Arts & Entertainment – Page 61

Stop winding it up so much please thank you.

All shall love me AND DESPAIR! I was watching “Saturday Night Live” this week (eyes over here, Mrs. Beatty) and the first musical guest was Gwen Stefani doing “Wind it Up” with an over-enthusiastic drum line and a throng of badly-dressed dancers.

It’s difficult for me to describe my reaction to seeing this, but in short: I became firmly convinced that the World is coming to An End. It started as an unfocused sense of unease from deep within my soul. Each yodel and every sample made it more concrete, more defined, until it became a concentrated pit of despair lodged in the center of my heart.

Imagine you’re a simple country villager in the outskirts of ancient Rome, and you’re asked to cater at one of Caligula’s parties. As you stand dumb-struck behind the buffet table, watching the proceedings, the servants wheel in another horse and some more lubricant, and you think, “Well, they’ve finally done it. They’ve destroyed civilization.” That’s the sense I got.

Now, I still like to think of myself as being on the fringes of hipness — not really genuinely cool, but at least at the VH-1 level of social awareness. But seeing this thing rocked my whole perception of what’s going on in American pop culture. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like it; I didn’t understand it. At all. I hated “Hollaback Girl” and “My Humps” like any right-thinking person should, but at least I had a sense of what they were trying to accomplish with them.

“Wind it Up,” with its video and album and fashion line and interviews and promotions and YouTube and MySpace appearances, is such an engineered consumer product package that it’s as far removed from actual music as Lunchables are from actual wheat. Video didn’t just kill the radio star, it’s on Fox News promoting its new fictionalized account of the murder titled If I Did It.

I’ve heard and read a lot of people — usually well into their 40s by the time they say it — say they remember the exact moment they realized they were “old.” Usually it’s when a clerk calls them “sir” or “ma’am,” or when they meet a co-worker who was born the year they graduated high school/graduated college/were released from rehab.

For me, it was watching a woman (who’s two years older than me!) doing a performance on “Saturday Night Live” and me feeling like I just saw a series of mushroom clouds over the horizon.

The Man With the Golden Franchise

"Yes. Considerably." = BAD ASS When I heard they were doing a reboot of the James Bond franchise, I thought it was a terrible idea. The series has degraded so far down to parody at this point, the only way to do it correctly would be to start releasing them as period pieces.

Not Austin Powers parody, but just turn back the clock to make it all work again. Jump back to the early 60s, where you’ve still got the Cold War and cool cars and you can film everything in technicolor and your hero will seem like less of an anachronism.

I’m really glad to admit that I was wrong. I finally got the chance to get out and see a movie last night, and it was Casino Royale, and it rocks in all kinds of ways.

I was hooked from the opening title sequence. Granted, they didn’t have the cool silhouettes of dancing naked women with guns, but they made up for it with the new theme song, which kicks boatloads of ass and is probably the best in the series. (It’s a drag, though, that the real version of the theme is only available on Chris Cornell’s myspace page, so you have to wade through loads of myspace effluvia to hear it). Best is that they didn’t bother trying to shoehorn the title into the lyrics — none of that “like Heaven above me, the spy who loved me” nonsense that Carly Simon didn’t have the stones to reject.

I’ve seen almost all the Bond movies, but have never really been a fan. I let myself get excited about the one with Michelle Yeoh, but of course they wasted her and ended up with just another all-hype, no-substance action movie. And seeing as how in retrospect, that was one of the better Bond movies of the past 20 years, I’m surprised they didn’t just give up the entire franchise the moment Denise Richards came on screen.

Casino Royale is impressive because they made all the right choices every step of the way. For starters, they cast the right guy. I don’t have any problem saying Daniel Craig’s the best James Bond; Sean Connery’s a movie star, but this guy is an actor. An actor who does a kick-ass job with the action sequences, too. He’s as cool playing poker as he is stopping jets from exploding.

There was a ton of negative hype around the casting before the movie was released, and you can see why — in still pictures, he doesn’t really look the part. But as soon as the movie takes off, he owns it. He plays Bond not as a superhero, but as a real person who is really good at just about everything. It was the first Bond movie I’ve seen in years that lived up to the ideal of the character — you can’t be a guy watching the movie and not think, “I wish I were that much of a bad-ass.”

