: iPad—$1.99; iPhone—$.99 In spite of its straightforward title, Cut The Rope is a deceptively complex puzzler. A piece of hard candy hangs from a rope, and a hungry frog-like monster waits patiently below. You cut the rope with a slice of your finger, it falls into his mouth, and he smiles. But then new elements are introduced to hinder the task. Timing becomes of the utmost importance when the candy starts to swing, spiders close in, and bubbles threaten to lift the candy offscreen. There are blowers activated by touch, tight ropes that fling the candy across the screen, and spikes that you can only avoid by cutting multiple lengths of rope in the proper order. Even freakin’ gravity is an obstacle in Cut The Rope; you have to ensure the candy falls from a proper height. All the elements work together brilliantly. Later levels require subway-stop-missing concentration, yet after a little trial and error and head-scratching, it’s never unclear what has to happen, and in what order. It’s just a matter of cutting the rope, right?… A-

Super Mind Dungeon Creator: Bad Hed Games Platform: Browser Price: Free Bad Hed Games’ Super Mind Dungeon distinguishes itself well in the realm of minimalist Flash platformers. The chunky chiptune soundtrack, blocky graphics, and playful sense of humor—Easter Island heads saying, “Hey, girl!” when you pass by are pretty funny—are standard issue for browser games, as is the mechanic of jumping around spike-filled halls to reach a goal. Super Mind Dungeon’s hook is that you only press one button to get around. Your little blue dude starts with a kinetic charge. You use the mouse to position a target, then click once to bounce into the air. You’re recharged when you touch a wall, allowing you to jump again. The environments are balanced with metal walls that don’t renew your kinetic charge, so the challenge becomes aiming your jumps for maximum ricochet potential—without hitting the copious spikes, of course. The bouncing character is a little too unpredictable, though, to allow for real precision, keeping Super Mind Dungeon out of the elite class of pixilated browser games… B-

Headspin Storybook Creator: Brandwidth Platforms: iPad/iPhone (Universal Binary) Played on: iPhone Price: $.99 Say what you will about the iPhone, the design-conscious nature of Apple’s customers has prompted iPhone game developers to focus on their games’ visual aesthetics—not “graphics,” the endless polygon-count arms race, but aesthetics. Sometimes, as with last year’s Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor, that artistic impulse results in a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind game. Other times, as with Headspin Storybook, the superficial beauty can be deceptive. Storybook takes the form of a pop-up book that flips through the story of a dragon-slaying knight. When the book flips to a new page, players have a limited time to flip elements of the scenery—cottages, trees, castle walls—so that the landscape on the right side of the book mirrors that of the left. The storybook is so appealingly illustrated that it takes a while for the reality to set in: There isn’t much game here. The tap-to-flip business wears out its welcome about five minutes in, and on the iPhone, many of the tapping targets are uncomfortably small, leading to misregistered touches. A nice way for geek aesthetes to show off their fancy Retina Displays, but not much more… C-

Journey Of Fortune: Dragon’s Fire Creator: Cinemax S.R.O. Platform: iPad Price: $3.99 Another entry from the too-good-looking-to-be-true files is Journey Of Fortune: Dragon’s Fire. The playing field for this iPad board game looks like a photographic representation of a thirtysomething’s inner child. The epic scene depicts a horrific cave where a cyclops, a giant spider, and other mythical monsters await your approach. You advance by spinning a slick wheel of fortune adorned with swords, magical spells, and dice for moving around the board. And it’s all laid out in the style of an elaborate 1980s arcade cabinet. The goal is to advance past the dragon, building your character and battling RPG-style by way of the game’s simplified dice-roll interface. The problem is that it’s too simplified. Whether you’re playing alone or with a friend, the game has all the strategy of Candy Land. In spite of the upgrade system and extended, turn-based battles, after a while it sets in that you’re just spinning the dice-wheel and watching to see what happens, over and over again… C+

Warlight Creator: Randy Ficker Platform: Browser Price: Free When played against multiple players, the board game Risk can take hours, days, sometimes weeks to finish. Warlight is Risk-lite, online—at least in concept, as the execution is far more engrossing than a simple port. The rules remain roughly the same: Using an ever-growing army, conquer the world and vanquish your opponents via a battle simulator (dice in the board game, a simple algorithm in this version). There are cards to collect, just like in the board game, but that’s where the similarities end. The online version includes gameplay enhancers like fog (you can only see territories right next to you) and a savvy simulator that mixes enemy actions with your own for dynamic, unpredictable battles. Of course, board games can’t be played alone, and Warlight comes equipped with an AI, proving a worthy opponent when friends aren’t around. The game also provokes a special kind of frustration new to Risk fans: the quick re-strategizing that happens when the enemy strikes in the middle of your own attack. These little touches yield massive enhancements to the game, making Warlight a vital addition to the Risk-verse—and one that’ll suck up days, weeks, months… A

Give Up Robot 2 Creator: Matt Makes Games Platform: Browser Price: Free Video gaming’s negative rep for relying on sequels is only partly deserved. Given games’ mechanical nature, they tend to benefit from iterative exploration where purely narrative forms don't. Telling the same story twice isn't terribly effective, but game rules tend to get better when they’re tweaked and refined. In the best-case scenario, a game proves the quality of its central workings the first time out, then perfects the model the second time out: Call it the Mega Man rule. Matt Makes Games’ follow-up to May’s Give Up Robot is a solid example. The original’s slick presentation has been made warmer with an earth-tone color palette, and the tight grappling-hook play for navigating the game’s single-room obstacle courses has been complicated and improved with more moving parts. Smiling blocks carry you once you’ve grappled on, other blocks must be dragged down to open doors, rockets must be ridden to open new paths—it’s a whole new game. The new environmental factors make Give Up Robot 2 a bit slower than the original, but it’s a better game for it… A-

Monster Slayers Creator: Nerdook Platform: Browser Price: Free In many levels of Monster Slayers, you can start a fight, visit a different browser tab to do something else, then return to find your army victorious. The game is about building squads to go out and defeat monsters, but the fights are never really challenging unless you’re trying to use units that are too low-level. It has plenty of options for customization, with four base classes (swordsman, archer, spearman, and lancer) that can develop into a host of other careers. Plus there are items to gather and combine to help you summon towering creatures to boost your forces, and unlockable hats that provide various power-ups. But the actual gameplay boils down to four basic commands which control your whole army at once. The game quickly devolves into quick, unsatisfying runs through nearly identical missions to level up, collect trophies, and unlock the next upgrade for your units… C

Bunny Flags Creator: CuaticGames Platform: Browser Price: Free In Bunny Flags, you play a little rabbit using a gun and a variety of protective towers to protect his flag—and himself—from swarms of disembodied fingers. The game gets hard fast. In the capture-the-flag levels, enemies will rush for your flag from different directions, then mob you while the flag carrier runs off. In the endurance challenges, it’s so hard to deal with the large groups of evil digits that new waves of enemies show up while you’re still fighting off the last two. The bad guys form swarms that you can merrily lead around your gun turrets to soften them up, but victory still requires frantic mouse-clicking as you try to keep shooting while placing new towers. Fortunately, even if you die, you level up, earning skill points that are used to improve your towers’ effectiveness or your bunny’s ability to take and dish out damage… B

Cuboy Facebutt Creator: Edible Castle Platform: Browser Price: Free As far as videogame names go, Cuboy Facebutt ranks up there with Axe In Face and Don’t Shit Your Pants. The game stars Cuboy, a Bartleby-like drone who is housesitting for his boss. (He also featured in last year’s Back To The Cubeture, among other games.) In the game’s opening scene, Cuboy completely misunderstands his boss’ instructions to “not break anything” as “break everything.” Using a stomp attack, as well as the eponymous “facebutt,” players guide Cuboy around a six-by-six grid causing as much property damage as possible to objects, including ottomans, cat-scratch posts, and kitschy flowerpots. To achieve higher scores, players are encouraged to alternate between facebutts and stomps. Each level is complicated by a time limit, as well as the occasional indestructible object like a stone garden gnome. As objects pile up around you and time wanes, the game feels like an approximation of what it might be like to drown in a vat of parfait. The learning curve is steep—it takes a good 20 minutes to make the direction keys feel comfortable—but failing a challenge is almost worth your while, if only to hear Cuboy utter his trademark line: “No, that was rubbish!” B+ « Back to the A.V. Club home

Rock Band 3

A

by Russ Fischer November 1, 2010 Platforms: Nintendo DS Nintendo Wii PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 Played On: Xbox 360 Price: $29.99-$59.99 Developer: Harmonix Publisher: EA Rating: T Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

A av club rating A reader rating based on 4 ratings Purchase Rock Band 3 from Amazon

Pundits say the music-game genre is dying. They may even be right. (Nice work, Activision.) But there’s still room for a flagship rhythm game that shows everyone else how it should be done. As of now, that game is Rock Band 3. With an ever-expanding song catalog boasting 2,000 tunes, the game’s 83 new tracks are less important than the streamlined interface upgrades that improve the experience for everyone, and gameplay additions meant to keep the most dedicated hardcore players enthralled.

To casual players, the differences might seem subtle. There are vocal harmonies imported from Beatles Rock Band, and music tracks that support a keyboard peripheral, but it’s essentially still the same game. Vocal tracks can become karaoke-only, with no scoring, which is ideal for less-sober play sessions. Players can drop in and out of songs on the fly, and difficulty modes are easily changed. The song catalog is more navigable, playlists are easy to make and save, and the career mode offers more options, presented with more elegance, than any previous installment. The options make group and solo play more accessible and pleasant.

The keyboard also opens a Pro Keys mode, and that’s where the big changes come into play. This mode ably straddles the line between game and “real” music, as it asks players to learn a few actual playing skills. Drums get a similar pro treatment, with optional cymbals and a second foot-pedal for the hi-hat. These Pro modes offer new challenges for players who breeze through expert difficulty, without altering the core game.

Pro Guitar is less accessible. It requires an expensive new peripheral ($149) which, armed with six faux strings to strum and more than a hundred buttons (six at each fret), finally prompts the old “Why don’t you just learn to play a real guitar?” question in earnest. For some, mastering the controller will be the ultimate gaming achievement. Others may react poorly to its notable differences from a real instrument—the strings are all the same width, and there’s no tactile feedback when you’ve fretted a chord—and find they make it far harder to play than the real thing. Pro modes are 100 percent optional, however. Even setting them aside, Rock Band 3 is a superbly engineered game that is both the most ambitious and the best the genre has to offer. « Back to the A.V. Club home

Other Shows Two and a Half Men - "The Crazy Bitch Gazette" C

by Leonard Pierce November 1, 2010 Other Shows Two and a Half Men - "The Crazy Bitch Gazette" season 8 , episode 7 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

C av club rating D- reader rating based on 14 ratings

(The Internet has made TV criticism more prominent, but the kinds of shows TV critics write about - serialized dramas and single-camera comedies - are rarely the kinds of shows that become popular with a mass audience. Every week, TV Club is going to drop in on one of the top-rated programs in the nation, one that we don't normally cover. What makes these shows popular? Should we be covering them more often? Are our preconceived notions about quality not necessarily following popularity justified, or are we jumping to conclusions? This week, Leonard Pierce looks at TV's top scripted comedy, Two and a Half Men. Next week, Noel Murray will examine its top scripted drama, NCIS.)

Shows like Two And A Half Men seem to serve as an example of the tunnel vision (or should I say snobbery?) of which critics are capable. We're so deeply immersed in the shows that deliver what we're looking for in a quality show that we become blind to what everyone else is actually watching. We're hyper-attuned to the ins and outs of shows that are hanging on by a thread in the ratings, while a juggernaut that's been watched by millions of people for seven seasons barely registers with us. Whenever we're confronted with this sort of disconnect between what we like and what the rest of the world obviously prefers, we undergo a sort of existential panic: Are we really that out of touch with popular tastes? Or do these shows really fucking suck?

Since its debut in 2003, Two And A Half Men hasn't even been on my radar. I've caught bits and pieces of the ends of episodes while waiting for something else to come on, but that's been the extent of my exposure to the most popular comedy on television. Of course, the quality of those bits and pieces of the ends of episodes have been bad enough to make me actively avoid tuning in. But the fact remains that the show, for me, is mostly the vehicle through which Charlie Sheen is able to realize his dreams of becoming one of Hollywood's biggest scumbags.

So I'm heading into a review of one of the biggest shows on TV with precious little knowledge of it. Embarrassingly, I didn't even know what it was about. I knew it was about two grown men raising a kid, and I knew from the aggravatingly catchy theme song that its humor largely derived from manly-man dude humor (which I've always found incredibly cheap and insulting, which may account for my lack of interest in the show). But—and here's that critical bubble for you—I didn't even know the basic premise, the situation of this particular situation comedy. So, in the unfortunate circumstance that you're like me, here it is: The two men of the title are Charlie Sheen as Charlie Harper, a freewheeling bachelor, successful jingle writer, and typical sitcom dude, and Jon Cryer as Alan Harper, his brother, a divorced chiropractor and "sensitive guy." The half-man is Alan's son Jake, a doughy tween cipher whose future is being shaped by the divergent influences of these two knuckle-fucks.

It seems like a serviceable enough idea for a sitcom, perfectly designed for the kind of viewer who goes for this sort of thing and doesn't want to have to spend an hour figuring out the nuances of the jokes on a half-hour sitcom. I can't and won't deny charges of having very specific tastes in entertainment; I dislike the loaded words "snobbery" and "elitism," but I like what I like. I don't take these things personally, though; it doesn't offend me when a show I find boring or predictable tops the ratings, while a show I think is clever and original struggles. That's the way things are, and you can't talk people into liking something they don't like. I also have no aversion to traditional sitcom formula; not every show can be Arrested Development, and some of my very favorite comedies, from Get Smart to WKRP In Cincinnati to Newhart, have been more or less straightforward, multi-camera, CBS sitcoms. Though what little I'd seen of Two And A Half Men didn't inspire me, I could see it being worthwhile, as long as it was well-written and not grossly offensive.

Therein, of course, lies the problem. Not knowing much about why people did like this show means I also didn't know why people didn't like it. While we were planning these reviews, my editor opined that it's "a fairly well-constructed show, but it's a mercilessly mean-spirited one." That didn't necessarily bother me; mean-spirited can be funny if it's not done half-assed. More problematic, as I looked into it, was the widely held belief that the show was mercilessly sexist, and the common complaint that it relied on cheap, predictable jokes (which usually go hand in hand with gender-stereotype humor). The title of tonight's episode—"The Crazy Bitch Gazette"—didn't do much to lift those worries.

There was reason to be hopeful; Don Reo, a veteran of some excellent TV comedies, is a producer on the show, and the original story was co-written by old school pro Eddie Gorodetsky. Once the episode began, though, it immediately began overplaying its hand. Now isn't the time or place to restart the debate over whether or not the laugh track (or the use of a live, studio audience) should be consigned to the trash bin of TV history (short answer: yes), but it's pretty depressing that at this stage of the game, 60 years into sitcom history, it's still being used so awkwardly. Especially on a show with this level of mass appeal, I understand the need to punch up its impact, but throwing the laugh track in front of non-jokes like "We used to date" and "Add to cart" is just wearying. Also a bit frustrating—and one reason, I think, in an era where audiences expect better performances out of their television, that single-camera sitcoms are gaining traction—is the way the cast oversells every joke with overblown facial expressions. Cryer, in particular, is capable of solid acting, but you certainly wouldn't know it from his mugging here.

The plot of "The Crazy Bitch Gazette" involves Charlie getting seriously involved with his dermatologist Michelle, who's accepting of all of his various flaws and foibles—except his inability to rid himself of ex-girlfriend/neighbor/stalker Rose (Melanie Lynskey). Rose claims to be getting married, which shocks Charlie into the realization that he might not truly be over her. Of course, we learn, even if he doesn't), that she really is a crazy bitch after all, who's staging her marriage to fashion industry bigwig Manfred Quinn ("Manny Quin"—get it?) just to drive him nuts. (The episode begins with a date between Charlie and Michelle that turns into an awkward dinner with his brother and mother. It's reminiscent of similar situations in comedy-of-humiliation sitcoms, like the "Dinner Party" episode of The Office, but for that premise to work, everyone has to appear to have a stake in things going well. If no one takes the stakes seriously, the joke fizzles like a wet firecracker.)

There's actually something to be said for Two And Half Men, if "The Crazy Bitch Gazette" is anything like a typical episode. (I'm betting it's not, though, if for no other reason than the half-man is on screen for all of ten seconds, just enough time to remind viewers that he looks like he's in his early 20s.) It really does have a solid sitcom construction; its pace is light and breezy—it hardly even seems to fill up 22 minutes— and mixed in with all the unfunny stuff and the jokes you can see coming all the way from the Pacific Ocean, there are some pretty solid lines. It's very easy to see why it would hit home as undemanding, comfort-food comedy for millions of viewers.

But it's also easy to see why critics choose to give it a miss. At a time when there are dozens of worthwhile shows on television, Two And A Half Men delivers nothing we haven't seen before. Even what it does well, other shows do better, without all the tedious baggage. Perhaps most unusual for a show that is such a ratings blockbuster, it doesn't seem very confident in itself: Every joke is oversold, and far too often, another line of dialogue is wasted in explaining the previous joke, which is time that could be spent telling a new joke. Characters like Berta the housekeeper and Evelyn, Charlie and Alan's mother, are without even a shade of originality; they could have been drawn from central casting 35 years ago. Shows like this are sometimes called 'fast food entertainment', and it's easy to see why: like a junky drive-through burger reduces a meal to a mere nutritional operation, Two And A Half Men converts comedy into a stripped-down entertainment delivery process that's forgotten five minutes after its over. There's nothing wrong with that; everybody fills up on junk from time to time. It's just not something you want to make into a habit.

Rating: C

Stray Observations: "On the list of things I expect to kill me, mercury poisoning ranks well behind liver failure, getting struck by lightning, and heart attack during sex." "And here comes the poorest shmuck I know." "The last time I met one of Charlie's dates, I was picking glitter off my skin for a week." "Not that every woman Charlie dates is a stripper. I couldn't picture you stripping, for example. I mean, I can picture it …" "I'm not sure how to get home from this side of the house."

National Ransom

B+

by Noel Murray November 2, 2010

Elvis Costello National Ransom Hear Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating B- reader rating based on 2 ratings

Related Reviews Elvis Costello: When I Was Cruel The Delivery Man Il Sogno

There’s never been an Elvis Costello album like National Ransom, even though nothing about the record is especially new. Working again with producer T-Bone Burnett, Costello cycles through his usual obsessions with archaic Americana, stately pop, and early rock, in songs that tell stories—both humorous and tragic—about economic exploitation and entertainers’ lonely lives. But perhaps because Costello has recently been reflecting on his career and his musical passions while hosting the Sundance Channel talk show Spectacle, National Ransom feels more comprehensive than usual. This isn’t Costello’s torch-song album, or his country-blues album, or his Euro-folk album; it’s all those combined, with a little pinch of New Orleans and some incidental nods to new wave.

National Ransom is long—too long, really—and it falls too often into the “venerable old rocker” trap of thinking that music is better the more it sounds like it could’ve been recorded by Alan Lomax. But unlike Burnett’s recent Grammy-bait album with Costello pals Elton John and Leon Russell, National Ransom has a remarkably high percentage of memorable songs, like the jumped-up acoustic-guitar ramble “A Slow Drag With Josephine,” the pleasantly reverberating rocker “Five Small Words,” the elegant love song “You Hung The Moon,” the Dylan-esque lament “Bullets For The New-Born King,” the grandly weepy honky-tonk ballad “That’s Not The Part Of Him You’re Leaving,” and the off-kilter rockabilly/power-pop hybrid “The Spell That You Cast.” Costello has made an album that’s unfocused by design, and better because of it.

Speak Now

B- by Steven Hyden November 2, 2010

Taylor Swift Speak Now Big Machine Records Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B- av club rating B- reader rating based on 5 ratings

Taylor Swift has the face of an angel and the heart of an assassin; just look at the bevy of famous guys she slays in songs from her third album Speak Now. The 20-year-old singer-songwriter dips a poison dart in sugar and aims it at Kanye West on “Innocent,” patting him on the head and assuring him that “32 is still growing up now / You’re still an innocent.” John Mayer wishes he only had to worry about being patronized; on the affecting ballad “Dear John,” Swift chastises an older man for his mercenary pursuit of a painfully sweet former child star. (Lines like “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with / The girl in the dress cried all the way home” can barely be heard over the tsk-tsking of an entire nation.) On Speak Now’s most gleefully spiteful track, “Better Than Revenge”—an often-funny takedown of her rival for Joe Jonas’ affections—Swift boasts that she always gets the last word. Anyone who doubts that will likely end up with a starring role on her fourth record.

