November « 2009 « Spectre Collie

Sunday November 29 2009 Movies

Helveticus Indiefilmicus

Fantastic Mr. Fox is one cuss of a good movie, as long as you like Wes Anderson.

“What if Wes Anderson wrote and directed an animated movie based on a children’s book?” sounds like the premise for a YouTube parody video. Martin Scorcese’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, followed by Quentin Tarantino’s The Wind in the Willows and Woody Allen’s Basil of Baker Street. And Fantastic Mr. Fox would fit right into that video.

It is completely, unapologetically, 100% a stop motion version of a Wes Anderson movie, from Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman in the credits, to the 60s pop and harpsichord and strings on the soundtrack, to the scene where the brash and arrogant title character makes a casually bittersweet connection with his son. The biggest departure I could see was that he used Helvetica instead of Futura on his yellow chapter title text.

But then, I wasn’t looking for a big departure. And as someone who loves Wes Anderson movies (Darjeeling Limited excepted), I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox. It’s loaded with style and cleverness, and all the people involved in the animation, art direction, character design, and voice direction were at the top of their game. It’s a movie about animals, but the human characters are brilliantly realized as well. And it perfectly achieves that holy grail of “family movies:” genuinely funny for adults, but not so arch or dry that kids wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. And while it does have the Wes Anderson formula right down to its DNA, it doesn’t look or feel like any of the other formulaic family movies being made today.

That said, the people who don’t like Wes Anderson movies are going to be squirming in their seats through this whole thing, finding it twee and self-satisfied and rambling with no real purpose.

I’ve never read the original story, so I can’t say how good an interpretation it was. (I’ve never read any of Roald Dahl’s works except for the Tales of the Unexpected stories). But I can say that it’s the best movie interpretation of a Roald Dahl story I’ve ever seen: more fantastic and less dismal than The Witches, more appealing than James and the Giant Peach, less Hollywood-formulaic than Matilda or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and less Tim Burtony than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’d even say I like it better than Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, if only because Fantastic Mr. Fox doesn’t have any Anthony Newley songs.

If there’s a lesson or moral to the story, I missed it. (But then, it didn’t really need one). It has its moments that are roughly equivalent to The Royal Tennenbaums‘s “It’s been a rough year, Dad” and The Life Aquatic‘s “I wonder if it remembers me,” but the moments in Fantastic Mr. Fox don’t spin the whole movie into focus like those other scenes do. The closest I could find to a recurring theme is the idea that the characters are wild animals, and so they should stay true to their nature. That message is mentioned a few times, but it’s never really pounded home. Well, except for the existence of the movie itself, which is a prime example of Anderson staying true to his nature as a director.

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Friday November 27 2009 Television

And she practiced her smile until it was perfect

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is an amazing series, and you can watch it right now

One of the best things available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service is Jim Henson’s “The Storyteller” series and its second series, “The Storyteller: Greek Myths”. They were two joint American/British productions made in 1988 and 1990, and they’re both wonderful.

It’s entirely possible that I was aware of them when they were coming out, but I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate them then, anyway. I would’ve lumped it in with all of the other non-Muppet releases from the Henson company, like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal: clearly full-to-bursting with imagination and craftsmanship, but they always left me cold. But where “The Storyteller” is different is that the stories truly are the focus; they don’t feel like just excuses to string together a bunch of creatures and effects.

Another key difference is that the series was developed by Anthony Minghella, and he wrote the screenplays for the first series, based on traditional folk tales. And the scripts are wonderful; he gets the cadence of the language and the spirit of the stories exactly right. (The title of this post is a perfect line from “The Three Ravens.”) It took a few episodes for the fairy tales to grow on me, but each one I’ve seen makes me appreciate the others more.

I started with the Greek Myths series, which is still my favorite. These are brilliantly narrated by Michael Gambon, and the whole production is skewed to that perfect level of non-quite-dark but not-quite-happy, not-quite-adult but not-quite-childish that the Henson company has (almost) always done so well. Even though I’d heard most of the stories before, they all added aspects of the myth I hadn’t heard, or presented them with such a level of drama that it felt as if the stories were being told for the first time. (I hadn’t heard any of the fairy tales stories before, so they were all new to me).