And everything else shows that they just get the true appeal of the character, and not what it had turned into. They remembered that he’s a spy, and should therefore be doing the kinds of thing that spies do — more of the investigating leads and gathering information, less of the riding space shuttles and jumping on alligators and putting on the worst “Japanese” disguise in the history of cinema. By scaling back the action sequences, they made them a lot more impressive. The opening chase through a construction site is just amazing, even without the invisible car or snowmobile chase or secret backpack parasailing chute.

There’s a long sequence where Bond is trying to stop a bomb at the Miami airport. It’s inserted into the plot seamlessly, the pacing is dead-on perfect, and the editing is not only genuinely surprising, but manages to make one of the most tired cliches of action movies (“We’ve got to stop that truck!”) exciting again. It ends up being the best car action sequence since the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the best part of all — it culminates in an explosion, but the explosion happens off-screen. And still you’re left saying, “oh hell yeah!”

The dialogue is excellent, conveying an assload of character with only a couple of words. (“You noticed.”) The references to the franchise are clever and subtle, when they could easily have been over-done. M comments, “God I miss the Cold War,” and that’s the last you hear of it. All the technology has been updated without stealing focus from the plot; it’s almost as if the filmmakers decided that story and characters were important again.

Even the product placement, inevitable in one of these things, was in the end inoffensive. The only way they could’ve worked the Sony brand in there one more time would be to have Bond fire up a PS3 and challenge the villain to a game of Ratchet & Clank. But the story’s got so much momentum behind it, and everything is so well-done, that you barely notice.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Thunderball and From Russia With Love, but I don’t remember enjoying them as much as the new Casino Royale. This is the first Bond movie I’ve seen where I didn’t feel like I was watching some historical artifact, or seeing something that’s cool only because it’s supposed to be cool. It’s the first Bond movie where I feel I can finally understand what the appeal of the franchise is, and I can’t wait for the next one.

A Tale Told by an Idiot

I mentioned RiffTrax a while back. Tonight I finally got to try it out.

Fans of MST3k have wondered a lot what it would be like if the guys had been able to do a good movie for a change. Well, I still can’ tanswer that, because I saw The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I own a copy of The Phantom Menace. Am I supposed to be embarrassed by that? Please, I have no shame left.)

The RiffTrax deal is just about exactly what I’d expected. Sci Fi Channel-era MST3k with bigger-budget movies and no host segments. It’s pretty damn funny, and I’m looking forward to the other ones. With the commentary and the “DisembAudio” they use to keep in sync, I’d say it’s the best possible job they could do without actually having the rights to the movie.

Now, for the movie itself. Holy cow!

What kind of reality distortion field was I living in when I saw The Phantom Menace the first time? I remembered it was bad, but I’d somehow managed to convince myself that it wasn’t completely irredeemable. It’s pretty, at least. And the pod race is kind of cool, right?

No! It’s such an enormous flaming turd that has nothing, nothing going for it. When it was released, it was bad enough to inspire years of disappointed mockery on the internets. It’s still got all that awful stuff — Jar Jar, midochlorians, racially offensive aliens, a plot so boring and incomprehensible it makes Russian movies seem action-packed.

Now on top of all that, it hasn’t aged well.The CG was the only thing it had going for it, but it already looks dated and it draws attention to itself. There’s just not a single good thing about that movie. It’s been like seven years since it came out, and now I’m mad at it all over again. I want to burn the DVD, but there’s still just enough residual Star Wars fanboy at my core that won’t let me.

Best moment in the whole thing is when Mike tells Jar Jar, “Okay, just go to hell, all right?”

Guilty Pleasure

I honestly can’t tell if “Heroes” has gotten significantly better since I first saw it (and mercilessly ragged on it), or if I’m just starting to come down off my high horse and admit that my tastes aren’t as highbrow as I like to think.