Swift’s niftiest trick is being at her most likeable when she’s indulging in such overt nastiness. Speak Now falters whenever Swift lets her outsized personality be subsumed by big, generic ballads like “Back To December,” which aspire to Faith Hill when Swift should be aligning with kick-ass kindred spirits like Miranda Lambert. All the syrupy strings and mawkish “end of childhood” images crowd out genuine country piss-takers like “Mean,” a pleasingly spare banjo ditty in which Swift calls out an unnamed tormenter from high school. “Why you gotta be so mean?” she asks in the chorus. The poor overmatched sap will likely wonder the same thing when he hears the song.

Death To False Metal

C- by Austin L. Ray November 2, 2010

Weezer Death To False Metal Geffen Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

C- av club rating

Related Reviews Weezer: Make Believe Weezer: Pinkerton Weezer: Raditude

On paper, it sounded promising: A month and a half after Weezer’s latest full-length (and first for Epitaph), Hurley, the band delivered Death To False Metal, a collection of rare songs recorded by modern-day Weezer. In other words: old songs by a new band, put out shortly after the new album, but on the same day as the deluxe Pinkerton reissue. On release day, the band would be a few weeks away from the so-called Blinkerton tour, and Weezer nostalgia would be as healthy as it has been in recent memory.

In execution, though, Death To False Metal is frustratingly hit-or-miss. For every anthem (the opener “Turning Up the Radio” is fist-pumping fun), there’s a heavy-handed dud (“I’m A Robot,” though rollicking, is lyrically embarrassing). For every solid rocker (the Nirvana-aping “Everyone”), there’s an unrewarding slow jam (“Losing My Mind”). False Metal consistently fails to find a groove. And then there’s the more obvious problem: These songs, created in the late ’90s or early ’00s, could just as easily be performed by a Weezer cover band after a time-lapse. Considering the circumstances, the straightforward Toni Braxton cover tacked onto the end of the record, and the goofy—even for Weezer—cover art, it’s hard to think of this collection as anything more than a few decent tracks padded with sub-par songs to fulfill a contract.

Soulsville

D+ by Jason Heller November 2, 2010

Huey Lewis And The News Soulsville W.O.W. Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

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It’s been 10 years since blue-collar pop-rocker Huey Lewis had a minor hit with “Cruisin’,” his cover of the Smokey Robinson jam performed with his Duets costar Gwyneth Paltrow. One might assume that his brief fling with Motown had something to do with the making of Soulsville—that a deep, consuming love of vintage soul music compelled Huey Lewis And The News to celebrate the Stax/Volt catalog with a collection of the label’s legendary tunes. But according to Lewis, the whole idea was his manager’s. It shows. With all the joy of punching a clock, Lewis and crew assemble exhausted versions of classics by Stax/Volt stars like Wilson Pickett, Rufus Thomas, and The Staple Singers. In particular, Lewis’ deflated renditions of Solomon Burke’s “Got To Get You Off My Mind” and “Cry To Me”—the latter being most famous via Dirty Dancing—serve as a pathetic epitaph for the late King Of Rock & Soul. Credit goes to whoever picked “Just One More Day” over a more obvious Otis Redding song; the smoldering track is one of the few here that rises above the level of really good karaoke. There’s a lot to be said for Lewis’ work ethic and nose-to-the-grindstone grit. What these songs need, though, isn’t grunting, grueling workmanship—it’s soul. And Soulsville just doesn’t have it.

November 3, 2010 : Savage Love by Dan Savage November 3, 2010

Illustrations by Misako Rocks!

I have a bit of a situation. I’m a 23-year-old heterosexual male, and I am married. My wife and I also happen to have a girlfriend now, making our arrangement a polyamorous triad. We all love each other very much, and we are getting to the point that we are thinking about how we are going to tell our parents about our relationship.

My parents have already been told. Their reactions were as expected: My mother was slightly bemused and amazed that I was able to pull it off, while my father gave me a high five. But my parents are divorced/remarried-to-other-people atheists, and by the time I was 12, my dad was teaching me how to eat pussy. So my situation is not exactly typical.

My wife’s family is super Southern Baptist, while our girlfriend’s mother is a big ol’ bag of crazy: She was a physically abusive nut job who beat her children with a Bible attached to a rope.

Our question is this: Should we even bother disclosing to either of their sets of Bible-beating parents? To give you an even better idea about who my mother-in-law is: I’m a recovering addict (two years sober), and after I told her that in confidence, she used it against me the first chance she got (called me a thieving junkie). She’s a hypocritical, judgmental bitch, but my wife feels like she needs her approval.

If we shouldn’t disclose, then how do we deal with things like family holidays and other group events? Is not disclosing a sign that either my wife or girlfriend is ashamed of the life we lead? Your help would be appreciated. Not Telling The Whole Truth

You don’t mention how long you’ve been in this poly triad, NTTWT, but seeing as you’re only 23 and were already married before you met the girlfriend, you can’t have been in this poly triad for very long. And while it’s nice that you have such an open and honest relationship with your parents—perhaps a little too open (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my father for not teaching me how to eat pussy when I was 12)—your wife and your girlfriend aren’t similarly blessed.

For that reason, I’m gonna advise against disclosing the true nature of your relationship(s) for the time being, NTTWT. Not because you have anything to be ashamed of—you most certainly do not—but because relationships with parents are best run on a need-to-know basis.

And it doesn’t sound like your wife’s parents need to know—not yet. This triad is new, and like most romantic relationships, it may not stand the test of time. For the moment, introduce your girlfriend as a friend; if your MIL is curious about why you’re all living together, say something vague about the economy. If it turns out that your triad is one for the ages, NTTWT, then you can come out to your MIL and weather the judgmental shitstorm.

As for the girlfriend’s mother, NTTWT, it doesn’t sound like that woman has a right to know anything about her daughter’s life.

All that said, NTTWT, I do think loving, committed non-monogamous couples should be open with their families, if only to prove to people that loving, committed non-monogamous couples exist. I’m not encouraging you to be closeted, just strategic. Your wife’s family is more likely to be accepting if they perceive your marriage as not just loving, but lasting. Give it a few years, NTTWT, and then, whether the current girlfriend is still in the picture or not, your wife can let her mother know—as matter-of-factly as possible—that you’re poly.

What do you know about orgasm denial for men? My husband is asking me to try all kinds of crazy things, like locking him in a chastity device and denying him orgasms until he begs. Is that safe? Do many couples do it? I admit I find it kind of sexy, but how in the world do I figure out how to do it and make it fun for him? Wants Info For Erotics

Except in the most extreme cases, WIFE, male chastity play isn’t really about orgasm denial. It’s more of an elaborate, extended kind of foreplay, a way of introducing elements of erotic power and control that usually result in the denied/chaste man having more orgasms, not fewer.

There’s no way of knowing how many wives out there are locking up their husbands’ dicks, WIFE, but there are enough couples doing it to keep male-chastity-device manufacturers in business (cb-6000.com) and enough couples interested in male chastity play for publishers to bring out books that explain how to do it and how to make it pleasurable (Male Chastity: A Guide For Keyholders by Lucy Fairbourne, Be Careful What You Wish For…: The Ultimate Guide To Male Chastity by Sarah Jameson).

As for safety: Make sure you get a male chastity device that fits properly, WIFE, as you don’t want his dick to go numb, develop gangrene, and fall off—that would be nullification, not chastity. And don’t deny your husband orgasms for weeks or months on end, as that could elevate his risk for developing prostate cancer. (His orgasms flush carcinogens from his prostate.)

I’m a guy in my late 30s and have been married for 12 mostly happy years, with three kids. I’ve never cheated, despite a boring sex life that I’ve tried to spice up. My efforts were not received well. We’ve talked at length about the frequency and style of our sex life, but she’s not interested in having sex very often, and when she is, it only happens one of two ways. I’ve thought about having sex with other women but have never acted on any of the opportunities that came my way. I’ve jerked off to plenty of porn in the meantime, though.

Anyway, I meet a girl, we’re attracted to each other, and we decide to go for it. No, my wife does not know. Yes, I’m an asshole. And the problem is, suddenly I can’t get it up—for either of them! Neither my hand nor porn work, either. WTF? I have NEVER had this problem. It’s been three attempts—patient girl, huh?—and so far nothing. I can’t tell if this is guilt, performance anxiety, or what. Has my wife, porn, and my hand ruined me for having sex with other women? Do you have any suggestions? I doubt it’s medical, since the onset occurred precisely when this girl and I decided to have sex, and that would be far too much of a coincidence. No Catchy Sign-Off

I’m thinking either it’s guilt plus performance anxiety—guilt-induced performance anxiety—or it’s a huge and highly unlikely coincidence. A medical checkup can rule out the latter, NCSO, but only a thorough examination of your feelings, your motives, and your circumstances can help the former.

You’ve taken a huge and potentially very consequential step: You’re gonna cheat on the wife (three attempts? you’re already cheating on the wife), NCSO, and if the wife finds out—and that’s a pretty small if—that could mean divorce. (It shouldn’t mean divorce, in my opinion, but it usually does.) Seeing as the potential consequences for you, your wife, and your kids are so dire that you’ve been struck bonerless, I would advise you to stop seeing the patient girl… for now.

You’re going to have to—sorry!—talk to the wife about your frustrations and the possibility of opening up your marriage. Because the only way your dick is going to work with other women, NCSO, is if you’re not risking everything with it.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage. Got problems? mail@savagelove.net « Back to the A.V. Club home

Newswire Jeff Bridges to record a new album by Sean O'Neal November 3, 2010

Fans of Jeff Bridges’ country crooning in Crazy Heart include Jeff Bridges, who was so enamored of his turn as boozy singer and poor surrogate father figure Bad Blake that he will now record an album for EMI. (Bridges made a previous foray into folk-rock and roots music with 2000's Be Here Soon.) Not surprisingly, the tunes will be co-written with and produced by his fellow Oscar-winning team of Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett. Meanwhile, Beau Bridges has yet to interest his brother in finally releasing that Fabulous Baker Boys record. Ah, just kidding, Beau Bridges. You seem like a nice guy. Thanks for taking our cheap little jokes in stride.

The Delights of 'Cougar Town,' with Bonus Penny Can Secrets from Ian Gomez by Maureen Ryan, posted Nov 3rd 2010 2:15PM Filed under: Reality-Free, Stay Tuned

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If I could make one command -- an edict that every TV viewer would have to follow -- I would direct the people of Earth to give 'Cougar Town' (9:30PM ET Wednesday, ABC) another chance. (I'd also ask you to give FX's very enjoyable 'Terriers' a try, if you haven't already. Yes, I know that's two commands. Work with me here.)

Last week's 'Cougar Town' may end up being one of my favorite episodes of television of the year. The Halloween installment of the show was delightfully written and acted and featured a terrific guest performance from 'Scrubs' star Ken Jenkins as Jules' dad. If you gave up on 'Cougar Town' last year or never gave it a shot, that's the episode to watch (there are seven episodes, including the Halloween one, here, and a previous piece singing this sterling comedy's praises here).

This week's episode features a prominent story line for Jules' neighbor Andy, who's played by Ian Gomez. Given that knowledge, I concocted a plan make Gomez reveal his penny-can secrets and other intel about the show.

Here are Seven Things That Ian Gomez Revealed About 'Cougar Town':

1. In tonight's episode, the issue of whether Andy and Jules are really friends -- as opposed to Andy being the merely tolerated husband of Jules' best friend, Ellie -- comes up. "I try to convince her we really are friends," said Gomez, who somehow gets Jules to go out dancing with him. "It's hip-hop dancing. It's slightly naughty dancing, not really dirty dancing. Or maybe it is."

2. We all know the 'Cougar Town' gang loves their red wine -- and once in a while, on the set, the actors are really drinking wine. Occasionally, the usual non-alcoholic grape juice in their glasses is replaced by the real thing. "It's later in in the evening, when we need a little something," Gomez said.

3. Ian Gomez wants a robot baby. Early in season 2, the show made light of the fact that we rarely see Stan, Andy and Ellie's baby. But that's because TV sets can be less than enjoyable for babies, as co-creator Bill Lawrence noted in this edition of the 'Talking TV' podcast. Gomez sounds as though he agrees with Lawrence. "I'd rather have a robot baby," Gomez said. "That's my stand on it. I think they should enjoy being babies, not be on TV."

4. Josh Hopkins, who plays Grayson, is the best at penny can, the 'Cougar Town' game that is as simple as it sounds -- it consists of tossing a penny into a can. "He's a basketball player. He's really good," Gomez said. Gomez said Hopkins is at the top of the penny can league standings, with Brian Van Holt (Bobby Cobb) not far behind. "The rest of us are kind of sub par," Gomez admitted.

5. Good penny can technique is "all about the loft," Gomez says. "You have to get the right loft. You can't line-drive it in there. It's about the finesse." He added that he's pretty good at the penny-can game on the 'Cougar Town' website.

6. He agrees with almost everyone that the title for the show is "awful," but he's enjoying the way the show is playing with the title in the opening credits. One week the show put the word "Still" over the words 'Cougar Town' and another week superimposed the words "Titles are hard." Gomez said a title card coming up will pay tribute to 'Modern Family,' ABC's better-known comedy hit. (I love me some 'Modern Family,' but a word to the wise -- some weeks, 'Cougar Town' is better. No, really, it is!)

7. Spoilers ahead for upcoming episodes: "I heard that in a script coming up, Bobby's boat goes into the water. I can't wait to see what happens with that," Gomez said. In the Thanksgiving episode, which airs Nov. 24, Elle and Laurie try to break Andy of his congenital optimism. "Other things happen, but the Andy story is about them trying to break me, and they can't," Gomez noted. (Speaking of upcoming episodes, Jules' son Travis brings home a college girlfriend for the first time in the Nov. 17 episode. That ought to go well.)

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (Unrated) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen

BY ROGER EBERT / November 3, 2010

Cast & Credits Hildegard von Bingen Barbara Sukowa Volmar Heino Ferch Richardis Hannah Herzsprung Kuno Alexander Held Jutta Lena Stolze

Zeitgeist Films presents a film written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta. In German and Latin, with English subtitles. Running time: 110 minutes. No MPAA rating.

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Tip O’Neill told us "all politics is local," and I suppose that applies as well to a cloistered religious order as to a city. "Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen" is about a remarkable 12th century woman named Hildegard von Bingen, who was cloistered with a Benedictine order at a young age and rose to become its leader, the author of spiritual books, a composer of music and an expert in herbal medicine. Although beatified, she was never elevated to sainthood, but is a saint for many feminists and holistic practitioners.

As embodied here by the powerful presence of Barbara Sukowa, she was a considerable woman, and succeeded in gaining almost everything she desired, despite a church hierarchy controlled by men. From the age of 4, she reported visions of God, and as these continued, they gave her authority and won her followers. Indeed, although in a cloister, she was permitted to go on speaking journeys and became quite widely known.

She also succeeded in moving her nuns from within the walls of the male monastery and building their own separate retreat, and then another. This she did despite the fierce objections of her superior, Abbot Kuno (Alexander Held), by appealing over his head to the local archbishop. Still refused permission, she apparently fell into a coma and was revived only by the presence of God. Or that is what she said.

What went on in the mind of this woman, essentially uneducated, who could not read the Scriptures but learned, wrote her books in her own modified alphabet and composed one of the largest surviving groups of Gregorian chant? That’s what fascinates the German writer-director, Margarethe von Trotta, who makes a choice to view Hildegard’s life in its externals and reveal few of the thoughts behind her sometimes forbidding facade. We never know what she’s thinking. That’s tantalizing.

In the small, closed world where she was raised, she clung to Jutta (Lena Stolze), the child who accompanied her to the cloister. They were "given to the church" as a sort of tithe, their entire lives decided before puberty. It is important to Hildegard to be right, and to be seen as right, and Jutta is her satellite and idolater. A new novice, Richardis von Stade (Hannah Herzsprung), enters the convent, and is favored by Hildegard, and an emotional triangle forms that is all the more desperate because none of the three recognize the lesbianism that may be at its core. In another time or place, their interdependent relationships would be recognized as romantic, but here all is sublimated in religion and a struggle for moral supremacy.

Was Hildegard faking her visions and comas? Yes, probably, but she didn’t realize it. She seems to have been spellbound by her own legend, and if her deathlike state during one crisis is psychosomatic, it is no less deathlike. She seems to have been an entirely sincere woman, self-deceived to her core. And a good woman, too, whose gifts in so many areas suggest an intelligence that found all the expression it could behind the cloister walls. One of the monks, Brother Volmar (Heino Ferch), recognizes her gifts and helps her to realize them, and so her passion is released in words, music and church politics rather than in madness.

Von Trotta is one of the most important feminist directors of recent years. See especially "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" (1975), "Marianne and Juliane" (1981) and "Rosa Luxemburg" (1986). Here she declines to impose a set of feminist ideas. She’s intrigued by the well-known story of Hildegard. The film is intense, measured and too slow, but absorbing. What was life like for this brilliant woman in a world entirely without stature or recognition for women? How did she play the cards she was dealt as a child? How did she maneuver? How aware was she of her uniqueness?

Barbara Sukowa never quite lets us know. She carefully avoids modern body and facial language, and stays within the limits of the age. So does von Trotta. We must enter these lives with our imaginations, and realize that no matter what rules society lays down for women — for anyone — ways can sometimes be found to prevail on one’s own terms.

Fair Game (PG-13) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.

Fair Game

BY ROGER EBERT / November 3, 2010

Cast & Credits Valerie Plame Naomi Watts Joseph Wilson Sean Penn Sam Plame Sam Shepard Bill Noah Emmerich Jack Michael Kelly Jim Pavitt Bruce McGill

Summit Entertainment presents a film directed by Doug Liman. Written by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, based on the books The Politics of Truth by Joseph Wilson and Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some language).

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It seems to come down to this: The Bush administration had decided to go to war in Iraq. Scrambling to find reasons to justify the war, it seized on reports that the African nation of Niger had sold uranium to Iraq. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, was sent to seek evidence. He found none. In fact, he found such sales would have been physically impossible.

His report was ignored. We went to war. The non-existent uranium sales were cited. He wrote an article in the New York Times reporting on what he found, or didn't find, in Niger. In an attempt to discredit him, someone in the administration leaked the information to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, was tried and convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury, sentenced to prison, and his sentence quickly commuted by Bush. Cheney was angry he wasn't pardoned outright. In the film, we see that Plame, under a variety of aliases, ran secret networks of informants in Bagdad and other Middle Eastern cities. When the administration blew her cover, several of her informants were killed; some reports say 70. Then the Bush spin doctors leaked the story that she was only a CIA "secretary."

The spinning is still going on. Doug Liman's "Fair Game," based on books by Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson and starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, is unusually bold for a fictionalization based on real events. Using real names and a good many facts, it argues: (1) Saddam Hussein had no WMD; (2) the CIA knew it; (3) the White House knew it; (4) the agenda of Cheney and his White House neocons required an invasion of Iraq no matter what, and (5) therefore, the evidence was ignored and we went to war because of phony claims.

Well. That's what the film says. There will no doubt be dissent. Few people are happy to be portrayed as liars and betrayers. What amazes me is that "Fair Game" doesn't play the game of using fictional names. They're all right there, including Cheney personally ordering the intelligence to be falsified.

Naomi Watts looks uncannily like the real life Plame, but that's beside the point; what I related to was the serious, workmanlike tone of her Plame, who doesn't see herself as a heroine but as a skilled operative. She has scenes where she devastates other characters with what she knows about them and how she can use that information. Sean Penn plays Ambassador Wilson, more combative than his wife, outraged by the way administration leakers try to destroy them. The film is realistic about the ways the Plame-Wilson marriage almost failed.

What's effective is how matter-of-fact "Fair Game" is. This isn't a lathering, angry attack picture. Wilson and Plame are both seen as loyal government employees, not particularly political until they discover the wrong information. The implication is that if the Bush administration hadn't suppressed their information and smeared them, there might have been no Iraq war, and untold thousands of lives would have been saved.