There’s more info about the series at Muppet Wiki and Wikipedia; I’d say just watch them and enjoy the feeling that you’ve unearthed a classic you had no idea existed. I was going to say that people just don’t make television like this anymore, but it’s actually worse than that: I can’t even imagine who would even have the idea to make something like this these days.

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Sunday November 15 2009 Movies

Counting the Beams

I Know Where I’m Going is a love story between a man and a woman, a director and a country, and me and the movies of Powell and Pressburger.

I’m a big, easily-manipulated sap when it comes to movies. If they tell me to cry, I’ll bawl like I’m at a funeral. If they show me a cheap scare and tell me to jump, I’ll ask “How high?” and “Would you also like me to lose control of my bladder?”

Where I’ve always been strangely immune, though, is with movie romances. I like moments here and there (and I love the “Your Song” sequence from Moulin Rouge! way more than any man should admit), but I always end the movie feeling vaguely out of sync. The whole story’s been building up to this big climax, and when it finally happens, I just think, “Hmm. Well that happened.” For me, every movie romance might as well be The Graduate.

At least until I saw I Know Where I’m Going! by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I’d never heard of the movie until I read Matt Dessem’s great write-up on his Criterion Contraption blog. I was surprised to see it get the Criterion treatment, as opposed to the more visually interesting A Matter of Life and Death, and I was surprised to see people calling out something so relatively obscure as one of their favorite movies. And after watching the movie with a reasonably detached interest for an hour or so, I was especially surprised to find myself tearing up. There’s a scene (pictured above) where the music swells, the dam breaks, and the rest of the movie delivers its big, romantic pay-off exactly as it was intended. For me, at least, it worked perfectly: this robot had finally learned to love.

I’ve only seen three of Powell & Pressburger’s movies at this point (the third is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), but at least through those three, there’s a common thread: they’re independent films made by conservatives. Not “conservative” in the modern, bastardized, politicized sense of the word, but in the literal sense: they have a very traditional, populist, and extremely British sensibility to them.

In his write-up of I Know Where I’m Going, Matt Dessem describes it and Black Narcissus (another Powell & Pressburger film from around the same period) as “genre jumpers.” That’s not the term I’d use, because it has a connotation of artifice that I just don’t see in movies this earnest. You could make a strong case that I Know Where I’m Going is a commentary on the British middle-class and the folly of social climbing, using the format of a screwball romantic comedy, but I like my interpretation better. I see it as what happens when these two filmmakers try to make a straightforward screwball romantic comedy: it starts out predictably enough, but they can’t help cramming in personal touches. They’re not constrained to formula, they just happen to really like the formula. And because they’re independent, they have the freedom to take what they want from the formula and jettison the rest.

The result is something that’s familiar without feeling formulaic, imaginative without being provocative, and completely sincere and genuine. That sincerity is the only way you can get a movie with such broadly-drawn characters — each the representation of an idea more than an actual person — that still manages to move you by the end. It’s the only way you could present a romantic comedy in which it’s clear from the first frame that the two leads will get together, and still make the ending a surprise.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Thursday November 12 2009 Television

Watchlist

The internet wants, no, needs to know what I watch on television

One of the side effects of weaning myself off live TV (mostly) is that I don’t have a good sense of what’s popular anymore. It’s been years since I hit my post-college levels of watching TV, but even then I had some vague sense of what was going on outside my peripheral vision. Lately, there’ve been whole series that qualify as pop culture phenomena, and I don’t know a thing about them — there’s apparently a lot of dancing and hospitals involved, and entire networks devoted to twenty-year-olds-playing-teenagers shows that as far as I’m concerned, might as well be interchangeable.

So the closest I can come to feeling like I’m plugged in is to tell everybody what I’m watching, and then see whether or not I’m in the popular crowd after the fact. Besides, I can’t really talk around the water cooler at work, because I only drink Coke.

New

Community
This is the funniest show on television now, and I never would’ve seen that coming. What little marketing I did see made it seem like a completely predictable big network sitcom. Smarmy lawyer guy has to go to community college, falls in love with another student while making his way through wacky hijinx and jokes about how small and bad the school is. And it pains me to say it, considering that I spent much of the 80s and 90s able to quote Fletch in its entirety, but it’s been a long time since Chevy Chase has been funny in anything.