I’ve still got problems with it. Biggest is that the whole thing reeks of Major Network Television. There are the stupid catch-phrases, and the big event gimmicks (“One of the heroes will DIE!”), and the soap-opera casting. Is it just me, or does anybody else think the actress playing the congressman’s wife just looks weird and unnatural?

Plus, it still feels like a bunch of people who are late to the whole comic book party. “We’ve got a superhero who can borrow other superheroes’ powers. Does that not just blow your mind?!?” Well, no, because we’ve seen Rogue do it in X-Men comics for decades, plus there were these movies that came out a while back you might have heard of. The creator of the show has been quick to point that out in interviews — he’s said he’ll come up with ideas and then hear from a friend that there’s already a well-established character that does the same thing. Still, it’s fun to make fun of him for it.

Especially when they try to build drama around it. Their big climax for the first half season was what goes down at Homecoming, and it was all relatively cool. But is there anybody in the audience who didn’t know what was going to happen as soon as the episode started? The character who borrows other heroes’ powers is going to sacrifice everything to save the girl who can survive falls from great height. But oh no! We see a horrible painting of the future showing him fall from a great height!

Fifteen minutes into the episode, my mother, who’s not exactly steeped in comic book lore, said, “After he absorbs the cheerleader’s healing ability, is he going to get the bad guy’s power too?” And she wasn’t having a heroin-induced vision of the future, as far as I could tell.

Still, the show’s engaging, it always delivers some kind of pay-off (I’m not mad at you, “Lost,” just very, very disappointed), and I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it seems like the dialogue has gotten less corny and the acting has been bumped up a notch to B-list.

And as cocky as I am, there’s stuff that I’ve been too dense to comprehend. One of my big problems with the show was figuring out what they were going to do with the Niki character. Multiple personality disorder isn’t a super power. It was only while I was reading a message board, trying to find out which hero is going to DIE next week?!? that some fan pointed out what I never picked up on: she’s the Hulk.

I don’t know if that counts as “subtle,” considering that there’s already a She-Hulk. And I’ve heard that a version of the real Hulk’s backstory says that he was created not from gamma radiation but MPD as a result of child abuse. Short of having her screaming “Hulk SMASH!” instead of using long-range rifles, I don’t know how they could’ve made it any clearer.

Roast in a 250 degree oven for 45 minutes, then rub it with a turtle

My regular Saturday Night thing. That’s Pearl Forrester’s turkey recipe from Mystery Science Theater 3000. A post on Rain’s blog reminded me how I used to gather round the VCR on Thanksgiving day, watching or recording as much of the MST3K marathon as I could manage. I had moved on from that profound sense of loss, so thanks to Rain for bringing it back up again.

Even though we can’t watch new episodes anymore, we can try RiffTrax, Mike Nelson’s attempt to ~~exploit his past success~~ re-awaken the magic of MST for us all.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like a good enough idea… AT FIRST. The bad: it’s only one or two guys instead of the whole cast (Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy make guest appearances), no host segments, and you have to sync up everything by hand. The good: the gang gets to cover modern movies, and Mike at long last gets to do Roadhouse.

Makes a great gift for the person in your life who doesn’t have real-life funny friends to watch movies with.

It can make your head hurt

Everybody knows that when you’re faced with an overwhelming amount of work, not because of outside pressure as much as because you’ve been slow to get things done, the best course of action is to procrastinate some more. The past couple of nights I’ve been hard-core with the procrastination; I did something I can’t remember doing in a long time: I just sat in front of the TV and flipped through the channels, watching whatever was on.

When you start channel-surfing after years of having a reliance on the TiVo, it really makes you stop and think. I just couldn’t shake the thought of how much research and effort and science and technology went into my TV setup.

Go back hundreds if not thousands of years, to when man first discovered sequential images. Then the discovery of persistence of vision, and the foresight to put those images together to create animation. Elsewhere, the principles of color theory that lead to the pointillist movement in art, and the ingenious discovery that the human brain can make up a complete image from discrete points of color.

Then there’s all of the genius that went into the discovery and use of radio waves and the idea of broadcasted transmissions. Research into sound and acoustics, so that a signal can be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced on a remote speaker. The study of phosphors, which can generate light when hit with electricity. The idea of representing information digitally, so that a single coherent image can be broken up into discrete pixels and then reproduced on a display device. The evolution of the cathode ray tube, which generates a complete two-dimensional image several times a second using a single beam of electricity that moves faster than we can easily conceive. Then the development of plasma and liquid crystal displays, which create images and animation on a flat surface. Not to mention all the technology that went into the construction of flat, high-resolution screens and tiny speakers and circuit boards.

On top of all that, there’s the study of propulsion and rocket science. And the evolution of that from the obvious applications like space exploration and blowing up people, to the ingenious idea of launching a piece of machinery into geosynchronous orbit with the earth so that you can transmit these digital images to far distant points on the planet almost instantaneously.

And all those centuries of research and toil and brilliant discoveries from the most genius minds of the human race all work together to bring us “Deal or No Deal.”

While we’re all contemplating the significance of that, I have to go use a bunch of miniaturized transistors that perform millions of calculations in a second, and ultra-thin liquid crystal displays and tiny radio transmitters that communicate with an extensive cellular radio network to provide instantaneous communication with points halfway across the world, so I can vote for Mario Lopez to win “Dancing with the Stars.” Slater’s got the moves, yo.

Flushed Away

At least Winslet remembered to keep her legs straight. One thing I forgot to mention: Flushed Away is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it to anybody who likes Wallace & Gromit.

It’s pretty dire for the first ten minutes or so; the whole thing has the taint of DreamWorks about it, and you’re likely to believe that the whole thing’s been Shrek-ified. But about the first time you see a slug, the Aardman effect kicks in, and it’s all great from there on. All the voices are great (especially Bill Nighy as the albino rat and Jean Reno as Le Frog), the story’s even more solid than a “kids movie” needs to be, the character animation is perfect, and they even put plasticine textures on the model to distract you from the fact you’re watching CGI.

The Wallace & Gromit movies are more about being clever and inventive; this is all about being funny. And it’s surprising how well it works; jokes as corny as these (again, see “Jean Reno as Le Frog”) really shouldn’t work as well as they do. But it’s all in the timing and their willingness to go at it full-barrel. If you’re going to do a getting-racked-in-the-nuts joke, go all the way with it. And then do it again.

I can’t think of a thing I didn’t like about this movie, and I hope it’s a hit.

Chick movies

Typical bachelor refrigerator. This week I had an inadvertent Mary Harron film festival, because I rented The Notorious Bettie Page and American Psycho without realizing they were both by the same director.

You can understand my confusion — one’s a biography about a 50s pin-up star, and the other’s a horror/black comedy adaptation of a satirical novel about yuppies. But when you look at them back-to-back, especially when you combine them with the only other Mary Harron movie I’ve seen, I Shot Andy Warhol, you can see an oeuvre developing. They’ve got a lot in common: they’re all period pieces, they’re all driven completely by the stand-out performance of a lead actor (Gretchen Mol, Christian Bale, and Lili Taylor), they all show a pretty antagonistic relationship between men and women, and they’re all ultimately unsatisfying for reasons that are kind of hard to define, exactly.

My first reaction after seeing Bettie Page and American Psycho was that Harron has what I call the “Drew Carey Syndrome.” That’s when you’re hip enough to be able to recognize what’s cool — Carey was a fan of The Sims back when it was still fairly esoteric, and he recognized the potential of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and its stars and brought them to popularity in the US — but everything you put out yourself is just kind of… there.

But that seems like too harsh a criticism. I have a hard time finding fault with either Bettie Page or American Psycho — they’re technically well-made, the scripts are fairly solid and well-paced and competent, the period touches are dead-on accurate without being overbearing, there are plenty of clever visual touches that keep the movie interesting, the casting is perfect and the leads are given the opportunity to totally take over the part, and as you go through you get the feeling that Harron made all the right choices.

Still, at the end of each I was left thinking, “how has my life been improved by watching this movie?” And I couldn’t come up with anything. The Notorious Bettie Page ends up feeling just like a standard biopic, with (welcomed) nudity and some interesting visual touches thrown in. It felt like a performance — a great performance, but still without the feeling that I got closer to understanding or relating to a real person.

And American Psycho is more broadly a satire/black comedy, so you’re not really supposed to relate to the main character. But it still feels “off.” Maybe it’s in the subject matter; you get the real sense that Harron worked hard to keep the 80s references from being too obvious or heavy-handed, but she was too constrained by the book and was forced to keep that material in there. Mocking yuppies, and Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston, might’ve seemed fresh in 1991, but by 2000 it just seems so dated as to be irrelevant.

American Psycho works the best of the three I’ve seen, because it ends with some ambiguity and forces you to think a little about what you’ve just seen. Of course, I did have to watch the ending again with the commentary on, to make sure that the ambiguity was intentional, but then that’s what the commentary is for.

The thing is that I really want to like Harron’s movies a lot better than I do, because of all the stuff she gets right. As I said, all the technical stuff she gets dead-on right. And the performances from Gretchen Mol and Christian Bale are about as perfect as you can get. And the choice of subject matter is interesting, and the take on it is uncompromising. All of the movies portray women as people, with their own motivations and their own independent life stories, instead of just defining them by how they relate to men. Considering she was able to convey that viewpoint even in the on-the-surface-misogynistic American Psycho, that’s pretty impressive.

So it’s remarkable that any of those movies were ever made, and that they managed to come out as strong as they did. I just wish I liked them better.

I Don’t

Ha! Boom! Suck on that witty post title, “Lost!”

Looks like the show has finally hit me with the one-two punch: a mediocre episode followed by a long break to completely ween me of any sense of involvement in the series. It’s their own fault; they’ve been hyping this thing since even before the season started, saying that we were going to discover all kinds of stuff and it was going to change our perception of the series forever.

It didn’t do either. It set up a cliffhanger that has enough maybe enough weight to it to ratchet up the tension for about a week. Not two months. And they didn’t answer anything. Unless you count “which guy will Kate choose?” but really, who the hell cares? It’s an ensemble cast with smoke monsters and polar bears and electromagnetic machines and mysterious codes; don’t we have more significant things to think about?

I’m still going to be watching come February; I’d be lying to say I won’t. But this was just a huge triple-A Anti-Climax.

Subtropical Homesick Blues

Oh boy! My blog’s first post-by-request. Granted, it’s about “Lost,” so I would’ve ended up talking about it anyway, but still.

It looks like the “Lost” backlash is in full effect on the internets, to the point that even the complaints have gotten stale. For my part, just over the last four or five weeks I’ve gone from being excited enough to stage an ill-fated “Lost”-watching party at my apartment, to being disappointed, to even forgetting that it was on last night until I was reminded. Still, I think the episodes this season have steadily been getting better.

I’m not the gushing fanboy that I used to be, but I kept thinking last night that there was some really cool stuff going on, stuff that reminded me of a show I used to like an awful lot. I didn’t really care about the big developments last night, and/or I saw them coming from a mile away even without the internet spoilers, but I still thought it was a very well-done episode.

The episode could just as well have been called “The Cost of Success,” because at this point, the show is clearly a victim of its own hype. The production quality and the performances haven’t gone down, and the series still has one of the highest cool-stuff-per-episode ratios on TV, but they’re just not delivering on everything they promised, and it’s wearing down viewers’ patience. I kept being reminded of the series “Heroes.” It’s really not a good show. It’s got enormous plot holes, terrible terrible dialogue, mediocre performances, and is full to bursting with tired cliches, stereotypes, and gimmicks. “Lost” is better in just about every conceivable way — so how come I’m more interested in what’s going on with the former than I am with the latter?

Now, the “Lost” guys have painted themselves into a corner, and they’ve got an obscene amount riding on the next episode. It’s going to be the last for a long while, so they stand to lose a lot of viewers. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve been hyping it even since before the season started, saying that it’s going to be the most stunning thing we’ve ever seen on television. If it doesn’t deliver on a lot of the mysteries left dangling since the pilot episode, then there are going to be a lot of pissed off viewers, and those of us who are still watching the show are going to have to hear about it incessantly for the next four months.

I still have faith they can pull off something good, even though there’s no way it’s going to be everything people want from it. I thought last week’s episode was pretty cool if forgettable, and last night’s showed they can still hand out the reveals when they need to. But for that I need spoilers, so don’t read the rest of this post if you haven’t seen the last two episodes.
Continue reading “Subtropical Homesick Blues”

The Supremely Satisfying Tittybong

I realize you’re supposed to finish a book before you write a book report on it, but 1) I’m really enjoying this one, and 2) I’m bored and want to virtual-talk to somebody, and c) who knows, I could die tomorrow, and everyone would be at the wake lamenting, “If only there’d been more time. Now we’ll never get the chance to ask Chuck if he enjoyed In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson.” (In case I drop dead while blogging: the answer is yes, I’m enjoying it a lot).

When I was reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I said that I was really impressed with Bryson’s writing but was frustrated with how he handled the material. While a historian and magazine columnist writing about science didn’t work well for me, a humorist writing travel memoirs works great.

For starters, it’s about Australia. Who doesn’t love Australia? Satanists, that’s who. And possibly New Zealanders, which is just about the same thing. The impression you get from In a Sunburned Country is that the country has the most bizarre and inhospitable environment on the planet, with the friendliest people in the world trying to counter-balance that.

The book is also funny as hell. I was sold as soon as I read the passage where Bryson describes himself falling asleep in someone’s car:

Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside — tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air — decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling.

Reading that was the first time I’ve laughed out loud at a book since I first found Roy Blount Jr.’s stuff. And he’s consistent; the book is filled with genuinely funny passages; even when he goes for the corny or predictable joke, it’s hilarious.

The best surprise of the book for me is that it’s reminded me to drop the preconceived ideas I have about people. Not Australians, in particular — the country as described in the book matches pretty well with how I’ve always imagined it — but people in general. I was pretty dismissive of Bill Bryson’s books, figuring anything that popular can’t possibly be good. I assumed they were light, and easy to read (both of which are true, it turns out), and full of Country Home Companion-style heartwarming, wry humor. I imagined the target audience, like Bryson himself, were suburban mid-westerners in their 50s who had excess income and leisure time they wanted to fill with something mildly adventurous. In short, the CBS crowd.

That was dispelled the first couple of times he said “fuck” and described himself drawing a cartoon about salmon masturbating. It sounds as if all you have to do is cuss and make giggling jokes about sex to keep me entertained, and while that’s true, that’s not my point. In fact, my point is the opposite. We’ve gotten so used to the idea that comedy has to be “edgy” to be funny, that it’s become just as tired a stereotype as the opposite. I suspect that people are a lot less sheltered and tightly-wound than we imagine them to be, and when your whole schtick is built around shocking people, more often than not you’re just being boorish.

The real talent isn’t in taking it upon yourself to shock people out of their complacent Father Knows Best existence, it’s having the subtlety and nuance to recognize exactly when saying “fuck” makes the joke. I’m glad I was wrong to be so dismissive about Bryson; he’s a lot more talented than I’d assumed.

Taiko

It’s coming up on November again, which means another International Taiko Festival in Berkeley and another post where I tell people they should check it out. The tickets are more than a little pricey, but it’s usually a spectacular show. If anybody out there’s planning to go, let me know so’s I don’t have to sit there by myself.

Until then, I’ve got the first of my home movies from Tokyo up on the interweb. I’d been hoping to see a genuine taiko performance in Japan, but didn’t know where to look. On one of my days off, I was headed through Yoyogi Park on the way to the Meiji Shrine, followed the sound of far-off drumming, and wandered right into the middle of the Tokyo Sri Lanka Festival. There I caught the tail end of a taiko performance on stage. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I don’t know the name of the group that was performing.

The videos suffer a little from the compression, and the fact that I can’t hold a camera steady on account of my condition, but the basic idea’s there. Here’s their final performance (about 7 minutes):

and its encore (about 2 and a half minutes):