This topic has been so poisoned by misinformation that a rational discussion seems impossible. I suppose the question becomes, how well does "Fair Game" work as a movie? I suspect it will work better the more you walk in agreeing with it. The portrait it paints of the Wilson-Plame marriage is a very personal one, based on conflicting personalities under pressure. Penn plays Wilson as a hotheaded idealist, fueled by outrage. Watts makes Plame an ideal spy: secretive, concealing, under the radar. Perhaps she would rather her husband had bitten the bullet like a good soldier. They're surrounded by press attention, and she finds her CIA work belittled by Bush administration spin doctors and her contacts overseas trashed. Joe obviously didn't prevent the war. If he'd kept quiet, her own CIA work would not have been destroyed.

One interesting element in the movie's version is the cluelessness of George W. Bush. In this version, it's possible he didn't fully realize how flawed his information on Niger was. The svengali is Cheney. That's the collective narrative that emerges from a group of similar films, like Rod Lurie's "Nothing But the Truth" and Oliver Stone's "W." The implication was that he wanted Scooter pardoned because Scooter was acting on his orders. It's unlikely Scooter would have been acting on his own.

For Colored Girls (R) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

For Colored Girls

BY ROGER EBERT / November 3, 2010

Cast & Credits Crystal/Brown Kimberly Elise Jo/Red Janet Jackson Juanita/Green Loretta Devine Tangie/Orange Thandie Newton Yasmine/Yellow Anika Noni Rose Kelly/Blue Kerry Washington Nyla/Purple Tessa Thompson Alice/White Whoopi Goldberg Gilda Phylicia Rashad

Lionsgate presents a film written and directed by Tyler Perry, based on the play by Ntozake Shange. Running time: 134 minutes. Rated R (for disturbing violence including a rape, sexual content and language).

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Some plays resist filming. They exist as stage fantasies that can’t survive the greater realism of cinema. When a stage character performs a soliloquy, we understand exactly what’s happening. When a film character does it, it can feel strange. A monologue on film, sure — but not a poetic construction unlike the ordinary speech in the same film.

Director-writer Tyler Perry’s ambitious "For Colored Girls" is based on the Tony-nominated "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" by Ntozake Shange. Many in the audience will have seen it onstage, and that will be an advantage; they’ll understand what Perry is attempting. Ordinary moviegoers, accustomed to Perry’s mainline films, are likely to be thrown off by the unconventional approach here. Perry tries to be faithful to the play and also to his own boldly and simply told stories, and the two styles don’t fit together.

He also paints a cluttered canvas. The play featured seven characters (each known by a color) in seven places with seven kinds of problems. He adds three other significant roles, in order to flesh out actions that the play described in prose. This is too literal. His actors do an effective job with their soliloquies, but the audience is tugged back and forth between the stylized speech and the straight dramatic material.

Too bad. What a cast he has assembled: Kimberly Elise (Crystal/Brown), Janet Jackson (Jo/Red), Loretta Devine (Juanita/Green), Thandie Newton (Tangie/Orange), Anika Noni Rose (Yasmine/Yellow), Kerry Washington (Kelly/Blue), Tessa Thompson (Nyla/Purple) and Whoopi Goldberg (Alice/White). Then there’s Phylicia Rashad as a wise woman who lives in the same apartment house with six of the others, sees all and provides a running commentary.

The Rashad character is new. So are Beau Willie (Michael Ealy), a war veteran and victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome who obsesses about Crystal, and Carl (Omari Hardwick), a rich closeted gay conducting a doomed marriage with Jo. Crystal works for Jo, an imperious magazine editor, establishing some class conflict. The movie, like the play, distributes other problems among the women, so that we seem to be moving between episodes of a soap opera.

Shange’s award-winning play is justly respected, but I’m not sure it’s filmmable, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a wise choice for Perry. He seems more at home with everyday, human-comedy types of people, and here I think he is, if anything, too wary of his material. If he’d gone all the way in rewriting it into a more conventional drama, he might have been criticized by lovers of the play, but he might have made a more entertaining and accessible film.

That’s not to say "For Colored Girls" doesn’t have its virtues. Seeing these actresses together is a poignant reminder of their gifts, and of the absence of interesting roles for actresses in general and African-American ones in particular. A generation has been often shut out of fruitful roles.

I saw the movie twice, and although it never worked for me as a whole, the second time I found myself appreciating many of its parts more. The soliloquies don’t fit, but taken as free-standing dramatic entries, they’re strongly done. So there are elements here, but not a fully rounded film.

Due Date (R) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis.

Due Date

BY ROGER EBERT / November 3, 2010

Cast & Credits Peter Robert Downey Jr. Ethan Zach Galifianakis Sarah Michelle Monaghan Darryl Jamie Foxx Heidi Juliette Lewis Lonnie Danny McBride Airport screener RZA TSA agent Matt Walsh

Warner Bros. presents a film directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Phillips, Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated R (for language, drug use and sexual content).

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"Due Date" is nearly a down-market retread of the great comedy "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." It pairs up Robert Down-ey Jr. and Zack Galifianakis in the Steve Martin and John Candy roles, puts them in a car together, sends them down the highway, and doesn't neglect to rip off one but two car doors.

The first film by director Todd Phillips since his blockbuster "The Hangover" cheerfully includes some of the same raunchy humor and the same dogged persistence in the face of overwhelming character defects. It's not as funny, but few films could be, and it does have some very big laughs. Unfortunately, the story holding them together isn't as successful.

Peter Highman (Downey) and Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis) have a Cute Meet, or more of a Brute Meet, at the Atlanta airport, when Ethan's beater knocks off the door of Peter's Town Car. Peter is a neat, precise architect with a schedule to meet. Ethan is a shaggy man-child who confesses that on the way to the airport he and his buddy split a six pack — of 40s.

Ethan is like Joe Btfsplk, that character in "L'il Abner" who always had a black rain cloud over his head, with the difference that the cloud is over the head of whoever he's standing next to. Ethan efficiently destroys Peter's trip by switching carry-ons with him, shoving his hairy belly into his face (under stress, to be sure), and getting them both thrown off the flight by insisting on using the words "bomb" and "terrorist." That scenario leads to a run-in with TSA agents (who, oddly enough, seem to be morphing into Hollywood's villains du jour).

All cross-country trips involving odd couples require deadlines. Peter agrees to accept a ride in Ethan's rental car only because he must be back in Los Angeles with his wife, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), who will deliver their child very soon by C-section. Ethan needs to get to L.A. because he dreams of becoming an actor. If you doubt Ethan Tremblay has a future in acting, simply consider Zach Galifianakis.

There are stops along the way to visit Western Union, Peter's old buddy (Jamie Foxx), and Ethan's practitioner in "herbal medicines," a pot dealer played by the scene stealer Juliette Lewis. Those visits are funny. There are also running gags involving Ethan's beloved pet dog and a coffee can containing the ashes of his father. When Ethan performs the rather private act of pleasuring himself in the car's front seat, it's not funny, but when the dog is inspired to copy him, it is. No matter how much I think, I can't decide whether training a dog to do that is cruelty to an animal.

So the movie probably contains enough laughs to satisfy the weekend audience. Where it falls short is in the characters and relationships. "Due Date" may offer enough, but with the example of the classic "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," it could have offered more.

Downey and Steve Martin are more or less a stand-off. But John Candy (and director John Hughes) made his character earnest, inept and lovable. The Galifianakis character seems more an exercise in passive aggression. He lacks social skills so urgently it's hard to believe he doesn't know what he's up to. Surely no one could be that obnoxious by accident. In comedy it helps if we have a bottom line of affection for the characters, and Galifianakis and Phillips make affection awfully hard to feel for Ethan.

There's a moment in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" when the Steve Martin character thinks he has seen the last of John Candy, and then pauses, reconsiders and returns. There's a moment something like that here, but frankly, we don't know why the Downey character returns.

Megamind (PG) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now

Megamind

BY ROGER EBERT / November 3, 2010

Cast & Credits With the voices of: Megamind Will Ferrell Roxanne Tina Fey Hal/Titan Jonah Hill Minion David Cross Metro Man Brad Pitt

Paramount and DreamWorks present a film directed by Tom McGrath. Written by Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG (for action and some language).

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"Megamind" was the third 3-D movie I'd seen in a row, and as I struggled to free my glasses from their industrial-strength plastic envelope, I wasn't precisely looking forward to it. Why do 3-D glasses come so securely wrapped they seem like acts of hostility against the consumer? Once I freed my glasses and settled down, however, I was pleased to see a 3-D image that was quite acceptable. Too dim, as always, but the process was well-used and proves again that animation is incomparably more suited for 3-D than live action is.

I'd just been rewatching "Superman" (1978) and felt right at home with the opening of "Megamind," narrated by a bright blue alien over flashbacks to his infancy. Born on a distant planet, he's packed into a rocket ship and blasted off to Earth, just like the Man of Steel. En route, he meets his lifetime nemesis, a golden child who lands on Earth and in the lap of wealth. The blue child, alas, lands in a prison and is raised by hardened convicts.

As they grow up, these two super-beings are destined to play crucial roles in nearby Metro City, where they're named Megamind (voice of Will Ferrell) and Metro Man (Brad Pitt). We may remember that Superman was given his name by Lois Lane, and here the story of the two superbeings is covered by a TV reporter named Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey). Roxanne's cameraman, Hal (Jonah Hill, looking rather Jonah Hill-like), later morphs into yet a third super-being named Titan.

This set-up is bright and amusing, even if it does feel recycled from bits and pieces of such recent animated landmarks as "The Incredibles" with its superpowers and "Despicable Me" with its villain. "Megamind" even goes so far as naming Megamind's fishy sidekick "Minion" (David Cross), a nod to the Minions who serve the despicable Gru. I enjoyed Megamind's conclusion, after being bullied as a child, that if he can't get credit for doing anything good, he might as well become a villain.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a hero requires a villain, and "Megamind" has some fun by depriving Megamind of Metro Man. Left without an opponent, he loses his zeal for evildoing, and actually clones Titan to cure his loneliness. All of this of course is accomplished with much slapstick and sensational action, in a population which consists entirely of super-beings, plus Roxanne, the prison warden and cheering thousands of anonymous humans.

Tina Fey does a spirited job with Roxanne, and again I was reminded of "Superman" and Margot Kidder's high-spirited, unafraid Lois Lane. This time Roxanne isn't smitten by anyone, which is just as well because these guys are aliens, after all.

"Megamind" is an amusing family entertainment and gains some energy from clever dialogue and the fun Will Ferrell has with his character. I like the way he pronounces "Metro City" like "metricity," for example. The 3-D is well done, if unnecessary. Nothing in the movie really benefits from it, and if you can find it in 2-D, that's the best choice. Save the surcharge and see those colors nice and bright.

THE AICN Q&A: BERKELEY BREATHED

Berkeley Breathed spent years saying in interviews that no one would want to buy an omnibus collection of his rude, rash and much-loved 1980s newspaper comic "Bloom County." So how the hell did editor Scott Dunbier finally talk Breathed into allowing IDW to publish the five-volume "Bloom County: The Complete Library"?

"By getting Scott to agree to do it himself," wrote Breathed in an e-mail. "It's really 'Bloom County by Scott Dunbier' now. A jaw-droppingly monumental job, compiling all that stuff. Most of the originals looked like the Dead Sea Scrolls. The difference being that my material actually did prove that Jesus existed."

For newspaper-comics fans of a certain age, Breathed was sort of the Chuck Jones of the funny pages -- a storyteller with ridiculously sharp comic timing who worked with a cast of talking animals and screwed-up humans. He could make you laugh with tiny facial expressions and anarchic bits of slapstick, much of the latter involving a diseased cat. Drawn in feverish, last-minute all-nighters, the strip was so reckless and awesomely crass that finding it on the same page as "Marmaduke" and "Garfield" almost felt like getting away with something. Breathed tends to play his gifts down in interviews: He told me he was "destined to be an outsider" in the cartooning community -- despite winning a Pulitzer prize for it in 1987, at age 29 -- "because cartooning was a means to an end: humorous expression and storytelling in whatever medium would have me. Cartooning happened to lay in my path and I rode it." He's selling himself wildly short. If Bill Watterson was Disney Studios, Breathed was Termite Terrace -- and part of the last truly comedically badass trio of newspaper cartoonists, along with Watterson and "The Far Side"'s Gary Larson.

Breathed ended his second "Bloom County" sequel strip, "Opus," in 2008, and seems to have quit the business for good this time (his third attempt, after retiring "Bloom County" in 1989 and "Outland" in 1995). These days, he develops TV projects and makes children's books, including "Mars Needs Moms!" -- which is being made into a film by Disney and Robert Zemeckis' production company. (A teaser trailer should debut any day now.) He's also become something of an elder-statesman cartoonist, which probably gives him hives: He enjoyed a blockbuster appearance at his first San Diego Comic-Con this year, and starting in February 2011, he'll have his first-ever retrospective exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. "The show is scheduled to run February to June, and will be split between Berkeley's children's-book work and 'Bloom County,'" said Dunbier. "There will be a reception at some point with Berkeley in attendance."

Almost exactly one year ago, I interviewed Dunbier about his mad scavenger hunt to assemble "Bloom County: The Complete Library." Now Dunbier's paved the way for an interview with Breathed himself -- in support of the just-released "Complete Library" Vol. 3. Breathed agreed to be interviewed by e-mail, as is his wont. He answered over 40 questions -- talking about deadlines, copyrights, Watterson, Schulz, Trudeau, college, editors, newspapers, disrespect, IDW, "Opus," the Internet and Hollywood triumphs and horrors. (God, the stuff about the Weinsteins.) An edited transcript follows.

-- Mike Russell, CulturePulp.com

'BLOOM COUNTY' MEMORIES

MIKE RUSSELL: I'm told that Scott Dunbier is constantly egging you to let IDW reprint more of your pre-"Bloom" college comic strip "The Academia Waltz" than makes you comfortable.

BERKELEY BREATHED: Much of it is embarrassing. Not from the lack of professionalism -- that's sorta cute -- but from the idiot callousness of the humor. Nineteen-year-olds should not have access to a newspaper page.

RUSSELL: For me, the biggest revelation of the IDW's first "Bloom County" collection was watching you learn how to make a comic strip in public. Almost the entire cast from the first six months of "Bloom County" was jettisoned. Was the syndicate cool about giving you time to figure it out?

BREATHED: The Washington Post syndicate had little option, as they hadn't a clue what I should do. They were smart about the fact that they were only slightly dumber than me vis a vis what a comic strip is supposed to be.

They'd tried to make a strip by committee just before they stumbled on my work: "Dupont Circle." A magnificent failure, of course. By the time they got to me, they were flummoxed and just threw me a bottle of Vermouth and the keys to the Ferrari.

Yep -- you can see me learning to drive and destroying the neighborhood in the process. All in the books now, alas.

RUSSELL: On your children's books, you've said you lay out the story in pictures, then write it. What was your construction process for "Bloom County"? Did you work backwards from a punchline -- i.e., Steve Dallas turned into a giant can of SPAM -- and then figure out how to get there?

BREATHED: Indeed -- you start with the image, idea or gag you want to finish with, and then work backwards to find the simplest, most efficient way to get to it.

Not that I did this well during much of "Bloom County." I see it now as shockingly overwritten. Today, I'd edit the dialogue down nearly 50% with half the strips. Becoming a screen- and TV writer teaches you much about word discipline.

RUSSELL: One thing that distinguished "Bloom County" from other strips was that it wasn't just a single type of comic -- it had political and cultural satire, but also continuity, lyrical moments, deep characterization, slapstick. Was there a conscious sense of juggling these tones?

BREATHED: I wouldn't use the word "conscious sense" in any context regarding my approach to work. Honestly, one tempts the gods with that.

Nothing in the history of creativity was done with less calculation than "Bloom County." The good ol' days. And, I might add, lovely irony, as it followed the aforementioned "Dupont Circle," which was cobbled together each week by a committee of editors from the Washington Post. I use this story now to steer away nosy producers as we put together a kids' TV show right now -- which, by the way, is EXACTLY like producing a comic strip, from a creating point of view. I'm back home.

RUSSELL: Re-reading "Bloom County" now, the sheer rudeness of some of these comics is still sort of breathtaking. What sort of editorial gauntlet did you have to run at the time to preserve what you've called the comic's "up yours" attitude?

BREATHED: Few fights then. Almost none. Interestingly ... probably impossible now. Fear rules in the pages today. Shivering, pee-in-your-pants fear that another subscriber will cancel. So the editors edit everything and anything out that could possibly offend. Or be vaguely interesting. A brilliant, sad strategy to speed up the inevitable collapse.

RUSSELL: Could "Bloom County" even exist in syndication today?

BREATHED: "No" is the short answer. Papers would be flummoxed by "Bloom County" now. It was meant for youthful eyeballs -- and there be none of those ogling newspaper comic pages now. Old-timers chuckling over "Doonesbury" and "Beetle Bailey" are pretty much all that's left. They clip out their favorites, stick 'em on the fridge, and put the rest under their parakeets to shit on. The good ol' days.

RUSSELL: You've talked at length about your deadline insanity in "Bloom County"'s early days -- epic all-nighters, finishing comics on the plane ride over to the syndicate, etc. Did a passenger sitting next to you on a plane ever freak out to see you speed-drawing in the air?

BREATHED: They were understandably intrigued, and often peppered me with questions while I tried to work. Not so interestingly, it was usually "What's it like to be a cartoonist?" An impossible question to answer -- even while one isn't on deadline trying to ink on a piece of 28-inch-wide paper balanced on a 14-inch-wide airline table while going through thunderstorms over St. Louis. I remember answering it with, "Well, what's it like to be a nose picker?" It made no sense, but that was the point, and they'd usually go quiet until Washington. The good ol' days.

RUSSELL: How long did it take you to produce a finished "Bloom County" strip when you were working on all fear-fueled cylinders?

BREATHED: Don't hafta tell you.

RUSSELL: You've said middle age gave you a bit more discipline, deadline-wise. Was this a gradual process, or was there an actual come-to-Jesus moment in there somewhere?

BREATHED: Maturity just handled it eventually. After 20 years, it simply became too embarrassing to seem that much of a juvenile dolt about deadlines. Plus, I had kids. They don't need to observe and learn that extra dollop of adolescent dweebishness from their dad when he's a walking manifestation of arrested development already.

RUSSELL: Steve Dallas' arias of foul behavior were always my favorite part of "Bloom County." I believe you've said he was based somewhat on a real person. Did that person ever catch on?

BREATHED: No, no. Steve Dallas was a synthesis of all the frat boys I went to school with. There was a suicidal kid at U of Texas that came to believe that he was Steve Dallas and I was listening through his walls. I'd wake each morning to find him sleeping on my front porch. 'Twas my first hint as to the can of worms that I'd opened with cartooning. And their weird power. Then.

RUSSELL: One reason the IDW reprints are possible is because you fought to win back your copyright in 1989, and encouraged peers like Gary Larson to do the same.

BREATHED: I had to swindle my rights back, which was unpleasant. A necessary evil. I told them I was going to quit "Bloom County" unless I got the rights back which they should have never owned to begin with. They thought I was bluffing until a week before my deadline. A Post exec flew out and hurriedly signed the papers.

A week later I told them I was retiring anyway, but now with my rights. War is messy.

RUSSELL: You went to your first Comic-Con this year. Were you surprised by the enduring love for "Bloom County," which you'd described in older interviews as having a topical sell-by date? Did it make you feel like less of -- as you've put it -- "a fraud and a cheat"?

BREATHED: Ha. Oh, I'm still a fraud, but I'll take "Appreciated Fraud" these days. Comic-Con was a marvelous experience. I relished being around so much creativity ... as nutcake as it was. I walked the insanity and breathed it in -- savoring it like a vaguely unpleasant odor from one's past that still brings on a smile nevertheless.

I live in a community where the only creativity expressed is at tax time.

[You can find videos of Breathed's 2010 Comic-Con presentation right here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ]

RUSSELL: Did you always see yourself as an outsider in the cartooning community?

BREATHED: I was destined to be an outsider because cartooning was a means to an end: humorous expression and storytelling in whatever medium would have me. Cartooning happened to lay in my path and I rode it. But the True Believers knew a part-timer when they saw one. Not in my DNA.

RUSSELL: You've talked about the "ridicule and disrespect" you've endured in certain quarters, especially early in your career. But now that print retrospectives are being issued of your work, do you sense that changing? Are you an elder statesman now?

BREATHED: "Ridicule"? Where'd I say that? The only disrespect I got was from the editorial cartoonists royally pissed I won a Pulitzer. Now there's some ill-treatment that one can relish. It's like being disrespected by your mother-in-law who sawed her own legs off during a drunk. Good simile.