But he’s funny here, because the cast really is an ensemble. And they know exactly what you’re expecting to see at all times, which lets them start out with completely predictable sitcom setups, and then take the idea off in some weird direction. They don’t let it settle into a tired fish-out-of-water routine, because they spend at least as much time making fun of Joel McHale’s character as everybody else’s; nobody in the cast is “the normal one.” And they somehow manage to defuse the will-they-or-won’t-they? gimmick while still milking it for all it’s worth. Best of all, it’s got Ken Jeong as Señor Chang, and I’ve been a fan of his ever since I saw the “What’s It Gonna Be?” video [probably not safe for work].

FlashForward
This one is so blatantly targeted at “Lost” fans, and it’s trying so hard that I’ve been trying to meet it halfway. But it’s been rough going. So far, it’s been in solid B+ territory: nothing offensive, just enough intrigue to keep you going, but none of the sudden bursts of imagination of something like, well, “Lost.” (Sorry, you can’t ride on one series’s coattails, even to the point of casting two of the stars of that series, without inviting comparisons). But I’ll keep up with it, if only because they keep doing stuff like casting Gina Torres and Gabrielle Union in the same episode.

V
“V” in 2009 is, well, pretty much exactly that. I’m not sure who this is targeted at, exactly — it’s not different enough to surprise fans of the old series, and it doesn’t seem novel enough to bring in newcomers. The old series, as cheesy as it was, still had these images that were completely iconic, and the closest the new version has been able to come is with the enormous image of Morena Baccarin hovering over the city: neat, but it’s not even in the same league as eating a live mouse. (I accidentally spoiled the identity of the Visitors to a co-worker today, just because I assumed that the old series was common knowledge at this point). But as I’ve said before, I’ll watch Elizabeth Mitchell in anything, because she’s awesome. I’m just going to be disappointed until they get to the half-human/half-Visitor baby.

Batman: The Brave & The Bold
Technically, this is still in its first year, so I guess it counts as “new.” I’m still not crazy about Deidrich Bader as Batman, but everything else is gold. Everything’s huge and full of Silver Age wackiness, while including all the new stuff from the DC Universe, like the new Blue Beetle. They do a pretty good job of striking a balance between comic book and comedy; although it errs on the side of the cheap gag a little too often, it’s great seeing a comic book series that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Returning

The Venture Brothers
It’s all genius, and I love that they don’t give a damn how impenetrable it is, and they refuse to pander. They still include casual throwaway gags that lesser series would build entire episodes around. They started to lose me a little bit in Season 3, but so far I’ve loved everything in Season 4. Even without Brock.

How I Met Your Mother
I think I finally figured out why this show works for me: it’s because they’re not afraid to be corny, and they’re not afraid to make any of the characters look stupid. Even their gimmicks work; I’m actually eager to see Robin’s Canadian Variety Show with Alan Thicke now.

30 Rock
It’s still got the highest joke-per-minute ratio of any sitcom, but it does feel a little bit like they’re treading water now, or they’re getting a little too wry for their own good. Plus, Stone Mountain, Georgia isn’t a farm town; it’s a suburb of Atlanta. There’s a Best Buy and everything, and no chuckle hut.

Monk
The closer I get to being 40, the more I wonder if “Monk” has become my version of “Matlock.” But it’s the last season, and they’re doing a respectable job of tying everything up. I’d been hoping for a season-long investigation into Trudy’s murder, but instead they’re just showing Monk gradually becoming more “normal” and independent. Which is probably a better idea.

Psych
It’s always been Monk’s goofy kid brother on the USA network, but it’s grown on me. What makes it work is that they’re just completely shameless with the goofiness; it’s not a mystery show with comic relief, but a stream-of-consciousness that tosses in a mystery every once in a while.