ASTONISHING HOLLYWOOD TALES

RUSSELL: Before Zemeckis came along for "Mars Needs Moms!," you had frustrating Hollywood experiences: an animated "Wish for Wings that Work" special that you mildly dismiss in the Vol. 3 side-notes as "sentimental"; a production of "Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big" that you've called "unfinished and unwatchable"; and a recent Miramax development process for an "Opus" movie that your recent comments suggest is best forgotten. (They wanted to redesign Opus? Really?) What are some of the most dunderheaded notes you've gotten during a Hollywood development process?

BREATHED: Bob Weinstein in 2006: "You can't have a penguin talk to people."

The project only had one place to go from there. It's very funny now. In the end, it cost him an astonishing amount of money to be allowed to say that.

RUSSELL: You've said, "Opus shall remain unsullied by another director's vision. He's mine." If "Mars Needs Moms!" goes well, is there any chance you'd pitch a Breathed-helmed "Opus" movie?

BREATHED: I've got nothing to do with "Mars Needs Moms" as a production. They declined my invitation to participate in development ... as well they should, in retrospect. They wanted freedom to re-invent. I granted. They went in an unexpected but nonetheless exciting direction with the movie.

I'll tell you a secret (this won't get on the Internet, will it?) -- I haven't told my kids that they've made a movie from my book. So I'll take 'em to the movies on opening day, but tell them we're going to see a Michael Moore lefty commie documentary on TARP. The opening bits for "Mars Needs Moms" will come up, and then I get to say, "Whoa. What the heck? Man, I'm always the last to know. Good title, though."

Being a smart-ass is a DNA thing in the genes. Trying to run away from it would be like expecting a llama to quack.

And no, there won't be an "Opus" movie. Bob and Harvey Weinstein own it and they don't think penguins should talk to people.

RUSSELL: What was it like directing Jonathan Winters in "Edwurd Fudwupper"?

BREATHED: I dearly love this story, because it's so instructive about life in general. The great man arrived royally pissed-off to have been conned into such a cheesy production. So I stuck him in a chair with several pretty make-up girls fussing over him, and he started telling funny stories and making people laugh, as I suspected. Boom. Like touching a match to some nitrates. He exploded, and I got a great little performance. The only successful thing about that disaster. Actually, we had Haley Joel Osment and Frances McDormand as voice talents, and they were wonderful. But the animation simply never got done to my satisfaction and it was never finished. Hiding in a vault somewhere.

RUSSELL: With "Mars Needs Moms!," do you finally feel you've gotten the toehold in Hollywood that you wanted? Did you think it would take this long?

BREATHED: Hardly a toehold, but it will be great fun seeing one's imagination realized in a movie. The movie business is all the crap and ego and greed that people have always laid upon it. But it is also the present depository of the most unabashedly creative people on the planet. They're not trying to invent the next fucking Facebook. They're trying to tell you a story and carry you somewhere. All of us -- whether we get into production or not -- are lucky to work in such a business. But they are all twisted nuts. Buried the lead.

REMEMBERING SPARKY

RUSSELL: You, Bill Watterson and Gary Larson all called your signature strips quits after about a decade, before you'd all lost your fire. What did the three of you understand that others creators don't?

BREATHED: Always leave them wanting more. Oh, how cartoonists ignore that one.

RUSSELL: You participated in the "Dear Mr. Watterson" fan documentary. Is he aware of the effort?

BREATHED: Oh, I'm sure he is. But he ain't poking his head out.

RUSSELL: Are you and Watterson still in touch?

BREATHED: The boy has gone to ground. We exchanged a large number of letters many years ago, where he'd penned brilliant, hilarious, deeply cruel cartoons of me or Opus at both our expenses. But now? Only quiet. I've got a very solid report that he was seen working at a Six Flags doing caricatures for 5 bucks. I'm serious. They said he looked really happy, albeit completely insane. I put out a bowl of milk for him on the porch on warm summer nights.

RUSSELL: Have you ever reflected on how Charles M. Schulz squeezed about three decades of prime greatness out of his 50-year run? (If you've read "The Complete Peanuts," the sheer stamina of that run becomes overwhelming.)

BREATHED: Cartooning coursed through his veins like cholesterol. His wife Jeannie once explained to me that he couldn't quit -- as I had suggested he consider -- because he drew to live. It would have killed him to stop. And indeed, he died the day that last strip appeared.

I'll be checking out in a different way.

RUSSELL: Schulz sent you some get-well art when you broke your back.

[In early 1986, Breathed -- as he writes in a Vol. 3 endnote -- "ran out of gas in a homebuilt ultralight and crashed into a boulder." It's why Vol. 3 ends with three Sunday strips in a row -- the last dated Feb. 23, 1986 -- and Vol. 4 starts when Breathed's injury-induced hiatus ended, on March 31, 1986.]

Please explain what Schulz's gift meant to you, at the time and now.

BREATHED: To be truthful, not that much at the time. But I will always harbor a deep, deep regret that I didn't make it a point to get to know him. He lived relatively close ... and was an odd, unexpected genius in a charmingly dumb way. The best kind of genius. The fact that they never gave him a Pulitzer Prize should be a curse upon the souls of the Columbia people. What simpletons -- they were so easily cowed when the editorial cartoonists raised a ruckus when I won. Such a narrow, parochial view of cartooning they and the editorial cartoonists have.

THE ART OF THE REVISIT

RUSSELL: As the IDW books have gone on, you've offered more and more remarks in the "sidebar" commentary that accompanies some of the strips. Why the increased participation?

BREATHED: Having fun looking back. In many ways, I'm almost just another reader. Most I barely remember. Most, in fact, seem to me to have been written by someone I don't know well. It's an odd bit of dissonance for me.

RUSSELL: Is there a "sweet spot" for you, reading over the entire run of "Bloom County" -- a point where you feel the strip peaks, narratively and artistically?

BREATHED: I came across my favorites ... and I point them out in the volumes. It's fun putting enough distance between me and my work where I can read it like a fan. I'll laugh. It's a weird feeling. But a good one. Like sex with cows.

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. Please don't include.

[Readers -- this is an e-mail interview. -ed.]

RUSSELL: When the IDW collections were coming together, were you ever tempted to restore elements the syndicate had cut -- restoring a gun removed from a man's hand, for example?

BREATHED: We handled each case differently. We usually fell back on what was actually published. Other times, I made them the way I had intended. Tough calls, often.

It was very, very, very hard to resist re-writing many of the Sundays. Some were in simply hugely ghastly in need of editing. Like that sentence.

RUSSELL: What's an example of a strip you did revisit?

BREATHED: I won't tell you. Won't. Can't. But I did. I cut about twenty unnecessary sentences out of some needless Opus oratory that made my teeth hurt. Ruined the spirit of the enterprise. But I did it, I'm not proud, and it's my book and I get to break the rules. I think I was high on horse tranquilizers when I wrote it in 1984, so there's my moral license.

RUSSELL: I just want to say: I hope there's a way to get the "Billy and the Boingers" floppy LP single from the Little, Brown books into one of these collections. That issue of the "Bloom Picayune," as well.

BREATHED: You will have to die unhappy. You find me a record player and I'll put the records in.

RUSSELL: How about a CD single?

BREATHED: I'll tell IDW that Mike Russell will be paying for this.

RUSSELL: Given any thought to having IDW collect "Outland" and "Opus"?

BREATHED: I've found that with Dunbier and IDW ... it's best to never say never. And then change your phone number.

GOING DIGITAL, GOING VINTAGE and SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

RUSSELL: You've embraced digital tools for coloring and painting. Have you experimented with going digital on the linework, as well?

BREATHED: Ha! If only. I just can't free up and get loose without a pencil. They may be the bridge too far for me, digitally.

No surprise-- painting digitally changed my career. My old painting table sits behind me now, gathering cobwebs. I miss only the beautiful painting to hang on a wall that used to be the result. Tangible, physical art can now be thrilling to look at. But far too slow for storytelling ... which is really my job. I don't paint. I draw stories.

RUSSELL: What was the learning curve to ramp up on the digital-painting process?

BREATHED: Steep for me. Hair-pulling incline. Career-changing once I went over the top.

RUSSELL: I've read that you have an impressive vintage-toy collection. What's your most prized piece?

BREATHED: An original Buck Rogers Disintegrator pistol from 1935. Ray guns. I was born too late.

RUSSELL: Has treatment for your Spasmodic torticollis [referenced on Breathed's Wikipedia page] proven effective? BREATHED: I mis-diagnosed myself. I just had a whopper of a neck spasm that dropped me for several days -- literally -- then lingered for a year. It was a great opportunity to put myself in the cartoon again. I love the drama.

'OPUS' AND THE END

RUSSELL: How would you describe your relationship with a syndicate editor? I remember I was having a late dinner with your then-editor Amy Lago at a 2005 journalism conference, and she was called away in the middle of it to help you make an "Opus" deadline. "He always gets a special dispensation from me," I recall her saying before she left. Nice person.

BREATHED: Amy was the only editor that I allowed to truly edit my cartoons. She knew the game. She knew that her job was not to tell me something wasn't funny ... but that it wasn't clear. She's the last of a dying breed. Like a vodka-swigging unicorn with a hell of a sense of humor.

She spanks cartoonists, by the way. We need to be on the record with this.

[I e-mailed Breathed's remarks to Ms. Lago for comment. She responded: "Mr. Breathed is, obviously, in need of another spanking."]

RUSSELL: The Internet's biggest impact on culture has been the fragmentation of discourse -- there's no one central album or TV show or comic strip that's a universal discussion point any more. How blessed do you feel for having gotten out of the game before that fragmentation really set in?

BREATHED: Your question is my answer. Blessed. The last hurrah. People think that things will unravel with rising sea levels. I happen to think that it's because we won't all ever be humming the same song at the same time around the country… or laughing at the same cartoon.

RUSSELL: You're somewhat unusual in having retired from comics three times and returned to them twice. Why do you think both "Outland" and "Opus" reintroduced tropes and characters from "Bloom County" (and cut down on what you've called "stylistic detours") as they went along?

BREATHED: Because I do as all artists and writers should do: Write what we know. I knew Opus.

RUSSELL: When you launched "Opus," you scored a glorious contractual obligation that the strip run large. The strip did not appear online, either, initially, in a bid to boost print-newspaper circulation. But changes followed. "Opus" shrank in size, lost some detail in its color palette and ended up syndicated on Salon.com. And when you ended the strip, you in fact asked readers to go online to see the final panel (a generous gesture on behalf of the Humane Society). How did your consideration of the Web and the newspaper industry change over the run of the strip?

BREATHED: I knew I was on borrowed time -- and hence announced on the first day that it would go for five years and not a day more. Our culture has moved on from newspapers, and the cartoon strip as we know it has sailed off into the sunset. The Web will be a home for graphic humor. But it will be different.

There are tribes of Indians in the jungles of Brazil that have never seen a spoon. But when one of them tries to get another to step into their canoe while holding an armload of bananas, promising to hold the canoe steady, the other guy will say "Oh right, and Lucy won't yank the football away at the last second, asshole."

We've lost that.

RUSSELL: Do you follow any webcomics?

BREATHED: I've never read comics anywhere. I will die wondering if I would have read mine if someone else created it.

RUSSELL: You've cited the "coarsening national dialogue" as spurring the end of "Opus." It was, you said, a bitterness-avoidance measure. Has it gotten coarser since?

BREATHED: I've gotten pissier, and hence, my cartoons would too. No fun, those.

When you're 24, you don't see the bullshit in quite the stark relief that you do in later years. That filter of youth helps you keep having fun with self-expression. I can't see this screen without reading glasses now. But I don't need glasses to see the strings yanking on events now. Anger is usually a poor lubricant for mirth. The kind that doesn't tear up the ground behind it, anyway.

RUSSELL: Ever feel the urge to call Garry Trudeau and finally make the peace? Your statements in recent interviews almost feel like ramp-ups to this act.

BREATHED: Good ol' Garry. Ever see the interviews with Elizabeth Edwards where she's asked about Rielle Hunter and she can't get herself to actually say Hunter's name? Calls her "that woman"?

He's sorta like that with me. Come to think of it, I'm sorta like Rielle. I just want all of us to be a big happy family even while I hold his fat homely bastard love child that looks like a penguin.

RUSSELL: What was the final straw with "Opus"? The blowback with the Lola Granola-converts-to-Islam strip? (I can't believe you could have Mary Kay declare a bloody fatwa on Opus twenty years ago, but have papers pull that Lola Granola strip today.)

BREATHED: I was already headed out the door when I spent an evening standing in the produce section of a Trader Joe's talking with the publisher of the Washington Post Company directing me over the phone as to how much hair should dangle down from the forehead of Steve Dallas' newly-converted Islamic girlfriend. Bo Jones -- a big, delightful, shrewd man in the tough job of sounding very, very small due to the times and pressures of a business that was wallowing in panic. It was a sad moment. But not unfunny.

I announced the final day for "Opus" within a week. An era had closed. What a good time was had, though.

RUSSELL: So you're standing in a Trader Joe's going back and forth on the phone with Bo Jones about a strand of hair on Lola Granola's head. How pissed-off are you becoming as this conversation goes on?

BREATHED: Aggravated, not angry. It'd be like getting angry at the fact that my kids are texting their lives away with the new technology. It just is. But that moment was galvanizing: time to say goodbye. The room in which you're singing is now empty except for the sound of your own echo.

The good news is that if you're willing to step through some new doors, there's always other rooms with people to serenade. Or in my case, to moon.

"Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume Three (1984-1986)" is in stores now. You can buy it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BooksAMillion, among other retailers.

-- Mike Russell: the personal site, the Twitter account, the e-mail addy.

How to Write a Better Resume Episode 248: November 4, 2010 General Grammar

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by Mignon Fogarty Friends and family often ask me to review their résumés before they send them to potential employers, and the most common error I see is that people fail to use parallel construction in lists of accomplishments or responsibilities. The podcast edition of this article was sponsored by Audible. Get a free audiobook to keep when you sign up for a free 14-day trial at AudiblePodcast.com/gg. How to Write a Better Résumé You probably did lots of things you want to highlight for a potential employer. For example maybe in your last job you were responsible for making coffee, decoration hanging, and you ran the office football pool. That's sure to impress them, right? It will impress them more if you change it so your three grueling duties are written using parallel construction. It's a mishmash the way it is now, the verbs are in different forms and in different places, and the last part (you ran the office football pool) is a whole clause. We can clean it up by making each part start with a gerund—an “ing” form of a verb: I was responsible for making coffee, hanging decorations, and running the office football pool. There, much better, each part is a gerund phrase. They match. Start each item in a list with the same verb form or article. More Ways Using Parallel Construction Helps You Write a Better Résumé Although the most common errors I see are using different verb forms or phrase forms, occasionally people will jumble their articles or prepositions. Here's a sentence that could be better: My team won best complainers, the most likely to leave early, and least likely to turn off the lights when we leave. The problem is the article “the” in front of “most likely to leave early.” The first and last items in the list don't have an article in front of them, so to keep your list parallel, you need to either remove the “the” from the middle item or put an article in front of everything. My team won best complainers, most likely to leave early, and least likely to turn off the lights when we leave. My team was voted the best complainers, the most likely to leave early, and the least likely to turn off the lights when we leave. Both versions are correct. You could write it either way; the important thing is that each list item is either bare or preceded by an article. Again, they match. You want your socks to match when you go to an interview. Make sure you get that interview by double-checking that your list items match. What Should You Capitalize on a Résumé? Make sure you get that interview by double-checking that the list items on your résumé match. And on a note completely unrelated to parallel construction, the second most common mistake I see on résumés is people capitalizing words willy nilly. We capitalize words because they are proper nouns—the name of something. That means you capitalize the official name of your department, but you don't capitalize the name of your position when you use it in a sentence. You also don't capitalize words that describe your department, a project you worked on, or your coworkers. As a salesperson in the Department of Desserts, I handled the gumdrop and jelly bean accounts at the request of the marketing group.

The only words in that sentence that should be capitalized are “department” and “desserts” because “Department of Desserts” is the official name of the department, which makes it a proper noun. There's no reason to capitalize “salesperson,” “gumdrop,” “jelly bean,” or “marketing,” but I see people do it all the time on résumés. Capitalizing unnecessary words doesn't make them seem more important; it just makes it seem like you don't know how to use the language.

Superman (1978)

BY ROGER EBERT / November 4, 2010

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The first time we see Superman in his red, blue and yellow uniform is nearly an hour into "Superman." Perhaps the filmmakers agreed with Spielberg's famous statement that "Jaws" would work better the longer he kept the shark off the screen. That means the film doesn't open like most superhero movies or James Bonds with a sensational pre-title sequence. To be sure, it opens on the planet Krypton with his father Jor-El preparing him to be launched into space. But those aren't action scenes; they provide weight to the origin story every superhero requires.

In fact, Richard Donner's "Superman" (1978) is surprisingly slow-starting. The scenes of young Clark Kent's boyhood and adolescence might seem pointless if we didn't know, "and someday…that child will grow up to be Superman." The high school football scene, where the future Man of Steel gets bullied and has a cute girl snatched away from him, pay off later in establishing Clark Kent as a shy and, yes, mild-mannered reporter. But they also raise the intriguing question: Who is this being, anyway.

He is clearly not human. His body is not from our world. It's probable he can't reproduce here, or perhaps even have sex with the cute girl -- or Lois Lane. Toward the end, when Lex Luthor's girlfriend kisses him, his response (before flying off to stop an earthquake) is positively Vulcan-like; he wonders why she kissed him before, and not after, freeing him from the Kryptonite.

Christopher Reeve, who must have spent his career in a love-hate relationship with the character, does a more nuanced acting job than he's usually credited for. As Clark Kent he's not merely mild-mannered, but performs with a wink to the audience because we know who he really is. Much of his dialogue is double entendre. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, looking like an undertaker in his blue suit, his hair coated with greasy alderman stuff, he may be 6-foot-4 and have the physique of a god, but Margot Kidder's Lois Lane doesn't take the bait. Perhaps she senses there's something… off… about Clark. She swoons for Superman and literally flies away with him, but then how could anyone think Superman looked like Clark Kent? Superman doesn't wear glasses. Is she seduced more by the superpowers than by the personality?

Probably. As Clark Kent, Reeve deliberately channeled a touch of Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby." As Superman, he goes to some pains to have no personality at all. It would be fatal to play Superman as a hero, and Reeve and Donner understand that. He had no personality in the comic books and has none here. He exists as a fact.

Young Clark Kent is saddened when his human foster father (Glenn Ford) has died of a heart attack. His foster mother (Phyllis Thaxter) has been warm to him in their grief. But soon Clark leaves her (walking off straight through a field), and explains that he must be about his father's business. He's apparently unmoved that the widow will be left alone on the farm. Mrs. Kent takes it well: "I knew this day would come."

How did she know that? The Kents knew Clark was sui generis, but was it discussed? He was advised to keep his powers under wraps, but why? In the original screenplay there was a scene of Jor-El explaining why he would need to keep his powers secret. The scene is missing here, and it occurs to me that there never was a good reason why Clark Kent and Superman needed dual identities. It's also a question why Clark waits to flaunt his superpowers. He walks all the way to Metropolis, where he demonstrates he can fly, stop a helicopter and a 707 from falling, and so on. Did he always know he could do that that? How did he know? Did it take practice?

(Enlarge Image) The wisdom of the comic books and the movie is that no attempt is made to explain too much. The device of the deadly Kryptonite is necessary because a superhero must have at least one weakness to give him interest. Other astonishments are simply designed to be accepted, as children do when told a story. He is Superman, he fights for Truth, Justice and the American Way, and that's that.

More recent superhero movies are top-heavy with special effects and wall-to-wall action. "Superman" is more restrained in its telling, but doesn't seem slow, probably because it tells a good story rich in archetypes. It started something. "It is to the superhero genre what 'Snow White' is to animation," writes the young Indian critic Krishna Shenoi. "It is literally the film that started the superhero film genre. Without it, there would be no 'Batman,' no 'X-Men,' no 'Iron Man'."

"Superman" pointed the way for a B picture genre of earlier decades to transform itself into the ruling genre of today. When the flamboyant producer Alexander Salkind announced his film and signed Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman for millions, the industry thought he was crazy. Comic books weren't being called graphic novels back then, and the emergence of the Marvel superhero stable was still ahead.