Dollhouse
It’s been cancelled now, which should surprise no one. And truth be told, I’m skeptical that the concept had that much life left in it anyway. The first season was sabotaged by its initial batch of really weak episodes, but around episode five or six, it picked up and turned into something pretty cool. (Still: I’ve got all of the season 2 episodes on season pass, and I haven’t felt compelled to actually watch them). I still say it would’ve made a better mini-series than an ongoing one.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars
I feel the need to explain this one. It’s a shame that you can’t talk about this show without qualifying it with “It’s better than you’d think,” because it’s clear that a lot more time and attention are devoted to this series than to most television. But still, the first season had way too much Jar Jar, which is to say: some.

Almost all of my allegiance to Star Wars was beaten out of me by three years at LucasArts and the prequels, but I don’t know if you can ever get rid of it completely. And I think back to when I was around 9 or 10 and had all of the Ralph McQuarrie concept art hanging up on the walls of my bedroom, and I’d try to imagine a story based around each one, all the cool stuff the characters must do in between movies. “The Clone Wars” series is basically just that: the stories are light, the characters are kind of shallow, and the whole thing seems to pander and underestimate kids’ intelligence a little bit too much. (Plus for some reason, Obi-Wan’s voice actor makes him sound unnervingly fey and suggestive, which is off-putting). But for 25 minutes each week, you get to see spaceships and aliens flying around beautifully-realized alien planets that look like concept paintings brought to life. I also like that they picked a distinctive art style and just ran with it.

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Saturday November 7 2009 Apple, Television

Defective

My shameful break from the Cult of Mac, and a detailed account of the trouble I went to in order to keep from getting up off the couch.

Update: As usual it only takes a few weeks after I buy something for the world to release something better and cheaper. If you’re considering setting up a home theater PC, check out the Dell Zino HD instead of a Mac mini; I wish I’d gotten one instead, since I could’ve saved at least 200 bucks.

For somebody who’s been so smug about cutting the cord to live TV, I’ve spent a hell of a lot of my free time (and extra money) getting a functional entertainment center. The problem is that the whole process hits just the right sweet spot at the intersection of TV addict, gadget nerd, and ex-programmer with mild OCD: I’ll jump through all kinds of hoops just for the sake of getting something that works as simply as just subscribing to cable.

But I finally got something that works. As far as cost is concerned, I think I’ve only managed to just barely break even versus my satellite bill. And it’s meant throwing out all my brand loyalties and assumptions about who’s best at handling media — I’m running WIndows! Hulu Desktop is actually pretty slick! There are plenty of “how to make your own home theater computer” articles out there, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Macworld and Gizmodo, but they either focus on people starting from scratch, or they’re based on something that just wouldn’t work for me. So I’m posting my setup in the hopes that anyone who’s planning something similar can avoid all the dead ends I ran into.

Hardware

I’m using a Mac mini, because Apple has finally released a version that’s actually usable at the “base” spec (2.26GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD). Since I ended up using Windows, I could’ve saved a good bit by just getting a mini PC; check out that Gizmodo article for suggestions. I still firmly believe that the Apple/Wintel price difference is way over-exaggerated, and I’m still firmly in the Macs-are-worth-it-camp for my “main” computer, but if you’re just looking for something to hook up to a television, the Mac mini is still overpriced.

I’d started out with an AppleTV, but it’s designed to be limited, and you’ll run into those limitations quickly. It exists to get you to buy stuff from the iTunes Store — which I’d assumed was fine, since I use the iTunes Store anyway — but if you want to break out of their interface, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. Getting a bonafide computer is more effort, but it keeps your options open.

For the TV connection, I’m using the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid. Again, there’s a “Mac tax:” if you’re building a Windows machine, you can find a tuner from Hauppauge for at least $50 cheaper. It’s not made explicit anywhere, but the EyeTV Hybrid does work with Windows, you just might have to download some drivers and make some simple edits to text files to get it to work with Windows 7. A Google Search for “eyetv hybrid windows 7″ eventually led to something that worked on my machine.

I’ve never had much luck with external hard drives in the past, including the Western Digital one I got for this experiment and had it fail after one day. But I returned it for an Iomega Prestige drive, which is silent, looks pretty slick, and has worked flawlessly so far. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

If you do use a Mac, the site Monoprice is the best place to get cables. I needed a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter to connect the mini to the TV and a Toslink to Mini cable to get optical audio to my receiver.

Software

This was the biggest surprise for me, because I’ve been using Vista on my Mac ever since it was released, I’ve hated every minute of it, and I’ve dreaded having to leave OS X to boot into Windows because of it. But whether Microsoft really did fix things with Windows 7, or if it’s just the Mojave effect, it’s finally a workable alternative to OS X. Everything works about on par with its OS X equivalent, except for one thing: Windows Media Center.

Windows Media Center (at least the version included with Windows 7) is miles ahead of anything on the Mac as far as home media’s concerned. I’m sure that part of it is just personal preference, and Media Center’s interface is slicker than Apple’s FrontRow. And if you don’t care about live TV, you may not notice a huge difference. But Media Center’s programming guide is by far the nicest I’ve ever used, including open-source projects and dedicated boxes like TiVo.

Elgato ships their own guide software with the EyeTV, and it’s adequate, but it looks and feels kind of clumsy and pieced-together compared to Microsoft’s. And what’s better: Microsoft’s is free for Windows users, while EyeTV’s TV Guide charges a yearly fee after the first year — only $19, but still, it’s the principle. (I also kept running into a bug where the TV Guide would say my service had expired after one day but then recover with no explanation, which isn’t cool for something you just want to set up and forget about). As much as I complain about Microsoft, when they get it right, they knock it out of the park.

I’m also back to using Hulu Desktop, despite the fact I still believe Hulu is pretty evil. No doubt they will reveal their true evil and start charging for service or something equally sinister, but for now it’s a fantastic interface for watching ad-supported content on a home theater PC. One of the nicest features is the programming queue and subscriptions, so you don’t have to search for the shows you watch regularly. There’s a free Media Center plug-in that lets you launch Hulu Desktop without switching apps, and it works great.

Netflix has been pushing their streaming onto any device they can, and I’ve tried most of them. For me, it’s a toss-up between the Windows Media Center and Xbox 360 support: the nicest interface is on Media Center, but I get the best picture quality on the Xbox. Microsoft is also pushing their Internet TV via Media Center, but at the moment it’s still not quite there; Hulu not only has a thousand times more content, but their picture quality is better as well.

I still use iTunes for the shows that aren’t available from my antenna (which gets High Definition broadcasts these days, I’ll remind everybody); or aren’t available on Hulu; or are available on Hulu, but I want to watch in high definition. And, frankly, the shows that I just feel like paying for because I want to support them, like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Community.”

The new Home Sharing in iTunes 9 replaces the missing sync functionality from AppleTV. I can browse for TV shows, get season passes, and download them on my desktop machine (where they’re backed up, which is important since Apple doesn’t let you re-download purchased files), and then have the Mac mini running iTunes for Windows automatically sync up the new stuff in the background.

I still haven’t found a great way to get iTunes to work within Windows Media Center, or to get it to work with a remote, so I’m still mousing it. (I did buy a plug-in called MCE Tunes, but I don’t recommend it. It’s very expensive for the little it does. And for me, it was a total waste of money, since it’s not yet Windows 7 compatible, assuming it ever worked at all). But on the bright side, the iTunes SDK for Windows has been available for a while, and it’s actually a little bit easier to program add-ons and plug-ins for the Windows version than it is for the OS X version! Plus, Microsoft has released a Windows Media Center SDK which works with their free version of Visual Studio Express, so even hobbyists can start writing plug-ins. I’m trying to write something that will control iTunes from Media Center, and I’ll put it up on here if I make any progress.

Remotes

I’ve been using the Logitech Harmony Remote for Xbox 360 for over four years now, and I never had problems with it. They don’t make that model anymore, but at this point I’d say that any of their remotes would be a good investment. (Back when I got it, I thought it was a ridiculously over-priced extravagance). Considering an iPod Touch goes for $200, though, I’m not sure why anyone would be getting the Harmony remotes that are more expensive than that.

If you’re using a Mac, then Remote Buddy is perfect. It lets you switch between apps, with controls for the most common media-PC-centric apps like EyeTV, DVDPlayer, boxee, Plex, FrontRow, iTunes, and Safari built in. (Plus, they fix a bug that currently exists in Snow Leopard with the IR remote).