"Superman's" most influential element is probably its special effects. Superman did lots of stunts in his earlier incarnations in movie serials and on TV, but rarely had effects like these been linked to the genre. Some of his heroics are frankly laughable, as when he descends to the bottom of a rift in the earth caused by an earthquake and literally pushes the early back up into place. Or when he flies into the exhaust of a missile and tilts it off course. And in the height of absurdity, he flies so fast around the planet that he reverses time and saves Lois Lane' life. The problems of logic presented by that stunt beggar the imagination.

But the point is, these effects on a vast scale are done well, and they upped the ante in the superhero genre. They are done traditionally, with back projection, traveling matte shots, blue screen, optical printers and all the other tools rendered obsolete by CGI. Is it only my imagination that the old-fashioned effects seem to have more weight and presence?

The subterranean lair of Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) is an example of classical set construction, probably combined with some effects. Luthor and his assistant Otis (Ned Beatty) and mistress Eve Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) lead a bizarre existence in what seems to be a subterranean train terminal. The film lacks the usual vista of Bond-style minions laboring at giant machines; instead, Hackman perhaps outsources his villainy. His plan to trigger the San Andreas Fault, drop California into the sea, and end up in possession of the new seacoast is rather glorious, I think.

Schemes no less absurd were plotted in Superman comic books, and in Bond movies. But "Superman" pushes on into the realm of comedy. Donner pulls off a balancing act involving satire, action, romcom clichés and of course a full serving of clichés from hard-boiled newspaper movies. What's admirable is that Salkind and Donner realized they had to make a comedy. The film came in an era of Disaster Movies that took themselves with dreadful earnestness, and they knew the essential element of Superman was fun. Superheroes who came later to big budget movies, notably Batman and Iron Man, would be burdened with angst. But Superman was above that sort of thing. Above it, or emotionally incapable of it, or whatever.

Flashback: Alexander Salkind, his son Ilya and his wife Berta held a press dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Cannes to celebrate "Superman." Toasts were given, speeches were made, and then Berta rose majestically and shattered a glass on the floor. Silence fell. She was the great love of his life, a flamboyant Mexican woman.

"Alexander Salkind says he produced this film," she proclaimed. "He did not produce 'Superman.' My son Ilya produced 'Superman.' And I produced 'Ilya!'" She then started throwing plates, glasses, bottles, vases and pitchers around the room. The guests dove beneath their tables.

The headwaiter summoned aid. Berta was quieted and taken from the room. Waiters materialized and swept away the wreckage. New tablecloths and place settings were laid. Alexander, having attended his wife, now returned to the room.

"I think," he said, "we will skip the cheese."

November 04, 2010 Due Date

A movie review by James Berardinelli

Due Date

COMEDY:

United States, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-11-05

Running Length:

1:40

MPAA Classification:

R (Profanity, Sexual Content)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

2.35:1

Cast:

Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx

Director:

Todd Phillips

Screenplay:

Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel & Todd Phillips

Cinematography:

Lawrence Sher

Music:

Christophe Beck

U.S. Distributor:

Warner Brothers

Subtitles:

none

Reuniting director Todd Phillips with the actor whose name no one can pronounce (the inimitable Zach Galifianakis) would seem to represent an excellent cornerstone for another laugh-till-you-drop comedy. Add Robert Downey Jr., possibly the best American thespian working today, and Due Date's prospects would seem to be stratospheric. Sadly, this movie is proof that pedigree doesn't mean everything. At best, this cross-country road trip movie feels like a warmed over update of Planes, Trains and Automobiles with heavy doses of raunchiness patching the holes left by the affability of John Candy and the screen chemistry enjoyed by Candy and co-star Steve Martin. Phillips seems to have forgotten that bawdy comedy is only deemed "edgy" if it's funny. When the seedy jokes fall flat, the result is crass.

That's not to argue that Due Date is never funny. There are some sequences, including one in which a dog imitates its master in inappropriate behavior and another in which Iron Man shows how a superhero deals with an unruly kid, that hint at what Due Date could have been had it pushed the comedy envelope a little farther (as The Hangover did). But the film's determination to spend time on failed relationship building between the two mismatched main characters and its unwillingness to veer away from the standard-order warm fuzzy ending make Due Date unremarkable.

The film opens in Atlanta with Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) about to catch a flight home to Los Angeles, where his pregnant wife, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), is hoping his return will precede the arrival of their first child. From the moment Peter steps out of the cab at the airport, things start going wrong. Murphy has arrived in the person of Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis), whose annoying friendliness and refusal to avoid words like "terrorist" and "bomb" while on board an aircraft result in Peter not only being forcibly removed from the plane by air marshals but put on the "no fly" list. Worse, with his wallet still at his vacated seat, he has no credit cards, cash, or I.D. That's when Ethan comes to the rescue, offering Peter a ride to L.A. Not long after the trip from hell has begun, Peter will wish that he had imitated Forrest Gump and made the journey on foot.

The best way to illustrate the central flaw in Due Date is by making a comparison with Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The contrast is warranted since Due Date exists somewhere between an homage to the John Hughes film and an unofficial remake. Although it's true that no trains have starring roles, two have cameos. It's hard to imagine anyone with reasonable movie experience not emerging from Due Date to remark that it was better when it was called Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Instead of going the John Candy route of setting Ethan up as a loveable loser, this screenplay reduces him to a detestable irritant - a mosquito bite on the head of a zit. The film's attempts to soften Ethan and provide an emotional component to his back story fail. They, like the obligatory relationship that develops between him and Peter, reek of Hollywood artifice. The key component that elevated Planes, Trains and Automobiles - the chemistry between Steve Martin and John Candy - never materializes in Due Date. The interaction between Downey and Galifianakis shows no warmth and little depth.

This is not Robert Downey Jr. at his best. Admittedly, playing the straight man in a raunchy, sophomoric comedy is not the most challenging or fulfilling job, but Downey brings less verve to it than he has to any recent role, including that of Tony Stark. Galifianakis deserves points for generating as much audience dislike as he does. One supposes he borrowed tips from Steve Carell, his co-star in Dinner for Schmucks. Carell's character in that movie and Galifianakis' in this one are essentially the same individual with an identical critical personality trait: they are irritating beyond belief. Jamie Foxx, Downey's co-star in The Soloist, makes an appearance that is more in the nature of an extended cameo than a supporting part.

Due Date is not without humor, but it lacks the explosive spontaneity of The Hangover. The script is not as clean or crisp and some of the funnier moments appear to have been shoehorned into the final production since they have no bearing on the movie's trajectory (a perfect example being Peter's method of dealing with an unruly child). Due Date also suffers from the listless, formulaic pattern that characterizes many road films, both in terms of how the characters relate to each other and how events unfold. One of the delights of The Hangover was its total unpredictability. One could argue that Due Date asks the question of how much laughter can be wrung out of an overly familiar story. The answer, at least in this case, is: not enough to justify paying the price of a full theatrical admission.

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Harry says that FOUR LIONS may not be as iconic as DR STRANGELOVE, but it is cut from the same satiric cloth!

Published on: Nov 10, 2010 1:39:31 CST

SPOILER ALERT !! I'm not real sure what I thought I was seeing with FOUR LIONS. I think in some ways I was expecting something more cartoonish, perhaps even bloody. What I wasn't expecting was the most biting satire that I've seen since DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. In fact, in someways this could be called, FOUR LIONS OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LAUGH AT AL QAEDA.

I mean, think about the terrorist attempts since 9/11. We've had the vaunted Shoe Bomber and the Exploding Underwear Man as the biggest headlines. But FOUR LIONS deconstructs the Terrorist Cell in the same way, in the very same kind of political and societal climate, as Kubrick faced when he deconstructed the far more epic Cold War with DR STRANGELOVE... and to similar ends. It made one laugh at the notion of the level of madness that would be necessary to actually cause Global Annihilation of the entire of humanity. Here... it has been scaled down to some fairly incompetent, ill educated glory hunting pissed off jihadists from London.

For some reason I thought I was going to be seeing a mockumentary, so when I found myself watching a more traditionally made movie, I was instantly delighted. This is a superior film. So superior that it dares to make us imagine just how insanely incompetent someone must be to intentionally blow themselves up.

I get these guys. They're not Snidely Whiplash. They're a different sort. They have a sort of taste for things. They have music, their car has issues. They basically unhappy with life, but they have senses of humor, but basically, they're all pretty weak people. They have plenty of reasons to be pissed off, and no real reason to live. They feel, the best reason to live, is to die with many. And somehow, that's they're notion of being a badass, being a man. Ya know, the chicken shit way out.

Now, I'm not entirely sure why I was expecting a truly absurdly goofy film, that is here. Don't get me wrong, this is a very funny movie for most of the movie, but we are talking about a story about Suicide Bombers. Even if we hate what they stand for, even if it is the darkest of subject matter... these are still human beings that we're spending time with. They're all sorts of stupid, but they're stupidity is in a weird kind of way... endearing. Sure they spout some pretty hateful and absurdly stupid things... and as a result, we laugh. But in the end, you can be quite a bit surprised how you'll react.

This cell is made up of a motivated leader, with a wife and kid. He adapts the story of THE LION KING to his own perverse way of thinking, to prepare his son for his own death. He doesn't outwardly say that, but it is obvious that that's what he's up to. Omar's belief is that his sacrifice will make his son a better, safer man. That it could change things. But he's incredibly deluded.

He surrounds himself with friends that all either just listen to him, or the other friend / slash competitor for being the leader of their little cell. This is BARRY, played by Nigel Lindsay. He's the white Angry British Muslim, and you really get the idea he's in this for the fucking badass commitment to ruling in the hereafter. He's about causing Armageddon. He wants to be the biggest badass he could be. His plans are the most radical. The most hardcore. He's a suicide bomber because, well... He's THAT committed. Never mind the fact that he's a fucking dumbshit. The sort of guy that would seriously believe that if you just constantly shook your head, that your face will be blurry on the Video Cameras throughout London. So whenever you do anything incriminating, shake your face about violently. But it isn't that he believes this, it is more like he loves to make those more gullible than him, kinda make an ass out of themselves. He's kind of a piece of shit, in a funny kind of way.

Then you have Waj, played by Kayvan Novak. He's kind of the dumb friend that you could talk into anything. He's a follower in the friend dynamic. And he's kind of the one you're rooting for. He has a perfect character arc to inflict the most... "OH FUCK" on ya. Because, he's just so densely naive. You just sort of feel for him. Oh sure, he's the dumb fuck talked into blowing himself up for something he doesn't completely understand, but fuck it, his friends are doing it. They make it sound like a good deal. I mean really, the afterlife of a martyr sounds really kinda good... if you're this dumb. But in some ways, he's the smartest one, because he does ask questions. The other three are all about the plan. Waj, he makes with the confused face.

The last member of the titular group of Lions is Hassan. He's the newest member of the collective. But by no means, the last character. You see there are other dumb fucks, that get picked off by various acts of stupidity... that comes with not quite knowing how to create high explosives out of household goods. It's a careful process. And a scary one. But, well I was talking about Hassan. He's a young pissed off Islamic kid that is tired of being treated like a terrorist, so what the fuck, if the world treats him like one, why shouldn't he be one.

Of the 4, the one I'm most surprised is a terrorist is Omar, as played by Riz. He's got a good job, he has the wife, he has the family. He's lost family, he believes in the cause, but almost seems smarter than that. He is a true believer, but the absurdity of its purpose escapes him. It just seems to be his life/death path. He's resolved to it.

So often in films, we see terrorists that are smart... with master plans and the most brilliant of nefarious plans. But what about the shoe bomber. What about exploding diaper man? How genius were they? Might they have put a bomb on a semi-trained raven? It's possible. I suppose.

I once saw this brilliant film called THE TERRORIST by Santosh Sivan of the terrorist situation in India. It was not funny. And in many ways, I consider it this film's FAILSAFE. It presented a different perspective on the suicide bomber... but I have to say... it wasn't nearly as funny or entertaining, but I have to say... FOUR LIONS feels equally true. I mean, these Jihadists are actually great heroes of the West... but then that is Omar's dirty secret. Well, Omar & Maj.

I seriously have no idea why this film didn't get picked up domestically before Tim League of the ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE had to create a distribution company just to distribute it, but man. Here in Austin, they're gonna make some serious money with this thing.

The audience was laughing throughout and enjoyed the hell of it. It is incredibly smartly written. I mean, it isn't easy to create likably stupid, but believably human suicide bombers - that not only invite one to see the inherent absurd "What the fuck" of being some one who will die by self-inflicted & possibly accidental detonation.

At the same time that you can't help but laugh at what these guys say & believe... one could choose to not laugh once and to sadly realize... this could be closer to the truth more often than not. That what they're doing is pointless... that it is truly absurd how fucked up it is that they gauge of success, kind of absurdly makes you wish they could have died for something bigger or more worthy of our like of these characters and that ultimately this is their purpose. To entertain us on their journey to annihilation. But that, in and of itself is the joke of it all. People will die. That is assured, but how and when and why... That's the "fun" of the film.

This film picked up quite a devoted following overseas, I just hope it picks up success over here. I really feel it is something that John Stewart or Steven Colbert would love to feature on their shows, because this is exactly THAT kind of satire.

This is really really great. Just the notion that in all likelihood you might not know exactly when it'll be playing in your city, after all, DRAFTHOUSE FILMS is a startup company - here's where & when it opens in the U.S.

Austin, TX 11/5 Cambridge, MA 11/5 Irvine, CA 11/5 Los Angeles, CA 11/5 New York City, NY 11/5 Philadelphia, PA 11/5 Seattle, WA 11/5 Washington, DC 11/5 Asheville, NC 11/12 Berkeley, CA 11/12 Chicago, IL 11/12 Portland, OR 11/12 San Francisco, CA 11/12 Katy, TX 11/12 Gloucester, MA 11/18 Duluth, MN 11/19 Landsdowne, PA 11/19 Denver, CO 11/26 Tempe, AZ 12/10 Columbus, OH 12/31 Nashville, TN 12/31 Tucson, AZ 1/21

Now, in the off chance that you either have a theater or theater chain and want to pick FOUR LIONS up... Or if you want your local theater to show FOUR LIONS and you want to make it easy for your local theater... This is who you contact. Daniel.Metz@drafthouse.com

I really loved this film. And this is an incredibly smart, funny and oddly touching comedy about a subject that we all seem to send way too much time being consciously frightened of. We've spent most of the past 9 years as a society that has gone so far as to force citizens to irradiated strip searches in airports out of a sense of grotesque paranoia. Shouldn't we really all laugh at this.

If you think so, this is absolutely the movie to nail this particular subject to the whoopie cushion. You really should take a seat.

Mr. Beaks And Chris Morris Discuss The Brilliant FOUR LIONS!

Published on: Nov 04, 2010 6:22:09 CDT

Opening this Friday in limited release across the U.S. is Chris Morris's FOUR LIONS, a brutally funny caper comedy about a group of London-based Islamists bumbling their way toward martyrdom. Like DUCK SOUP or DR. STRANGELOVE: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, Morris's film delights in lampooning the misguided righteousness (and outright stupidity) that often drives humankind to armed conflict; unlike those movies, it unnerves viewers by attempting to empathize with its fools.

Had Morris simply gone the smart-but-zany Monty Python route with FOUR LIONS, the film would've probably caused more of a stir than it has. But by choosing to draw his characters as recognizably flawed people instead of punch lines, Morris forces the audience to consider the circumstances that might compel an otherwise rational human being to give up their life - while taking the lives of others - for a religious cause. These guys aren't all brainwashed monsters drooling over their afterlife allotment of seventy-two virgins; some of them are decent family men who've committed to what they believe is a higher - if not the highest - calling.

Feel free to refute this as lazy leftist thinking, but, as Morris explains in the below interview, he's done the research; he's sat in on the trials of thwarted jihadis, and read countless books on the subject. These guys are not, by and large, ferociously dedicated ideologues. They're kind of flighty, actually. In the days and months leading up to zero hour, terrorists are just as preoccupied with idle celebrity gossip and marital issues as everyone else (they probably have a favorite Housewife of New Jersey). Most importantly, these guys are far more likely to fail than succeed; in fact, it was the botched assault on the Yemen-stationed USS The Sullivans in 2000 that inspired Morris to begin developing FOUR LIONS.

For nearly two decades, Morris has taken dead satirical aim at every taboo known to man; if you're new to his work, a) I envy you, and b) I'd recommend going chronologically from ON THE HOUR to THE DAY TODAY to BRASS EYE - by which point you should be completely hooked (and ready for JAM). But please don't let your lack of familiarity keep you from FOUR LIONS, which opens this Friday, November 5th in limited release (go to Drafthouse Films' website to find out if it's playing near you). Morris's directorial debut is one of the year's best (and funniest!) movies regardless of how well you know his prior endeavors.

When one interviews Chris Morris, it is evidently obligatory for the journalist to note that the British humorist is "reclusive", "press shy" and/or "mercurial". So here is my interview with the reclusive, press shy, mercurial, warm and tremendously insightful Chris Morris.

Mr. Beaks: I've been waiting for someone to come at terrorism without complete solemnity. Speaking as an American, it seems verboten to approach this subject with even a dark-comedic sensibility.

Chris Morris: Why should that be? I really don't understand. Particularly since on my tiny sample - i.e. Sundance, South By Southwest and a screening in New York I attended a couple of weeks ago - it's not that people aren't prepared to get it. So why the reticence in coming forward? You'd have thought that having received what one might describe at least as a slap nine years ago that there would be people more than willing to come forward and change the record.

Beaks: I would think so, too. We were willing to do that decades and decades ago when Ernst Lubitsch made TO BE OR NOT TO BE in the midst of World War II. He made a very funny comedy about Nazis - with Jack Benny, of all people. I think Americans had become so complacent before 9/11 that it was a shock to the system when it happened. And now there's a great deal of political correctness about it.

Morris: That's weird, though, isn't it? You could easily understand the right, or at least the center-right, having a position that is sort of irreverent with it. SOUTH PARK is an exception, but they play it in a cartoon vein, so it often gets overlooked. But that kind of thinking... that Mark Twain kind of tradition. (Pause) Glenn Beck! I'd like to see Glenn Beck running around the studio dressed as an airliner!

Beaks: I would like to see that, too. That would be fantastic.

Morris: It's so close! Surely, to see him strapping on some white wings and putting a nose cone on his face and charging around. It's got to be done!

Beaks: Why was this your first feature? What made this the logical first feature project for you?

Morris: I don't tend to think about things that way. People had been saying to me for years, "When are you going to make a film?" I just thought, "Well, when there's a film to be made." Thoughts pop into your head, and they have a rough shape; you know what they are in terms of what they're intended to be. When this came up, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that it at the very least had to be a three-act structure piece. And then it's kind of like, "Well, is that going to be on TV or on film?" That's the only question. You know the length - it's approximately ninety minutes - and you know the rough shape. It just clearly wasn't going to be a sketch, a sitcom, a song or a novella. I think it just had the right shape for a film - whatever shape that is.

Beaks: You've talked about the inspiration being the Yemeni Millennium bombers, and how their boat sinking was a sort of Keystone Kops moment. Once you had that idea, did you then have to think about tone?

Morris: I use that example because that's the first one I specifically remember as announcing the possibility of this project. But it didn't do it completely; it just announced the possibility of it. There had to be a cluster of examples before you got a pattern. By that point, a range of different tones of humor suggested themselves, from a reaction shot in a Keystone Cops film to the basic, nitty gritty of people getting on and not getting on in a tight-knit group - and, I suppose, the kind of humor of undermining the status of previously, immaculately iconic bad guys. Once you have that as a sort of early kind of role, things just start sticking to it.

The Keystone Kops thing, for example... I attended a court case that lasted eight months, which was basically seven guys who'd gotten 600 kilos of fertilizer. They'd gone to a training camp to learn how to turn it into a bomb. Then they'd come back, and they'd forgotten how to make it into a bomb. But they still wanted to make it into a bomb, so they started making calls back to Pakistan saying, "Yeah, you told me how to make a bomb, but I've forgotten. Could you remind me?" At which point the people in Pakistan were like, "Are you joking? There's probably only half the world's security services listening to this line!" They'd got themselves a top-notch MI5 surveillance into the bargain.

What struck me is that this was referred to in court by the significant posse of policemen who were always there, and the twenty odd journalists who came in every day, [as] "Keystone Kops". They talked about it. They literally said, "This is like Keystone Kops what these guys are up to." And yet when it was reported in the papers, it was back to the serious narrative: these guys were going to bring down ten airliners. I mean, they weren't going to bring down ten airliners. They momentarily had a fantasy that it would be a great thing to do, but there was as much chance of that as them building a moon rocket. So there was a lot of laughter that wasn't getting outside, and that really seemed, in fully three dimensions, to suggest the basis for this film.

Beaks: And that's because, for the newspapers and the networks, fear keeps people reading and watching. If these guys seem kind of innocuous, they'll have a laugh and turn away, I guess, right?

Morris: It is partly that. But once you're reporting for a newspaper, you've got a preset condition. It's actually to do with people not thinking at all; it's just to do with "This is the shape of a modern terrorism story." You instinctively sideline the farce; you sideline the fact that even when these guys bought the fertilizer... the guy who sold the fertilizer to them said, "Right. This is for your allotment, okay? Is your allotment as big as three football pitches? Because that's how much fertilizer you've got there." And the guy buying it said, "Yeah. Yeah, it's about that big." These really stupid conversations that are not there in the newspaper report because 1) it's pushed for space, it's probably going to be 200 - 300 words on the average day of the court roundup, and 2) they're going for the things that fit the narrative anyway. If they mention airliners or blowing up some slags in a nightclub, that's the bit that's going to get in - rather than the bit where the one white guy in the group pretended to be from MI5 in order to persuade the parents of one of the brown guys that they should let him go to Pakistan. Literally. You've got an MI5 recording of this happening in real time audio. They say, "Right. There's my mom's house. You go down the road there, you pretend you're from MI5, and you say it's important to go to Pakistan as a matter of national security. My parents are loyal Brits. They will buy that. They will buy the authority of MI5." Duly, this guy goes and does exactly that, and comes back to the car ten minutes later and goes, "Yes! High five, brother! I've done it! I've fooled your parents! They're going to let you go!" And indeed they do. I'd love to see that report in the papers, but there's not the queue for it at the moment.

Beaks: That's unfortunate.

Morris: But it's getting there, isn't it? It's getting there. Somebody was trying to bring down a plane and set fire to his underpants. He looks pretty damn silly. And there was a guy in Indonesia the other day: he was a suicide bomber on his way to bomb an army compound. He was on his bicycle, swerved to avoid a pothole, hit a lamppost and blew up. I mean, these kinds of incidents are pretty stupid. (Laughs)

Beaks: (Laughing) They are. But when they get reported in the United States, if there were any American citizens that could've been hurt, that fact gets used like a shillelagh to beat over the head of Obama or whomever is believed to have been negligent in allowing this to almost happen.

Morris: They weren't looking. Yes. (Pause) I'm sure you're right in that there's always a political angle on any story, but I do genuinely think that almost anyone in the American political spectrum is capable of going, "Hang on a second. These guys really are ridiculous." I don't think it's without American consciousness to do that. I just suspect that it's what the needs of the day are. The Republicans are on the rise, and the Democrats are going to get a bashing; the referee is going to blow his whistle on Obama's presidency so far. You've got all those presets surrounding any story that comes in today. That will determine how it goes. Similarly, if you're fighting in Iraq... after all, Fox News ran a program called "The Cost of Freedom"; I think they still do. So everything is determined by a preset of policy. But I think, equally, on any day, any one of those pundits or talk show hosts could just suddenly say, "You know what, these people are ridiculous." It wouldn't have to be Howard Stern. It could be Rush Limbaugh. It could be anybody. As I said, it could be Glenn Beck strapping on wings. I don't know, It seems to me it's there, and I don't think anybody could violently disagree with that. Am I wrong?

Beaks: I don't think you're wrong. It's just that someone's got to be the first to do it, and I think that's a frightening place to be. Because if you do it and you draw silence or outrage, then your career is mucked up a bit.

Morris: (Laughs) True. Yeah. Sean Hannity goes full on for the jihadi comedy effect, and tumbleweeds blow across the studio, and his ratings go to zero. I don't think that would happen, but I see what you mean. Breaking ranks. But that's the job for these guys, right? They're all professional rank-breakers! They're all radicals!

Beaks: Did you always plan for your characters to push as far with their plan as they do in the finished film?

Morris: Yeah. I really didn't want to take the very worst examples - guys trying to set fire to their feet or letting off bombs in their underpants - and try and let those speak for everything that is happening. That would be dishonest. Everything in the film is drawn from a real life observation of some kind. We've made everything up, but we've made it up on the basis of what real life had dished up and shown could happen. So I wanted to have a medium-impact event.

The guys in the 9/11 attack behaved farcical behavior in their build-up. There's a very good book by Terry McDermott [PERFECT SOLDIERS: THE 9/11 HIJACKERS: WHO THEY WERE, WHY THEY DID IT], which details sort of eyewitness accounts of various people who met the Hamburg cell as they were plotting the 9/11 attacks. And there's another book written by [Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding] called MASTERMINDS OF TERROR, which talks about the guys who planned the 9/11 attacks. In both cases, you have examples of silly behavior. So it would be wrong to suggest that it's only the rank failures who behave foolishly. It's common. You have examples of klutzy behavior. I wanted to include that, but I didn't want to preclude the fact that they could actually get some of the way to enacting their plan - albeit in a totally compromised way.

Beaks: But also, at the center of this, giving us a character like Omar [played by Riz Ahmed], who's somewhat rational and a good father. My favorite scene in this movie is his use of THE LION KING to explain away his failure. It's also a subtle indoctrination. When you're using a story as powerful as THE LION KING with a child... as Omar's son says, "Simba would never give up!" At that point, he's got him.

Morris: Of course. But I think he's actually talking to himself in that scene. Omar is almost seeking his son's advice for what he should do. He's coming back and saying, "Should I tell everyone and risk causing confusion, or should I keep it a secret and tell them everything is cool?" And his son says, through THE LION KING analogy, "Scar's got to be defeated." And Omar goes, "Great." And off he goes. He's almost seeking the pure advice of his son through that membrane. I don't think his son really understands what's going on, but he knows the narrative of good and evil.

I came across guys with radical pasts who love THE LION KING for precisely that: they're caught up in a good-and-evil narrative. It just so happens that they're on the other side of it, and they see the people they're fighting as Scar. It doesn't stop them from being, as you say, a "good dad". I mean, it's the sort of over-repeated cliche that bin Laden is impeccably polite. Now, I would put that as a lower moral rating than being a good dad - albeit, we've just shown [Omar] as a cinematic good dad.

I think this is part of what's interesting about what's going on; you might say "frightening", but I think it needs to be dealt with. I think these people can be good dads. It just depends on which side of the fence you are. They're not mean to their own. A soldier who's going out to fight anywhere in the world might have a moment like that with their son. We don't even think about it. When I was a kid growing up, we ran around fighting the Germans, being Spitfires and Hurricanes shooting down Messerschmitts. When we were five, we didn't even think about it. When you're a child, you're caught up in that kind of narrative. I think it's partly natural. The leader of the bombers who attacked London on July 7th five years ago is actually on a video shot by one of his friends with his nine-month-old daughter on his knee saying to her in 2004, when he thinks he's going off to fight in Afghanistan, "You're the best thing in my life. You and your mom have meant more to me than anything else. I'd love to watch you grow up to learn how to speak, but the thing is, I've got to do what I've got to do. I may not see you again. If I don't, I love you more than anything in the world." You're watching this and thinking, "Wow! This is the good-dad speech from a guy who came back and blew up some people in London." That gives you a difficult equation to [work out] in your head.

Beaks: I love the way characters veer effortlessly from English to their natural language when frustrated. It seems like that would be difficult to write.

Morris: I met lots of people when I was doing this, and I noticed, even in the second- or third-generation Pakistani lads I met, was that when they got vexed or excited, they'd slip into what was their most immediate mother tongue - which was either Urdu or Punjabi. The great thing I discovered, particularly in the case of Punjabi... that language is made for swearing; it's an agricultural language which revels in coarseness. I always love playing with language, but I wanted to be restrained in the use of language in order to be accurate, to capture the cadences of the way the people I met spoke. But when you have this rare moment when you go into Punjabi and Urdu, where you can let rip - indeed they did. As soon as I realized that was the case, I just wrote to all the people I'd been meeting, and they all just showered me with the very worst things you can possibly say. That came from pure observation. Even in Arabic, there are basic donkey-and camel-based insults - like the Emir gives them in the training camp. There's a counter-argument that says it's seen as not proper behavior to swear, that a proper Muslim doesn't swear or curse. But while these boys won't curse in front of their parents, they will in front of each other.

I can tell you also that Riz, who plays Omar... we'd come up with some extra bits on set. I'd say, "How do you say this?" He speaks Urdu much better than he speaks Punjabi. I didn't realize this would be the case, but when his parents came to see the film... they very much enjoyed it, but their main comment was, "Far too much swearing, Riz. What was all that about?" It's because he was swearing in Urdu, which is seen as a much more decorous language. So if you swear in Urdu, which is possible, it's like you've gone out of your way to swear in the wrong language. Whereas if you swear in Punjabi, it's actually sensible because it's accepted. So that was an extra bit of spice I wasn't expecting.

FOUR LIONS begins its limited roll out this weekend. Again, hit up the Drafthouse Films website for the full release schedule. See this movie!

Faithfully submitted,

Mr. Beaks

Star Trek: The Next Generation "Transfigurations"/"The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1" B+

by Zack Handlen November 4, 2010 Star Trek: The Next Generation "Transfigurations"/"The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1" season 3 , episode 25-26 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating A- reader rating based on 8 ratings

"Transfigurations"

Or The One Where Alien Jesus Helps Geordi Get Laid

It always bugs me on TV shows when cute girls are really obvious about liking a guy, and the guy doesn't catch on. I mean, sure, I'll buy it if the guy is a creep, or if he's not interested, or if he's so paralyzingly shy that any interaction is beyond him. But when the guy like the girl back, and is just too insecure to make his move ... I dunno. I've been insecure most of my life, like any sensible person would be (I mean, have you seen yourself naked? What the hell is going on there?), but if somebody I had a crush on kept going out of her way to talk to me and smile at me and leave me gigantic openings in the conversation for me to make my move, I would at least acknowledge the opportunity existed, even if I was too much of a wuss to take it. "Transfigurations" opens with Geordi whining to Worf about his romantic problems (note to TNG: if you've gotta keep coming back to Geordi not getting laid, I approve of including Worf in the conversation), and the object of his affections is so painfully interested it's hard to feel any sympathy for Geordi at all. Suck it up, man. Worst she can do is laugh.

Although technically, Christy already rejected Geordi way back in "The Booby Trap," so maybe he's just worried she's been taken over by aliens or something. I'm not sure what's changed in Geordi between those two episodes (maybe he's been working out?), but whatever it is, Christy likes it. It's just our poor blind Chief Engineer can't spot the signs, and not even Worf's helpful advice can reach him. Then the Enterprise gets a distress signal while charted a previously unexplored region of space, and they find a shuttle crashed on an unknown planet, a seriously wounded alien on the ground beside it. Dr. Crusher connects Geordi's brains to the alien's to help regulate the severely wounded stranger's vitals, and in the exchange, somehow Geordi gets a piece of something that gives him a boost of self-confidence. He starts making out with Christy in the turbo-lift. But just who is this alien? What is it he does? And is it possible to bottle up his mojo and sell it as some kind of over-priced body spray for men?

Judging by the title of the episode and by the effect the alien (who doesn't ever get a real name in the episode; they just call him "John Doe," and I will follow their lead) has on Geordi, I assumed that sudden surge of bravado was going to turn sour soon enough. That's how these stories play out, generally: The geek finds some magical shortcut to coolness, they get to enjoy the shortcut for a few days, and then they sprout fangs and murder everyone. Or else there's pig's blood at the prom or the magic box has to go back to the shop because the switch is stuck on "Stabbing." (If you're trying to figure out what movies I'm referring to, don't kill yourself; only one of those is actually real.) Characters very rarely get exactly what they most desperately need without having to pay a very steep price, and it seemed reasonable to assume that Geordi's brief trip to Real Live Boy Land wouldn't last out the hour. I expected the confidence would turn sour and he'd get violent. That seems to happen a lot.

That's not what happened here, though. "Transfigurations" is a largely conflict free episode—there are arguments, and one major character even gets killed, but he doesn't stay dead very long. (It's Worf. As always, his job on the ship is show how dangerous the danger is by getting his ass kicked. In this episode, he's defeated by a wave of yellow light; next episode, a forcefield takes him out. Stay strong, my Klingon brother!) John Doe isn't a threat, although he puts the Enterprise in a couple of tight spots. He heals very quickly, which is vaguely suspicious, but he's also quite nice, and Beverly is quickly taken with him. (Which once again raises the question: How the hell would you ever get romantically involved with a member of another species? Just because they're all vaguely humanoid doesn't mean the genitalia matches up; we've seen the faces, it boggles the mind what might be going on below the waist. If below the waist is even a place where things go on for Doe's people. Ah well. Beverly's a doctor. I'm sure she knows more about all this than I do.)

John also makes a habit of healing people on the Enterprise, first inadvertently with Geordi, then fixing O'Brian's dislocated shoulder. (Sorry for another parenthetical, but: O'Brian injures himself on the holodeck. He's kayaking, so it's not like he was attacked, unless he kayaks with bears, but—what about the safety protocols? Surely the system would be designed to prevent any but the most minor injuries. Because if you have a program that can dislocate your shoulder, however accidentally, you have a program that can kill. Join us next week for our latest installment in Why The Holodeck Don't Make No Damn Sense.) Later, of course, he brings Worf back to life after inadvertently breaking his neck. It's emblematic of the short-sightedness of this episode that Geordi's cure, the first one we see, is also the one with the weirdest implications that nobody ever recognizes. There's a big difference between curing a physical ailment and boosting someone's self-esteem, and while the positive effect John has on everyone around him is probably connected to Geordi's good vibes, there's something strange about treating insecurity like a wound. Does this mean that Geordi's passed some personal threshold, or is he just on an adrenaline high that won't last him past third base?

Not that "Transfigurations" is really about any of this. We're more concerned here with John's ascension into godhood or whatever. This is the sort of episode that starts off fairly interesting, gets a little more interesting as it goes, and then just falls apart once it actually has to start answering the questions it's raised. It's all terribly symbolic and reads a little like somebody's a big fan of his X-Men comic books: John is one of the last survivors of a race that's been systematically destroyed because his race is reaching a new level in evolution, and that scares people. It scares them real bad because eek, change! And newness! There's a confrontation with one of the bad guys who does all the killing, the bad guys use their mind power to choke everybody on the Enterprise, and then John saves them, and turns into one of the aliens from Cocoon. It's pretty stupid. TNG works best when it's specific in its stories; it can do more archetypal fare (like, say, "The Survivors," in which we're less interested in the mechanics of how everything works than we are in the tragedy of it), but too often, these kinds of vaguely symbolic plots come off as weak and reductive. That's the case here. There's a reason I spent most of this review talking about the edges of "Transfigurations" rather than dealing with its main arc head-on. It's because there's not much to say about another episode in which our heroes are largely passive and in which everything gets tied up in a neat little bow by the end.

Grade: B-

Stray Observations: I would watch a show of Worf giving dating advice. Hell, I'd watch a full series. "I'm going to hook up your nervous systems with this tricorder." Um, no? Late in the episode, there's a shot of everyone on the bridge, and it shocked me to see Troi in her usual spot. I'd completely forgotten about her. Given that John suffers from amnesia for much of the episode, wouldn't it have made sense to consult with her earlier? Oh, hey, there's Wesley.

"The Best Of Both Worlds, Part 1"

Or The One Where We Meet Locutus Of The Borg

I've probably mentioned this before, but I write fiction. It's my first love, writing-wise, and one of my favorite aspects of it is the satisfaction I get from fitting the pieces together of a really excellent climax. See, the thing about writing characters is that if you want them to seem real, you can only have them doing things that that sort of person could be expected to do. If your hero is a doctor, it's not a stretch that he'll see a patient or two or that he'll drive a car around or talk to people or maybe even have a drug addiction or be a werewolf. These are varying degrees of possible, but none of them inherently violate who that character is—we accept fantastical elements in stories, but what we don't accept is when characters behave in ways that violate their nature simply to facilitate plot. So if we spend a whole story hearing about how great this doctor is, and then he intentionally murders a toddler, and we're still supposed to believe he's great, only now he's really, really upset about that dead toddler, well, we're not going to buy that.

Or for a better example ... I'm about to spoil the hell out of the ending of The Mist, so if you haven't seen it yet (and you should, as it's one of the best horror movies to come out in the past decade or so), better skip to the next paragraph. At the end of the movie, Thomas Jane, distraught over the loss of his wife and the apparent destruction of his entire world, shoots his companions, including his own son, to save them from a more horrible death at the hands of whatever monster lurks around the next turn. He then walks around for maybe three minutes, screaming for something to kill him next, because he's all out of bullets. Then the mist clears away, and the military rolls by, carting survivors from the town he just left, the world restored to some relative version of sanity. None of the individual pieces of this ending are unworkable. Given all the ugliness that happens over the course of the movie, it's possible to accept that he and the others might be driven to group suicide. The arrival of the army, the sudden reveal that everything's okay after all (except for poor Jane, who probably sucks a shotgun 30 seconds after the scene fades to black), that's not inherently bad either. The problem is the abrupt conjunction of the two and the way it forces us to re-examine the shootings in the car. In order for this ending to work, we need to believe the trap that Jane and the others are in almost as much as they do. Given the rush of the rest of the film, we're in the moment when it happens, but by having the rescue arrive less than 5 minutes after the deaths, the scene becomes less about Jane's awful mistake and the way fear corrupts our judgment, and more about how obvious the strings are. Whether or not the characters in that moment would've believed they were trapped, we no longer believe they were, and it becomes nearly impossible to empathize with their choice. Instead of walking away shell-shocked, I kept making jokes about how the next time I shot my son in the face, I'd wait 5 minutes first.

The point of all of this is that plotting means the creation of a succession of plausible events. The greater the stakes of an event, the greater a violation of a character's internal code it requires, the more thoroughly the trap must be set. By the end of "The Best Of Both Worlds, Part 1," Riker orders the Enterprise to fire and theoretically destroy a Borg ship. That's not much of a stretch—except the Borg ship has Picard. A good portion of this episode is devoted to getting us to a point where we'd be willing to believe that Riker would knowingly give an order that would kill his captain. Sure, Picard has been Borg-ified by now, but Beverly insists she could still save him. Doesn't matter. Riker speaks his final line in the episode without any hesitation whatsoever, and what's even more amazing is that we don't doubt his conviction for a second.

"Worlds" isn't complete in and of itself, but it makes a terrific way to close out the third season, and as TNG's first attempt at a finale cliffhanger ending, it's deservedly iconic. Ask anybody what they most remember about this series, and I'm betting 7 or 8 times out of 10 (presuming you can ask that many strangers before they kick you out of the mall), that most will mention this episode. Not the only episode, mind you, just that final, awful scene: most of the cast on the bridge, aggressive newcomer Cmdr. Lt. Shelby insisting that Riker contact Starfleet for advice, and Riker having none of it. Then Picard's robo-zombie gaze filling the view-screen to inform them that hope is dead, meet the new boss. And, of course, Riker's response. This is not a show that's given to taking major risks with its cast. Tasha Yar is the only main character to die, and that was way back in the first season, before we really cared that much about any of these people. To suddenly throw the show's most important character into the cybernetic meat grinder, and to do so in such a way as to imply that he could very well be gone for good? That's heady stuff.

I don't think I watched "Worlds" when it originally aired, so I have no idea if people actually believed Picard was lost. I kind of doubt they did, given Beverly's comments, and seeing as how we never actually see Worf firing the Magic Bullet that will supposedly take out the Borg cube; most cliffhangers don't resolve by just giving us the most obvious next step. But this was back before everyone knew about actor's contracts, before every casting development hit the Internet before the ink was dry. Plus, the episode is structured in such a way as to strongly indicate that Picard is on his way out. Nobody ever suggests it, but there's a lot of talk about Riker getting a promotion, about how he needs to move on and take command of his own ship, and about how his time on the Enterprise, as much as it means to him, may have robbed him of something in himself he once valued a great deal. Moxie, I guess, or boldness. This is all partly to help us understand his determination in that final order and maybe suspect he might be trying to prove that he hasn't entirely lost his spine, but it also works to suggest a future for the series in which Riker is seated in the captain's chair, with Shelby slotted into the Number One spot.

Really, this is more Riker's episode than it is Picard's, which is one of those sideways choices that seems counter-intuitive but actually works to the show's advantage. Much of the running time is given over to Riker debating what he should do next, and sparring with Shelby over her mildly aggressive manner (which of course reminds everybody of how Riker himself used to be). The investigation into the recent Borg attack is suitably chilling, but the threat remains in the background for the first half; there are poker games to attend, after all. So it's wonderfully effective when the Borg cube makes its first appearance. The Enterprise is en route to the cube's last place of attack when they're ambushed mid-trip by that old classic, an unidentified vessel. Ten seconds later, there it is in the view screen, all bulky and hideous. I don't often get unnerved by TNG episodes—it's hardly ever a truly scary show—but that reveal gave me chills. For a long time, the Borg were the threat to beat in the Trek-verse, and while countless iterations have diminished the threat (as is understandable since you can't have an unbeatable foe bent on destroying you and your civilization hang around forever), at this point in the franchise, they were still, so far as we knew, unstoppable. And for some reason, they were gunning for Picard.

And it's not just the Enterprise; they specifically want Jean-Luc Picard because the Enterprise is the strongest ship in the fleet and he is its captain. Which is one of those compliments that I never know quite how to take, honestly. Picard does get a few nice scenes before the Borg finally grab him—his conversation with Guinan is great, as she essentially tries to console him by explaining, "Well, most everyone in your race will be killed, but a few will get away, so that's cool, right?"—but the show does a great trick of giving us a passing-of-the-torch style episode without ever openly admitting that's what's going on. I highly doubt there was any intention to do away with Patrick Stewart; you don't get rid of the best actor on your show just when your show is actually becoming excellent. (That is, unless Stewart was holding out for more money, in which case this would have to be the best episode-inspired-by-contract-negotiations ever.) Still, just seeing him with that zombie make-up, his voice flat, merciless, dead ... Whatever logic tells you, there's a part of the mind that believes he's gone, same as it believes the shadows behind the closet door have teeth. Hell, I know he'll be fine, and I'm still a little concerned.

I should probably point out the trap I was going on about earlier. It comes down to this: The Enterprise is chasing the Borg cube, which is headed for Earth. They need to slow the ship down long enough to use their big guns on it—a weapon that can only be used once, by the way, although that's basically true of every weapon when it comes to the Borg—so an away team beams aboard the cube to find some way to force them to drop out of warp. They shoot some distribution nodes, which has the desired effect, and they find Picard's empty uniform, which freaks everybody out. Back on the Enterprise, everything's set for the magic bullet weapon, except when the away team beams back, they tell Riker that Picard is still alive, only he's been turned. Shelby begs for a chance to go back to get him, but the problem is, the Borg cube is already regenerating the damaged components. It'll be back at top warp speed momentarily, and the Enterprise engines have been so drained by the chase that they won't be able to retake the ship. And they can't just go back and destroy some more nodes, because the Borg will be prepared. This is the only chance to stop the cube before it reaches Earth.

So Riker makes his choice, and, at least for now, sacrifices Picard. It's really very elegantly done, and all of it is built on information we already know about the threat and the characters. We know the Borg adapt quickly and that they represent a nearly insurmountable threat, and we know that the crew of the Enterprise is trained to keep going about their duties even after losing one of their own. I love cliffhangers, because I love how they feel—like someone pausing in the middle of a sentence, staring at you, grinning, driving you out of your mind. ("SAY IT!") The resolutions are nearly always disappointing, so I'll be curious to see how this one plays out. (Other than the fact that Picard goes back to being human soon enough, I honestly don't know what comes next.) So let's just savor the moment, shall we? We—and the show—have earned it.

Grade: A

Stray Observations: I really, really wish the "Data takes adages literally" would die. I understand that he doesn't do metaphors very well, but given the amount of memory he has and the information about humans he's acquired during his lifetime, surely he would've heard "The early bird catches the worm" before? All right, change of plans--because YOU DEMANDED IT, on Thursday, I'll be doing a season three wrap-up, and then moving on to "Best Of Both Worlds, Part 2." « Back to the A.V. Club home

Interview Chris Morris

by Sam Adams November 4, 2010 Article Tools

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Chris Morris’ Four Lions met with glowing reviews at Sundance, but while the festival’s lesser lights were snapped up in the weeks and months that followed, Morris’ movie remained without a U.S. distributor for nine months. Despite Morris’ status as one of the U.K.’s most revered—and, in some cases, most reviled—comedians, the thumbnail description of the film as a comedy about suicide bombers was too much for some to swallow. (It was picked up, finally, by the newly formed Drafthouse Films, which will release it November 5.) There’s no question that Four Lions is one of the boldest and most necessary comedies to come down the pike in some time, a dizzyingly absurdist and surprisingly touching portrait of four generally affable, mostly incompetent British Muslims edging ever closer to a deadly attack. Playing both ends against the middle, Morris somehow manages to skewer the absurdities of religious extremism while humanizing the low-level grunts who fall prey to it.

Morris is no stranger to taking on extremism. With Steve Coogan and In The Loop’s Armando Iannucci, he created the simultaneously scathing and surreal The Day Today and its radio predecessor On The Hour, which tore into the stentorian excesses and soft-minded blather of broadcast news. With the satirical documentary series Brass Eye, he drew real-life figures into his trap, prompting a conservative member of Parliament to inveigh against a fictitious drug called “Cake” and leading Phil Collins to endorse a non-existent anti-pedophilia charity called “Nonce Sense.”

In the U.K., Morris is legendary for his insistence that his work speak for itself. He refuses nearly all requests for interviews, and those fortunate enough to be granted one may find themselves the subject of an elaborate practical joke; one journalist who asked for Morris’ contact info was given a number that led to a voicemail message explaining that there would be no follow-up questions. Even at Sundance, Morris remained elusive, leaving the festival ahead of schedule and without warning. But The A.V. Club caught up with him in Park City to talk about the intersection between terrorism and farce, avoiding “mad guys with beards” jokes, and why jihadists love Johnny Depp.

The A.V. Club: It’s interesting to measure Four Lions against your TV work. It’s very much in the same spirit, but it’s more character-driven, more approachable in some ways. How did the story fall into place for you?

Chris Morris: I was, out of curiosity, just reading about the subject. I was reading a book by Jason Burke on Al-Qaeda, and I came across an example of a bunch of people from Yemen who wanted to blow up a U.S. warship on Millennium Eve. They went down in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., they filled up a boat with explosives, and it sank. I thought, “Ah.” I laughed out loud when I read that. I wasn’t expecting to laugh when I was reading that book. Then I came across a couple more examples—a guy who set out to blow up an officer at a compound, I think it was a Kurdish compound. He went off on a job, he was called back, so he built up over another week and a half, basically got himself psyched up to do it, went up to the compound. As he was going through the gate the guard said, “Who are you here to see?” He said, “I’m here to see the chief officer.” He said, “All right. By the way, what’s under your shirt?” The guy said, “Oh, yeah, it’s a bomb.” And again I thought, this is just ridiculous. How he got to that point. And then I started pursuing that line.

I read a few other books, and similar little silly things happened, things that were sort of stupid-level, ordinary human behavior funny. Then I went to a high court case. There were a bunch of guys in the docks for buying fertilizer making very loose plans what to do with it, and there was about three months of surveillance from MI-5. Page after page of absolutely ludicrous, pretty much stoner drivel. Drug-free, but it was hard to believe when you read it. I thought, wait, we’re on to something here. The ideology is terrifying, but it’s somewhat modified when it’s juxtaposed with conversations about what a great actor Johnny Depp is, how cool he’d look with a big beard. Just silly things, which seem surprising, until you think, “Why would these guys be any different to any other bunch of guys?”

AVC: Suicide bombers are very much the cannon fodder of the jihadist movement. They’re not the best and the brightest. Osama bin Laden isn’t going to drive a truck bomb into a military compound.

CM: But you know what? Even the guys higher up the chain—for example, I read an interview with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the architects of the 9/11 plot, and he was interviewed by an Al Jazeera journalist in Karachi shortly before his arrest. I was struck that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed took an hour to get himself ready for the camera, because he kept wanting to choose a costume that didn’t make him look fat. You have this, I think, right the way through the top. It just started to ring true. It just seemed, “Of course.” Take anyone. You can probably hang around with Barack Obama and find out he does some silly things. It just seemed such a mind-blowing scene of dissonance, when it appears to be the case.

Four Lions

[The next question and answer contain spoilers for Four Lions.]

AVC: The movie is very adept at mingling tones. A lot of it is pure farce, but toward the end the consequences become quite real. You play the death of a character within the rhythms of comedy, but we don’t feel like laughing. There are some very real, even sobering moments in the film.

CM: It is quite real, but I think it’s interesting with the audience, they think they’ve lost a guy that some were hoping might get out of it. Then they laugh when the police reveal to have shot the wrong guy. These sort of things, they are basic comic tropes. It’s funny that people laugh when Barry dies. They don’t give a stuff about the guy who goes with him. These things are pretty hard to parlay on strict levels of propriety. But I do think you have to go all the way with something like this. A comedy war film, like M*A*S*H or something, doesn’t avoid the realities of the situation. So I felt as long as we kept making sure the beats were true—in other words right or plausible—that’s what we should do.

AVC: How did you decide on the tone of the film?

CM: Well I think the tone was sort of there really from the moment I decided that this should be a film rather than something else, and that decision was informed partly by the fact that this story would go the full distance. It wouldn’t be like a sitcom, a kind of dwelling with some people who are trapped in an existential fault. It’d be following a plotline to its endpoints. Therefore, you can be as dark as you like. Anyone can slip on a banana skin, but you knew where you were going. So that informed the writing I did with Sam [Bain] and Jesse [Armstrong]. It informed the meetings that we had before the writing started. We had a lot of meetings for the shape of the plot and that sort of thing. And it informed, obviously, the way things worked on set. That said, of course you do deliberately vary tone a little bit in your takes, just because you’re not within a single thin line. You’re within a bandwidth. You want to cover the bases.

AVC: Does the final film look the way you thought it would?

CM: Well, yes. It did. One of the actors, the guy who plays Ahmed, the conservative brother, came to see it. We had a screening in Northern England for cast and crew. He said to me—because of course, I would say “Yes,” right?—he said to me that’s exactly as he saw it in the script. Story elements change. I always knew we’d be shooting on two cameras. I always knew we’d be shooting very fast in order to try to get it as realistic as possible. I knew it would be brisk and I knew we’d be jump-cutting. I did the edits. I did rough edits myself, which were a disgrace, but plotted things out for the editor to then put his magic on. We both knew we’d be chipping it about a bit. I knew what the sound would be too, but it may be just because we had some delay in the funding that I had time to think these things through.

AVC: The most interesting relationship in the film is between Omar (Riz Ahmed), who’s planning the suicide attack, and his brother Ahmed (Wasim Zakir), a conservative Muslim. The argument between them illustrates that the extremists are not always, or even often, the most devout Muslims. The 9/11 hijackers went to strip clubs.

CM: It’s a very, very complicated field, and I wanted to have some element that reflected that. You find it, actually. You find that somebody who’s gone radical, he may well have done it against the will of his family or he may have become a little bit estranged from his family. There’s a difference between old-fashioned, conservative, quite strict behavior and radical behavior, and I think that is reflected in the relationship between the two brothers. The brother with the beard follows a lot of rules. It doesn’t mean, as it were, that he’s a “proper” Muslim, because there’d be lots of other practicing Muslims who would say he was ridiculously old-fashioned and orthodox. Often the two will get lumped together. An extremely orthodox Muslim will be seen as one step away from becoming a dangerous radical, whereas, in fact, often they’re just following an old-fashioned tradition, which may not be too much fun for you and me.

AVC: There’s so much misunderstanding and fear in the air. I was delayed on the way out here because a flight from New York to Louisville was diverted when one of the stewardesses saw an Orthodox Jewish teenager putting on his tefillin to pray and thought he was attaching a bomb to himself.

CM: Those kinds of things do happen. One of the things that made the film such a crunchy journey is seeing things like that—how culturally estranged people are from each other, even if they live in the neighboring street. That sense of strangeness. People are shockingly insular. I’m sure people would feel a great deal happier about what Muslims wear generally if they just bothered to hang out a bit more, and certainly if they did that in Britain they’d be in for some very, very good curry. There’s little communities keeping to themselves. It’s not just Muslims being insular. It works the exact opposite way as well. I don’t want to say we’re a bunch of hippies aiming for world peace, but you only have to traipse around and talk to a bunch of Muslims, which I did, and found many, many delightful, friendly people, who were sort of desperate to associate and get sucked in and talk about things and bring more sharing social attitudes.

AVC: What kind of research did you end up doing?

CM: Pretty involved, actually. Apart from reading—the most valuable research really—and looking over court cases to get the sharp end of what happened, what was rather delightful was going around and meeting a lot of people and following chains of contact. Going to hang out with people, whether they were just young lads blazing up in their car or people’s fathers or cousins or sisters, just to get a picture of the landscape within which these tiny, radicalized exceptions operate. Because without knowing the full context, you’re reduced to making “mad guys with beards” kind of jokes. To see the contradictions close up and see how it feels to be these people, to be a first-, second-, or third-generation Pakistani lad in a northern mill town, regardless of your politics, you see that’s the context, and then you follow the political lines, and then you start talking to radical people. It could be endless, but I did it as much as I could. Actually, I spoke to a guy in the FBI last time I was here, as well. He was following a case in Sacramento, which, interestingly, he said he’d been asked to come in to look at the evidence for the prosecution. He’d left the FBI, but they wanted him in as an expert, and he said the evidence was so flimsy, by far and away the worst-prepared evidence he’d ever seen. He actually flipped and became a witness for the defense. But that was about a small group of Pakistani immigrants in Northern California.

AVC: How did you decide on the film’s perspective? You could easily have made a satire about the extremism of the Western response to terrorism instead.

CM: Yes. I mean I wanted to make sure that there were some security blunders in there—they’re part of the picture—but I felt you can’t do everything in a film, and in terms of the tone, I wasn’t really interested in the cartoon level. Obviously I’ve laughed at funny versions of that. But I felt you don’t have to push into a subject very much to get there, to do that. Part of the process of this kind of thing is asking questions, following your own curiosity. So, as a result of following your own instincts, if you throw up quite a lot of details that fall outside the realm of the cartoon version, then why not play with them? I wanted it to be realistic at some level. One of the ironies is, you talk about the research, and quite a lot of research is plain. It’s plain, straightforward life. If you’re Larry David you would never have to do any research, because your life is your research. You know what I mean? But if you’re sort of talking about a bunch of people with whom you’re not very familiar, a lot of the research is not, you find some examples as you go along, but it’s sort of just getting the essence of existence.

AVC: The movie encourages us to feel for the characters, despite their extremism. It’s not like the James Cameron movie True Lies, where the death of Arabs is played as a Three Stooges routine. Here the death is part of who the characters are.

CM: I think that one bounces both ways at once, quite deliberately, I suppose. That’s what happens if you hang out with characters. You start to at least empathize with them, if not sympathize with everything that they think. That’s just a product of how films work, unless you go out of your way to make them thoroughly objectionable. I felt that was part of it. Actually, not least, it’s just a mechanical necessity for making a film work. You can’t spend 90 minutes hanging around with people with whom you make no connection.

AVC: The movie has been described as a satire of jihadism, but on a larger scale it’s about extremism of any kind, which is a subject that seems to consistently fascinate you. The “Paedogeddon” episode of Brass Eye is a great example. It’s not satirizing pedophilia, but the hysteria that surrounds it. Do you feel an interest in deflating that kind of discourse, taking some of the pomposity and overwrought rhetoric out of it and getting back to the truth underneath?

CM: Here’s a pitch, and I’m not sure if it’s necessarily true, but if you’re dissatisfied with forms of discourse on subjects that seem to be driving the whole issue way off course into a sort of flaming field, then there are a number of ways of coming at it. One of them is to attack the style and approach of that discussion directly, but another way is to try and get beneath the very mechanically rigid limitations of the discourse by finding out yourself. So I was just thinking, “We’re caught up in a big situation here, and we get a very limited tick and tock of discussion, the way it all works in the war on terror or however you care to describe it, and we’re missing tons. We all know that there’s a lot of bullshit flying around, but we can’t really call it for what it is, because we don’t know the backgrounds. We just sense innately that it’s crap. So much stuff is spun, and I thought, “This cannot be real in the way it’s presented.” So I just went forward that way. You could say that’s coming from the same place and taking a very different approach. It’s a dissatisfaction with idiocy. Idiocy and petrol bombing.

AVC: Going all the way back, even your character on The Day Today is sending up that incredibly self-serious, almost angry style of British newscasters.

CM: I know. Although, actually, come on. Look at people like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. It’s just a different thing. I think it’s partly, you go back to The Day Today and stuff, it’s just reveling in the sheer pomposity. They used to call it, actually, quite without irony, a certain style of BBC news presentation they used to call “The Voice of God.” I think actually that that gravitas is just about gone now. I think there’s been a cultural shift. Or at least it comes in a different way. Everybody’s so desperate to ironize themselves, to make sure that they look like they have a sense of humor and that they know they’re being ridiculous. Nobody’s really worked out a way of replacing it. That sense of authoritarian voice isn’t as secure as it was.

Newswire Scarlett Johansson to play "ruthless alien seductress" by Ethan Stern November 4, 2010

Scarlett Johansson is set to star in Under The Skin, a sci-fi film helmed by director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) based on the Michel Faber novel of the same name. Fittingly, Johanssson will play an “alien on earth, disguised as the perfect aesthetic form of a mesmerizing woman,” according to the official description. “She scours remote highways and desolate scenery looking to use her greatest weapon to snare human prey—her voracious sexuality.” So it’s sort of like the 1995 Natasha Henstridge film Species, except that as she begins to understand human life more, she becomes less of a “ruthless alien seductress” and more sympathetic, and ends up “on a collision course with her own kind.” (So more like Species meets The Day The Earth Stood Still.) Johansson is likely to start production in the late spring after wrapping The Avengers.

Four Lions

B+

by Nathan Rabin November 4, 2010 Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating A- reader rating based on 15 ratings Director: Chris Morris Cast: Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay Rated: R Running time: 102 minutes

Chris Morris’ corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It’s a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable, a wacky slapstick comedy that gleans big, cathartic laughs from the surreal juxtaposition of the mundane and the militantly spiritual, and the impossible gulf between its hapless anti-heroes’ delusional perception of themselves as fearless religious warriors, and the much-less-grandiose reality.

Riz Ahmed stars as the token grown-up in a terrorist cell that’s otherwise the exclusive domain of overgrown adolescents merely playing at being holy warriors. Ahmed longs to die a martyr’s noble death, but co-conspirators who are a danger only to themselves and their cause stymie him at every step. There’s a hapless Ali G. type who expresses his guileless enthusiasm for holy war via inane raps, a milquetoast sad sack, and a would-be charismatic cult leader who unfortunately (or fortunately) fatally lacks both charisma and leadership skills.

Four Lions is less Abbott & Costello Meet Osama Bin Laden than Abbott & Costello Are Osama Bin Laden: The bad guys, anti-heroes, and comical bunglers are all one and the same. There’s something strangely humanizing and even faintly humanistic about the film’s depiction of would-be holy warriors who wrestle with the same anxieties, fears, and hopes as the rest of us. The jihadists here register as all too recognizable; it’s easy to both laugh at them and identify with their neuroses. Morris has a lot of fun spoofing his subjects’ vanity; even terrorists threatening to deliver a deathblow to the godless secular world want to look good on camera. Four Lions maintains such a ramshackle, loosey-goosey, larkish vibe, it can be easy to forget its grim subject matter, but there are moments throughout when the wackiness dissipates and the high stakes involved become bracingly apparent. Four Lions is audacious and uncompromising, a fearless comedy that isn’t afraid to use exploding bodies as punchlines, especially during a rousing climax that will forever change the way audiences see comical animal costumes. Like few satires, domestic or otherwise, Four Lions feels dangerous; it’s an edgy provocation that alchemizes tragedy into literally explosive comedy. « Back to the A.V. Club home

AVQ&A Out-of-context appreciation

by The A.V. Club Staff November 5, 2010 Article Tools

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Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com.

I’ve been watching Arrested Development again in reruns on IFC, and I’m struck by how funny Liza Minnelli is. I always knew she was an icon and the daughter of the one and only Judy Garland, but I didn’t care a thing about her until I saw her as Lucille II. In fact, I still don’t think I appreciate her entire body of work the way many people do, but her performance on that gone-but-never-forgotten show sticks out to me. Are there actors or musicians or authors you appreciate for something completely arbitrary, not what they’re best known for? —Kip

Tasha Robinson I was late on board the Buffy The Vampire Slayer bandwagon. My boyfriend and I had heard a lot about how it was hilarious, touching, exciting, blah blah blah, but when we happened to catch a random episode on TV, it was one that started with the Scoobies casually killing a demon, then having an off-handed, ironic chat about it. To us, everything about the tone seemed ridiculous and artificial, so we tuned back out. (Much later, watching the whole show and seeing that scene again in context, we realized that one scene was the show consciously making fun of itself by turning its own action and themes slight and ridiculous. It was just about the worst possible place we could have started.) So when friends dragged me to a Joss Whedon Q&A at a comics convention in 2001, I was baffled and ignorant among a huge crowd of people who thought he was the Second Coming, people so bowled over with admiration for Buffy and the spin-off Angel that they could barely get their questions out. The questions they asked (“Is Spike ever going to get that chip out of his head?”) meant nothing to me, but Whedon’s answers were hilarious, disarming, and casually frank. By the end of the Q&A, I was a fan—not of the show, but of Whedon himself, of his ability to be funny and supportive to his fans while essentially saying “That’s a stupid question, and I’m not answering it.” I enjoyed hearing his answers so much that I arranged to interview him, having still never seen an episode of Buffy or Angel. I still recall that interview really fondly—my boyfriend and I still sometimes use the phrase “I dented the bathroom stall with my puddly little fist” when describing our own moments of impotent, useless anger. I’ve since come around and watched all the shows Whedon has had a hand in, and I’ve enjoyed and respected them all, but I’m just not built for the kind of bowled-over, subsuming fandom his incites in a lot of people. Instead, I’ll always be a fan of the man himself, as a speaker and an apparently just really personable, sharp-witted individual.

Leonard Pierce I have lots of people like this, artists and writers and performers who I value (maybe even over-value) just because they accomplished something unusual outside their area of expertise. Even when I was younger, I was enthralled by Heddy Lamarr, a beautiful, talented actress of the 1940s who also co-created a form of technology that helped pave the way for wi-fi and wireless telephones. The avant-garde composer John Cage was also an artist, choreographer, essayist—and mycologist, or expert on mushrooms. And I’ve always especially admired artistic figures who also proved to be genuine tough guys, like playwright/author Samuel Beckett, who fought for the French resistance, and actor Sterling Hayden, who carried out a number of frightfully perilous missions for the OSS during World War II. But maybe my favorite is comics artist Jim Steranko, a man of many talents: He was a stage magician, an escape artist, a sideshow performer, a boxer, a master fencer, an amateur criminal, a musician who shared the stage with Bill Haley, an entertainment impresario, a gymnast, a graphic designer, and an ad man, all in his teens and 20s. And he shared with Hayden the brave, or foolhardy, choice of walking away from his greatest claim to fame at the peak of his powers. Frustrated with the creative constraints and brutal deadlines of the comics industry, Steranko—who, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, drew some of the most striking work the medium had ever seen—quit the business when he was fully in command. He went on to do successful work in a half-dozen other careers, including television writing, fine art, graphics, production design for film, and publishing. The rare jack of all trades who seems to master them all, Steranko is still going strong in his early 70s, and even though he’ll always be remembered—and rightly so—for his comics, he’s almost infuriatingly good at everything he tries. He’s such an amazing character that he seems like a superhero himself: Jack Kirby based the character of Mr. Miracle on him, and Michael Chabon designed The Escapist in The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay on him as well.

Claire Zulkey I have so many of these. Right now, I am tickled by Alan Cumming, of all things, hosting Masterpiece Mystery, which I just started watching thanks to Sherlock. First of all, just the fact that I’m watching Mystery is funny to me, because it’s something I associate so much with being a little kid, since my parents would watch it when I was little. (I always liked the animated Edward Gorey sequences—specifically the yelling lady, who’s still there!) So I guess now I’m old too. I’ve always like Alan Cumming as an actor, but I’m especially entertained by him hosting Masterpiece Mystery because a) we get to hear him speak in his Scottish accent, which is really beautiful but he rarely seems to speak in when he’s acting and b) to me, Alan Cumming is a bit of an iconoclast, a man once described as “a frolicky pansexual sex symbol for the new millennium.” I just love that PBS, then, is having this guy host the new incarnation of an old standby series. I should pledge, now that I think of it…

Keith Phipps Mine’s easy, and I don’t think I’m alone: I’ve listened to Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack approximately 20,000 times. I’ve seen the movie exactly never. I’d like to. I’ve seen plenty of other blaxploitation movies, but somehow never gotten around to this particular cornerstone. (Future Better Late Than Never, maybe?) I think that’s partly because of the soundtrack. It’s so good, I don’t think the real movie could ever measure up to the one in my mind.

Marcus Gilmer When reading the pre-release information for R.E.M.’s 2004 album Around The Sun, I was dismayed to see that one song, “The Outsiders,” featured a guest spot from Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. It was the intersection of two musical entities I have great respect for, but the past made me apprehensive. R.E.M. was my favorite band growing up, and still maintains a spot high on the list. But they’ve dabbled in the rap-rock mix before on “Radio Song,” the jarring Out Of Time opener that featured KRS-One. The song didn’t have much to do with the baroque nature of the rest of the record, and it just wasn’t good. Thirteen years later, R.E.M. returned to the guest-rapper format with the help of the man who fronted the group that produced one of my favorite hip-hop albums, The Low End Theory. But what on paper appeared to be an awful plan actually comes off pretty damn great. In fact, it’s the reverse of “Radio Song.” That was a blemish on an otherwise fantastic record; “The Outsiders” remains one of the few stand-outs on an otherwise bland, underwhelming record. Q-Tip’s appearance is limited to an outro, a smooth, mellow flow that seamlessly fits the song’s melancholy yet defiant tone. As with any song, its meaning is open to interpretation, but there’s clearly a political element, which dovetails nicely with the political aspects of ATCQ’s output. If anything, Q-Tip’s presence in the song is almost understated, a welcome reverse from KRS-One’s obnoxious guest-spot. In fact, when the band performs “The Outsiders” live, Michael Stipe performs the outro verses himself, lending more credence to its presence as something akin to beat poetry rather than rap.

Genevieve Koski I’ve been on a major podcast kick for the past year or so, and I’ve become extremely fond of two weekly podcasts helmed by comedians I formerly had little to no interest in: Doug Benson’s Doug Loves Movies, and Chris Hardwick’s The Nerdist. I previously knew a little of Benson’s comedy, but not enough to elevate him beyond the pejorative of “stoner comedian” in my mind. (I’ve since come around on him a bit.) And I knew Hardwick was a stand-up, but still thought of him as the guy from Singled Out with the unfortunate haircut. (I know he also hosted Web Soup, but, really, who has G4?) But I’ve since become a big fan of both in the context of their respective podcasts, where they come across as much funnier and smarter—particularly in terms of pop-culture stuff—than I ever gave them credit for. The informal, rambling nature of Doug Loves Movies and The Nerdist is somewhat different than a written, polished stand-up routine, though Benson and Hardwick’s comedy certainly influences the content, but I think I’m more impressed with their abilities as MCs and—particularly in Hardwick’s case—interviewers.

Kyle Ryan Until recently, most of my experience with Albert Brooks derived from his many appearances as a guest voice on The Simpsons, not his filmography. According to the IMDB, he has appeared in five memorable episodes: as Jacques, the Frenchie who tries to seduce Marge in season one’s “Life On The Fast Lane”; self-help guru Brad Goodman in season five’s “Bart’s Inner Child”; supervillain Hank Scorpio in season eight’s “You Only Move Twice”; and fat-camp drill sergeant Tab Sprangler (with a cameo by Jacques) in season 16’s “The Heartbroke Kid.” He also played presidential puppetmaster Russ Cargill in The Simpsons Movie. Only in the past few years have I begun digging into his films in earnest, thanks in no small part to superfan Scott Tobias. I haven’t even touched his two comedy albums yet. The Simpsons has turned me on to many things over the years. Next up: I hope to learn more about this belch-master Eudora Welty.

Marah Eakin Growing up as an indoor child, I was an enormous fan of the Saturday and Sunday afternoon movies. Thus, my introduction to Dolly Parton wasn’t through “I Will Always Love You” or “Coat Of Many Colors.” It was Steel Magnolias, Straight Talk, and the much-maligned-but-much-loved-by-me Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, which I liked because it was a little dirty. As Truvy, the hairdresser with a heart of gold in Steel Magnolias, Shirlee, the accidental radio host with a heart of gold in Straight Talk, or Mona, the madam with a heart of gold in Best Little Whorehouse, Parton was inherently likeable and darling, and she had incredible hair. I knew she was a singer or something at the time, but, frankly, I was more interested in her fictional life in Chinquapin Parish, and how she dealt with Shelby’s hair after that scary diabetic crisis. Later, I became absolutely obsessed with her voice, and I’ve even dressed as her for Halloween a couple of times, but I’ll always hold a fond spot in my heart for Best Little Whorehouse’s “Sneaking Around.”

Noel Murray I grew up watching game shows like To Tell The Truth, The Match Game, and Hollywood Squares, which featured celebrity panelists I recognized only because I’d seen them on TV before, mostly on other game shows. I started thinking of people like Charles Nelson Reilly and Peggy Cass and Brett Somers as “game-show celebrities,” famous for being famous. Then in 1999, I moved to a place with Game Show Network on the cable system, and I started watching all those old shows again, but this time with my laptop open and Google at the ready. Untangling the long Broadway and Hollywood histories of these game-show folk gave me an added appreciation for the history of the business and the way certain strong personalities endure.

Vadim Rizov This tends to work well for musicians either past their prime or who I generally don’t like much to begin with. One example is John Mayer, who tends to get a pass from some people because he’s apparently a technically decent blues guitarist. (He played with Stevie Ray Vaughn’s band Double Trouble, and apparently didn’t embarrass himself.) Yet in spite of the simpering creepiness of “Your Body Is A Wonderland” and the images I get of people frolicking on hilltops with Coke bottles in hands whenever “Waiting On The World To Change” comes on at the drugstore, I’m willing to give Mayer a pass for two things. One was that much-maligned Playboy interview, which I actually thought was kind of admirable for its nutsoid candor; the other, of all things, was his cover of Radiohead’s “Kid A,” which was actually pretty good, making it a shockingly workable voice-and-disconnected-acoustic-guitar something or other.

On the other end of things, there’s Liam Gallagher. I’m with all the people who think Oasis effectively sucked it up hardcore past 1995, but I would have cheerfully watched the band go on for years and years, pumping out one sludgy single after another, just for the pleasure of Gallagher’s hilariously combative interviews. A staple of these interviews tends to be Gallagher explaining why every other band in the world is basically shit: He called Scissor Sisters “weirdos on stilts” and said Radiohead fans “are boring and ugly and don’t look like they’re having a good time.” Too bad the band broke up. Hopefully they’ll get back together, so Liam has a platform for hurling more inexplicable expletives at people.

A List of Dos and Don'ts for Conan's New Show by Maureen Ryan, posted Nov 5th 2010 1:45PM Filed under: Reality-Free, Stay Tuned

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No doubt Conan O'Brien has a team of a highly paid advisors telling him what he should and shouldn't do with his new late-night show 'Conan,' which premieres 11PM ET Monday on TBS.

But what kind of television critic would I be if I didn't offer unsolicited advice? And hey, Conan's pretty smart, but he could use a few reminders about what has worked for him in the past and what we want to see more of in the future.

Therefore here are my humbly submitted Dos and Don'ts for 'Conan':

DO try to get game guests and use them well. When Conan is riffing with a guest who gets his sensibility or doing a pre-taped skit with someone like Mr. T, the results are usually funny. That's why I'm looking forward to Week 1 guests such as Jon Hamm, Jack McBrayer, Julie Bowen and Tom Hanks. They're all likely to get into the Conan groove and go with whatever goofy skit or idea he has planned for them, or simply chat in a way that's unlikely to put the audience to sleep.

DON'T do many of those typical talk-show chats with ditzy or boring actors and actresses promoting some dumb movie. Conan's shows work when he himself is having fun or jazzed up for some reason, but his interviews are often hampered by his tense and visible desire to march through the by-the-numbers celebrity anecdotes as quickly as possible. Ask Conan to zipline across a studio or pull any kind of other stunt, and he takes on the task with glee. But ask him to interview some young actor from 'Glee' and he just doesn't carry it off with the same relaxed panache. Translation: I'm not looking forward to his Week 1 interview with 'Glee's' Lea Michele, given that he'll probably avoid or nervously rush though asking her about the one thing she should be asked about -- that very questionable GQ photo shoot. As for his Week 2 interview with the usually stiff Harrison Ford, well... do you think Conan could get him on a zipline?

DO keep things loose. Some of Conan's best shows happened during the writers' strike, when he was clearly energized and embraced the freedom that came with a complete lack of rules and expectations. Spinning his wedding ring on his desk, zipline stunts, German disco parties -- all those things showed off Conan at his goofy best. Conan's actually a really good improviser, one who clearly enjoys situations in which things might veer out of control (and thanks to his skills, they often do so in an amusing way).

DON'T take too many potshots at Jay Leno. Many of us in the media were Team Coco all the way and wrote screeds about the stupidity of NBC management and about how Leno emerged as a craven, schticky weasel in last year's late-night brouhaha. But you know what? Everybody's kind of tired of that whole thing. It's classier if you don't revisit that battle except when you have an amazing zinger to launch. Even then, think twice.

DO bring back the Masturbating Bear. No, not the Self-Pleasuring Panda or the Overly Excited Marsupial or some other approximation of the old Conan show standby. There are two reasons to bring back the Masturbating Bear: It represents the kind of anarchic humor that put Conan on the map, and using the character on the TBS show might prompt NBC to launch an intellectual property lawsuit, given that the Peacock network technically owns Conan's old bits. I would not only welcome the opportunity to endlessly make fun of NBC's attempt to wrest control of a naughty-minded bear, I would greatly enjoy the Twitter meltdown that would ensue the day the legal papers for NBC Universal vs. Masturbating Bear hit the Internet.

DO command the stage. In his final run of 'Tonight Show' episodes, Conan had an authority and a presence that he'd never really shown before. I'm not saying he should stay as angry as he clearly was then, but he seemed more like a grown up and less like a gawky spaz in those last weeks of the Jaypocalypse. While "gawky spaz" is clearly one of Conan's go-to comedy modes, a little of that goes a long way.

DON'T stop being weird. Conan's brand of comedy was never going to appeal to everyone; it was more niche, surreal and meta than anything seen on 'The Tonight Show' in the past. That's why I'm actually glad he's migrated to cable, where niche is the name of the game. Not everyone's going to get why Conan's trip to Finland was comedy gold. But for those who don't get it, there are plenty of other late-night options available.

DO keep booking great bands. That's always been a draw for the show, and I don't expect that to change. The first two weeks alone feature Jack White, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Soundgarden and the Decemberists, among others.Final thoughts on the Jon Stewart/Reddit issue, Comedy Central is not The Daily Show, and why Legacy Media and New Media need a new perspective on each other Posted by Drew at 2010-11-04 3:26:05 PM (812 comments) | Permalink More: FarkBlog

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Watching this whole Stewart/Colbert/Reddit thing play out this week has been like watching a game of telephone. Except instead of the message traveling in a linear fashion, it expands out in all directions at once. Some folks chose to concentrate on less important parts of my main issue - which was how Alexis was treated.

The primary issue was I felt like a friend of mine was done wrong, and I felt the need to take up for him. Everything else I said in my previous blog entry was evidence for my argument about what happened (because it wasn't entirely clear what happened), not my motivations for doing it.

Some folks think that I'm overreacting, seeing something that isn't there. To that I say: maybe. Or to put it another way, finding out that it was just some oversight on the part of Stewart and Colbert is pretty much the best case outcome here, and honestly I'd prefer that be what really happened.

In the past few days there were a couple things of note:

Colbert turned up a stack of papers during Indecision with the Reddit mascot clearly written on the bottom. Which was way cool, hilarous, and I'm pretty sure we can all agree on what that means.

Jon Stewart, when asked by Chris Wallace if Fox News contributed to the country's dismal outlook after 2008, said "it didn't hoit" in the same tone he used when talking to Alexis discussion Reddit/The Internet's contribution to the rally. All right, I get it.

So based on what I've heard both publicly and privately, I'm leaning toward viewing the incident as an accident and willing to leave it at that and drop the issue. I'm sure some people will call this backpedaling, it's also known as learning.

----- It's all odds and ends from here on out, I'm putting them on paper because I can just refer people who email me to this blog entry for clarification. It breaks down as follows (not necessairly in this order: - Comedy Central is not The Daily Show, and wasn't involved - Reddit Inc wasn't involved - Legacy Media should rethink how it views the greater Internet as a whole

- Comedy Central is not The Daily Show. The mistake was mine, Comedy Central doesn't tell The Daily Show what to do.

- Am I'm butthurt about not getting mentioned on the Daily Show? After 10 years, yes I am. Do they owe me? No. Is it common courtesy to do it once in awhile? Yes. Is that what this is all about then? No.

- Fark as a community is against me on this. No. The majority of them don't care about this one way or the other. I got more freakout response from posting an offhand comment saying we're thinking of adding threaded comments to Fark than anything else I said in my blog entry on Monday. And if that wigs you out too, don't worry because I forgot to add "and it will be an option you can turn off if you don't like it". I was glad though that people freaked out more about the issue of threaded comments because it put the rest of the complaints into a different perspective.

- Am I attempting to make myself an unappointed spokesman for the entire Internet? No, the point I was trying to make was that the Internet, and Reddit in particular, can and do have a much greater impact on Legacy Media than LM wants to acknowledge. If LM disregards online contribution, the natural course of events will result in negative backlash. I'm not saying I will cause it to happen (and as it turns out I can't - online communities will only do what they want). I'm saying it will happen of its own accord like a force of nature.

There's a greater Internet issue here: Legacy Media doesn't consider the Internet to be of consequence to their day to day operation, but yet they rely heavily on it for source material. Anyone who has a friend who is a regular blogger can provide many examples of times their material was used by a LM website or TV show without attribution. It happens all the time, and it happens in the other direction as well: some bloggers over-rely on LM for source material without attribution - or worse, they oversummarize while giving attribution which results in little to no outbound traffic to the LM website. How the hell do we start that conversation exactly? All the discussions about this go in one direction, it's either LM railing about blogs ripping them off or it's blogs railing about LM ripping them off. Surely there is some middle ground there somewhere. Seems to me like a dialogue would be a good idea. I'd offer suggestions as to how, but this is outside of my area of expertise (assuming I have one, other than sounding like I know what I'm talking about).

One of the root causes of this two-way resentment is that for some reason, just about everyone (both Legacy Media and New Media) doesn't seem to understand that heavy attribution/linking to other sites helps everyone grow. Even when similar sites with similar subject matter link to each other on a regular basis they will eventually gain each other's audience. The fastest way to gain an audience is to share it out between sites, because people don't remove bookmarks when they find a new site they like - they add a new bookmark to their list.

When this whole mess started Monday, it turns out that somehow a bunch of Farkers had never heard of Reddit. A few whiners taunted me that I was in trouble now because now these Farkers were going to read Reddit. To which I say: great, I hope they do. Reddit is a great site, everyone should go check it out, add it to your daily reading list - right above or below Fark. Discovering Reddit is not going to cause people to leave Fark, tons of people read both sites. And vice-versa.

- Isn't this is a Reddit issue not a Drew issue? Partially. I contacted the Reddit admins before posting my complaint on Monday, their stance was basically they didn't want to get dragged into a pissing match with Colbert/Stewart but that my opinion was my opinion and I was welcome to it. In other words, the opinions of Drew Curtis do not reflect the opinions of Reddit etc and so on. They're not involved in the slightest. Why did I go to bat for them? A believed a friend of mine was done wrong while representing Reddit's greater community. Plus Fark and Reddit's admins partner on a number of issues most people wouldn't be aware of. Alexis asked me for help structuring the Reddit Gold subscription model, for example. At any rate, this is getting seriously Inside Baseball, so I'll close this out by saying Reddit has nothing to do with me going off, it was all me. Just in case anyone doubted that.

And that's that.

PS Would someone please post the "Not this shiat again" guy in the thread so we can get that over with right off the bat? Thanks I appreciate it.