On Windows, IR remote support is built into Windows Media Center and Hulu Desktop. Note that for reasons beyond my limited understanding of how all this stuff works, the IR sensor built into the Mac mini doesn’t cooperate well with Windows under Boot Camp. But most “Windows Media Center Remotes” or Home Theater remotes come with a USB IR Receiver which works fine. (I happened to have an old one my brother gave me, I plugged it in, and it worked immediately).

There are also plenty of remote control apps for the iPhone and iPod touch that work over your wireless network to control a Mac or a PC. Apple’s “Remote” app is free and works perfectly for controlling iTunes, but keeping with Apple’s philosophy, that’s all it does. I’ve tried almost all of the other ones, and my favorite is still Mobile Air Mouse. It’s got the trackpad and keyboard support that all of them have, but what sets it apart are the specialized keypads that automatically pop up when you start a recognized app. (The “accelerometer-based mouse” just doesn’t work for me).

Worth it?

In the end, I could’ve saved a lot of time, money, and effort by just getting back into reading books. And any notion I had about weaning myself from the media has long since been abandoned. But it’s nice finally having everything in one place, all working together. And it’s a little bit liberating feeling like I’m not missing out on anything, I can do what I want with the stuff I record instead of having it trapped on some proprietary device, and the only monthly fee I have to pay is for the internet connection (which is pretty much essential, anyway).

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Monday November 2 2009 Music

Paint the Black Hole Blacker

St. Vincent has actually managed to get me interested in music recorded within the last decade.

I didn’t hear about St. Vincent (Annie Clark) until someone posted a link to her video to “Actor Out of Work” and commented that she was a lovely woman who was opening her mouth so wide she looked unsettlingly anaconda-like.

A catchy song and a creepy video? Reason enough for me to try out the whole album, Actor. But it’s been at least five or six years since I’ve gotten really excited about music, so I didn’t listen to it more than a couple of times, and I didn’t think much other than “it’s interesting enough.” (And still, I’d occasionally find myself whistling some tune that had lodged itself in my subconscious, but I couldn’t quite place it).

Fast forward a few months to October, when I catch this performance on “Austin City Limits”:

I was completely captivated. And when she and the band segued into “Black Rainbow”, it was downright creepy: I knew this song; I’d been hearing it bounce around my head for months.

I think she’s just fantastic, the perfect antidote to everything boring and predictable about popular music. She composed the whole album in her apartment, so it’s not as predictable and soulless as the over-produced pop that has taken over everything. She’s not a pop star who picks up the guitar for a song or hops over to the piano for her big power ballad; she really knows music. And she’s clearly intelligent, but without making a show of it: you don’t get any sense of twee self-important irony that you get from musicians who are presenting themselves as an antidote to pop. Plus, the videos and live performances I’ve seen are every bit the bizarre bursts of creativity you get from musicians like, for example, Bjork, but she can turn it off and be perfectly unassuming and sane. Obviously, I’m completely smitten.

There’s a good interview from TV Guide where she talks about the process and her influences when writing songs. An even better and more insightful interview from ABC News describes her music as “sweetness and creepiness,” which is perfectly appropriate. The interview makes the great point that her music could come across as “precious” — Clark lists the orchestrations of Disney movies like Sleeping Beauty among her inspirations — but that she can also “truly shred on the guitar.” I don’t think the contrast is quite that simple — sweet-sounding songs with sinister lyrics is an easy gimmick, as Lily Allen’s remaining 3 out of 15 minutes are proving — but it’s a big part of what makes it work.

It becomes even clearer when you watch this acoustic performance of “Black Rainbow” with just Clark on guitar and Andrew Bird on violin. It’s a great melody that still sounds epic and cinematic even when stripped of all of its extra layers of production; it doesn’t depend on a gimmick to make it work. As orchestrated for the album, though, it turns into the pop song equivalent of the Winchester Mystery House: ending with St. Vincent tearing it up on an electric guitar in a climax that just keeps building before cutting off abruptly, like a staircase that leads to nowhere.

The title of this post is from my favorite song off “Actor,” the first track, called “The Strangers.” The album version really is best, since you get the background vocals and the keyboards and the full effect of the production, but this live acoustic version is almost as great: