Man, do I really like "Not Afraid," the first single leaking off of Eminem's Recovery album. I wasn't really a fan of the horror-movie obnoxiousness of Relapse, but this is a completely fascinating, and beautifully executed, example of his contradictions, and perhaps a new direction:
Stylistically, this is Eminem at his best. There are tons of multiple rhymes within lines, and lots of wordplay, including references to raising an actual bar, and jokes about dental crows and getting shot (trust me, it works), and perhaps my favorite: "It's time to exorcise these demons / These motherfuckers are doing jumping jacks now." The song is profane and violent, and often funny.
But it also balances all of those tendencies with a tenderness, vulnerability, and responsibility that have marked Eminem's most emotionally mature work. Fader jokes that the chorus has a certain "Hakuna-Matataness" to it, and that's true, but it's also sonically rich, giving heft to declarations that might come across as somewhat emotionally hollow. There's a perspective switch halfway through the song: it's third person through the early lyrics, as Eminem is describing someone pretty messed up, cursed by his talent, set against the world. But by the second verse, he's in solid first person and dedicating himself deeply, and emotionally, to his fans.
When he rhymes, "I solemnly swear to treat this group like my daughters and raise it," I was actually caught off-guard by the tenderness of the line. Despite songs like "My Dad's Gone Crazy," Eminem seems to draw a sacred circles around his daughters, one his by birth, one by choice. For him to include his fans in the circle is a huge gesture. I've always experienced Eminem as the guy I shouldn't want but do anyway, someone who I bond with by picking my way through the minefield of his lyrical and mental volatility. He's not someone who woos his audience, who asks them to stay, who promises to nurture them. Rather, when he creates unity, he does so through shared anger and pain. And those emotions are there too, but Eminem sounds like he's in a better place than we've ever heard him. I have no idea how that'll impact him in the long-term, or even on a full album. But this is very compelling.
Dear Producers of Jonah Hex,
Does no one remember how awful Wild, Wild West was? If not, you might want to consider it based on this trailer you put out:
I realize Gatling guns mounted on horses are cooler, and moderately more plausible than mechanical spiders, and John Malkovich is probably a better Old West Bad Guy than Kenneth Branagh. But I worry that in this case, not even Lance Reddick will save you.
Best wishes,
Alyssa
I realize Gatling guns mounted on horses are cooler, and moderately more plausible than mechanical spiders, and John Malkovich is probably a better Old West Bad Guy than Kenneth Branagh. But I worry that in this case, not even Lance Reddick will save you.
Best wishes,
Alyssa
We Are But Limited Humans
So, there is apparently a kerfuffle over Idris Elba's being cast to play a Norse deity in Kenneth Branagh's movie adaptation of Thor. Now, I understand lots of religious traditions portray their gods as looking like them. But as a nominally-practicing Jew, I'm pretty sure we have no idea what deities actually look like. For all we know, God is like the aliens in Contact, and shows up in whatever form we'll be able to relate to. But I'm down with the Sufi idea that seventy thousand veils separate us from the real thing. So who cares if the character is a god worshipped by the Norse? Idris Elba looks superhuman to me.
Girls and Horses
So, Secretariat is clearly a feel-good, obstacles-overcome sports story, designed, as Vulture says, "to make grown men cry." Despite that freakish and slightly annoying genetic engineering, I think there's one thing that might make this movie different than its predecessors, and therefore more watchable: the recognition that people who are supremely confident about underdogs may be right, but they also are probably supremely strange:
Cue John Malkovich. And the weirdly sexy voiceover at the beginning. And I really like the intense, candy-colored palate.
I also really like that the movie's apparently going to explore some of the anachronisms of Southern female rebellion in the early seventies. Penny Tweedy's an interesting combination--a Virginian with a Smith College degree who met her husband in business school at Columbia, who also was still sort of a perfect picture of Southern womanhood into the 1970's as the women's movement advanced elsewhere in the country. It took ten years after Secretariat's Triple Crown win for her to be elected to the Jockey Club, and she's not listed as Secretariat's breeder, even though she was the one who made the mating decision that lead to his birth. So frequently the conflicts in sports movies have to do with race (often quite justifiably, it's not as if I don't think race is an issue in sports, or that sports haven't been a huge proving ground for racial equality, I totally do) that I'm curious to see one that focuses more on gender (although I will be curious to see if the movie deals with race in the horse business). Diane Lane is sexy and tough as hell, and given some of the trash she's been in recently, I hope she makes a serious meal of this role.
Cue John Malkovich. And the weirdly sexy voiceover at the beginning. And I really like the intense, candy-colored palate.
I also really like that the movie's apparently going to explore some of the anachronisms of Southern female rebellion in the early seventies. Penny Tweedy's an interesting combination--a Virginian with a Smith College degree who met her husband in business school at Columbia, who also was still sort of a perfect picture of Southern womanhood into the 1970's as the women's movement advanced elsewhere in the country. It took ten years after Secretariat's Triple Crown win for her to be elected to the Jockey Club, and she's not listed as Secretariat's breeder, even though she was the one who made the mating decision that lead to his birth. So frequently the conflicts in sports movies have to do with race (often quite justifiably, it's not as if I don't think race is an issue in sports, or that sports haven't been a huge proving ground for racial equality, I totally do) that I'm curious to see one that focuses more on gender (although I will be curious to see if the movie deals with race in the horse business). Diane Lane is sexy and tough as hell, and given some of the trash she's been in recently, I hope she makes a serious meal of this role.
I Think Glee Is Off My Must-Watch List
I'm going to write about this at much greater length over the weekend, so I won't vent my full spleen here. But I love, love Amber Riley, and I love Mercedes as a character who can declare "I'm worried about showing too much skin and causing a sex riot," as an explanation for why she refuses to wear a cheerleading skirt, and I hate that the inevitable end consequence of having a big, sassy black girl is a story about eating disorders and a rainbow of high school students singing Christina Aguilera's most saccharine song. Why can't she just be fabulous without consequence? Why can't she have a boyfriend? Why are the show's best, tartest couple reduced to sidekicks? Why does the gay kid have to be semi-pathetic and clueless?
To be fair, I thought the adults were great. April Rhodes is a wonderful character, and I wish Kristin Chenoweth and Sue Lynch could go a couple of rounds on the show. I really like the evolving relationship between Finn's mother and Kurt's father (except in that it's used to perpetuate the gay-boy-mooning-over-the-obviously-straight-guy stereotype and make Kurt look stupid), and the show's commitment to the idea that you don't have to be rich or educated to be emotionally intelligent. But they're not the focus. And it's not enough to keep me watching regularly every week. So sorry, Brian Wolly--no more rage-tweeting the show. I'll check it out at the end of the season. But life's too short. There's Bones to catch up on. I need my hour per week back.
To be fair, I thought the adults were great. April Rhodes is a wonderful character, and I wish Kristin Chenoweth and Sue Lynch could go a couple of rounds on the show. I really like the evolving relationship between Finn's mother and Kurt's father (except in that it's used to perpetuate the gay-boy-mooning-over-the-obviously-straight-guy stereotype and make Kurt look stupid), and the show's commitment to the idea that you don't have to be rich or educated to be emotionally intelligent. But they're not the focus. And it's not enough to keep me watching regularly every week. So sorry, Brian Wolly--no more rage-tweeting the show. I'll check it out at the end of the season. But life's too short. There's Bones to catch up on. I need my hour per week back.
Funny Girl
I'm not exactly sure what Easy A is about, and I worry that the fact that it's a Scarlet Letter riff means it'll end up being slut-shaming and sex negative. But man, does Emma Stone look adorable in this:
I definitely know the whole "let's see how far I can make my hair stand up on my head while I'm shampooing it" trick! Stone is really funny, and great, and likable, and I think that unlike a lot of super-cute female actresses her age, she believably portrays that sensation of having this luscious body you haven't quite figured out how you fit into yet. She was authentically and charmingly dorky in The House Bunny, even when Anna Faris taught her how to rock her assets and made her over. That's a valuable commodity, one that even Lindsay Lohan didn't really have in Mean Girls: she was moving smoothly, even before she got Plastic-ed. Here's hoping that Emma Stone keeps her hair color, her charm, and her sanity. Lohan's decline still feels tragic to me, but it does leave welcome space for Stone's ascension.
I definitely know the whole "let's see how far I can make my hair stand up on my head while I'm shampooing it" trick! Stone is really funny, and great, and likable, and I think that unlike a lot of super-cute female actresses her age, she believably portrays that sensation of having this luscious body you haven't quite figured out how you fit into yet. She was authentically and charmingly dorky in The House Bunny, even when Anna Faris taught her how to rock her assets and made her over. That's a valuable commodity, one that even Lindsay Lohan didn't really have in Mean Girls: she was moving smoothly, even before she got Plastic-ed. Here's hoping that Emma Stone keeps her hair color, her charm, and her sanity. Lohan's decline still feels tragic to me, but it does leave welcome space for Stone's ascension.
In The Only Pop Culture Development My Father Cares About More Than I Do
Michael Scott is leaving The Office. Or so Steve Carrell is rumbling. The Boston Globe hopes it's only a negotiating tactic, but I don't. I was never an enormous fan of the show's particular brand of intensely awkward humor, but it could be funny and sweet. The thing is, though, as originally conceived, the story of The Office is Jim and Pam getting together. That story is over. It's resolved. It's time for the show to make the exit it should have made when they got married, or even before then, when that exit could have been graceful. Steve Carrell doesn't need the show. And the show doesn't need to exist.
Am I Mad?
If I profess an affection for Rupert Grint? I've found his somewhat-awkward-looking adolescence and maturing quite charming in comparison to the intensely-manicured rollouts Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe have had. And I sort of appreciate that he's actually landed more acting work than either one of them (though Watson is in college, and pursuing fashion quite seriously) since the Harry Potter movie franchise launched, despite the fact that he's sort of treated like Ron Weasley in the media, the lesser third of the trio. Among the projects he's got coming out are the delightfully, particularly British-looking Wild Target:
I would have seen this in any case simply for Bill Nighy, who is a demi-God among imperious comedians and Emily Blunt, who seems like an enormous amount of fun. But I like Martin Freeman, too, and the idea of Martin Freeman as an assassin even better. I like the idea of Rupert Everett not using his talent in the service of junk. And I really like the idea of Grint playing a character who gets some mentoring and attention. I like the idea of Nighy giving him a shaping-up in real life, too. Grint is more rubber-faced than Nighy is, and certainly hasn't grown into the older man's way of wearing a suit yet. But I can definitely see Nighy teaching him something about walking the line between hilarity and dead seriousness.
I would have seen this in any case simply for Bill Nighy, who is a demi-God among imperious comedians and Emily Blunt, who seems like an enormous amount of fun. But I like Martin Freeman, too, and the idea of Martin Freeman as an assassin even better. I like the idea of Rupert Everett not using his talent in the service of junk. And I really like the idea of Grint playing a character who gets some mentoring and attention. I like the idea of Nighy giving him a shaping-up in real life, too. Grint is more rubber-faced than Nighy is, and certainly hasn't grown into the older man's way of wearing a suit yet. But I can definitely see Nighy teaching him something about walking the line between hilarity and dead seriousness.
Cee-Lo Gets Smooth
Courtesy the fabulous BabylonSista, hey, there's new Cee-Lo! And it's solo stuff! I like Gnarls Barkley quite a bit, and I think they've done particularly well for themselves with music videos. But Cee-Lo is a glorious entity unto himself, and deserves wild success on his own, instead of simply as part of a highly stylized joint personality. And this track, "I Want You," is in Cee-Lo's fine loverman tradition. This, and "All Day Love Affair" are terrific wooing songs.
Yes. That's Exactly Right.
And by "that," I mean this conception of how Nick Fury is going to work in Iron Man 2:
In Jackson, Favreau says, Marvel has a charismatic player with a black-ops grin who can hold his own in a room full of super-powered types.
"He has tremendous presence," Favreau said. "We have a scene in the film at Randy's Donutswhere Tony, after a rough night, needs a talking-to. And as Fury, Sam is a combination of sponsor and mentor and also this mysterious guy who is indoctrinating him into this order of superheroes."
Not to be a huge nerd, but one of the things I think is really interesting about superheros is the idea that there are communities of practice, that you can wake up superpowered one day, but that doesn't actually make you a superhero: rather, that's something you learn along the way. I was actually sorry Kick-Ass didn't do more with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy actually pushing Kick-Ass to figure out what it actually means to be a hero other than showing up, saving his ass, and showing him he's an amateur. One thing I thought The Incredibles did quite well was to demonstrate that in the absence of a community, people with superpowers may end up intervening in ways that aren't helpful, or that they aren't actually in training to do: running into a burning building and ending up in a confrontation with the cops is the kind of thing that's a natural product of confusion and a lack of professionalism that leads people into real and serious danger. In Civil War, there's this great tension over whether Captain America is going to accept the Punisher as a member of his faction, despite the fact that he doesn't actually adhere to the generally accepted superhero code of behavior. Superheroism is most interesting when its definition is in tension. And Samuel L. Jackson as one of its key definers promises to bring the awesome.
I Haven't Played Video Games In Years
But I would so play this one. Although I might rely a bit too heavily on the Bourbon button.
It's Not About the Salary...Except When It Is
Hua Hsu, in a piece over at The Atlantic on hip-hop and selling out, I think unintentionally draws an intelligent brightline between the kind of selling out I was writing about over at Ta-Nehisi's place in February, and attempts to turn a buck based on past feats. I was talking about the value of art that is commercially successful, and even, perhaps, designed to be commercially successful, when I wrote:
And the truth is, I tend to think it's okay if folks want recognition and promotion and success, even if they don't absolutely need the money....Truth is, I don't think anyone should have to be ashamed of wanting to be successful, recognized, and to live comfortably. It's true of art of all kinds what Annie Savoy said of the national game in Bull Durham: "Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job."Among the things Hua's piece touches on (it's fairly wide-ranging, and worth checking out in its entirety) is the rage of hip-hop pioneers, who he compares to aging NFL retirees, who are angry that the labels who reaped so much financial success from their talent have failed to provide for them, and are looking to assure their own financial futures:
KRS—he of "It's not about a salary it's all about reality" fame—is ostensibly raging against the Museum, but it's only a version of a longer-standing target of his: the failure of a hip-hop industry to care after its own. (Maybe it's a version, too, of what's going on in the NFL.) This KRS clip is absorbing, righteous and crazy, all at once. He expresses a bitterness toward an industry that has left its pioneers behind; yet he is also too proud to admit bitterness, and too deeply scorned to confess what he wants.
And, rather than picketing in front of Interscope or shaking down the Black Eyed Peas for some of thatDipDive dough, he's savaging a museum, the site where memorial and money meet. KRS' rant is situated at the collision of two sensibilities, one that moralized its inability to draw that just salary, the other that sees no aspect of itself that can't be successfully monetized. Whether or not you buy the altruistic aims of KRS' gate-crashing, he's describing a very real contestation here, wherein a lot of old school artists, still waiting by the mailbox for those checks, are realizing that their stories can be sold, not just told.People have a right to make a living, to sell their stories if there's a market for it. But there's something sad about selling, very literally, a part of yourself because the market changed after you were a player in it.
Expensive Paper
I'm really happy to see graphic novels beginning to win significant literary rewards, and to be included for them. But I have to admit, I feel like I'm much less likely to purchase graphic novels than I am novels or works of long non-fiction. The emotional payoff can be similar, but it takes so much less time to get there that it doesn't always feel worth the cost. And while individual works like 1602 or Watchmen have fragments of fantastic, incandescent prose, I miss the longer, more sustained passages of novels when I read graphic works, including comics collections. I really want to read Marvel's Secret Invasion arc, for example, but I've been having a hard time justifying the purchase. Of course, this doesn't necessarily hold for everyone--and I hope it doesn't. I want graphic novels to stay commercially viable so they'll keep being written, and so libraries will start to stock even more of them. But it's a preference I've only just noticed, even as it's developed over time. And I'm wondering, as paperbacks have become more expensive, if anyone else feels the same way?
What It All Means
Some of you may remember the friendly tiff Noah Berlatsky and I had about Twilight last fall. Since then, we've become email pals, and he was nice enough to ask me to contribute to a series he's publishing on criticism. I wrote a personal history for him, with some thoughts about why I do what I do. An excerpt is here:
But check out the whole thing. There are stories about how dorky I was as an 8-year-old! Trust me, it's awesome! As is Noah's blog!
And after watching policy bloggers slug it out against the backdrop of an oft-deadlocked Congress, pop culture seemed more valuable than it had before, as both an escape, and as a field of play. I’ve become a somewhat more sophisticated consumer and observer of media in the last decade and a half. I can explain why I like or don’t like things now. But I’ve also found myself interested in a larger question: what does what we like say about us?
Noah and I met, in fact, because of a disagreement over what the Twilight phenomenon means for discussions about sexuality and gender. We never reached agreement on the merits, but it was clear we were working under the common assumption that culture, particularly popular culture, is a place where both creators and consumers work out real-life issues ranging from deciding whether to have sex before marriage to what would happen in a world with extremely large, well-equipped private armies.
Doing this kind of criticism doesn’t necessarily mean being deadly serious about things that are, after all, a lot of fun. Sometimes a Robyn song is just a Robyn song. But sometimes it’s also an argument for female artists about going independent rather than relying on and being shaped by a major label, just as the pop-rap fusions in collaborations between artists like Kanye West and Keri Hilson or B.o.B. and Janelle Monae are evidence for rap’s conquest and colonization of popular music. The Iron Man movies are fun because Robert Downey, Jr. is relaxed and having a great time playing a roguish industrialist, but they’re also action movies for people who feel ambivalent about the projection of American military power–even if it means they’re settling for an individual having tremendous power, fire- and otherwise, because he’s charming. Unlike in politics, in pop culture the choices don’t always have to be clear. Artists are blessedly free to explore gray areas without risking the career suicide that so often accompanies the impression that a government leader possesses less than crystalline moral clarity.
But check out the whole thing. There are stories about how dorky I was as an 8-year-old! Trust me, it's awesome! As is Noah's blog!
This May Sound Really Strange
But I'm really sorry the Nicole Wallace storyline on Law & Order: Criminal Intent wrapped up like it did. And that Detective Goren is gone. There aren't enough great female monsters on television. I would have loved to see a TV movie with the two of them that's the equivalent of The Final Problem, Reichenbach Falls and all. But with sexual tension.
Just Because You Love It
So, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was on FX over the weekend, and because it was gray out, and because my sister and I would make kickin' Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore substitutes, respectively, in a Halloween recreation of the trio, I watched it again. And after revisiting Justin Theroux's performance as an Irish gangster, I really do appreciate that he's doing screenwriting work, and not just employed as a set of abs.
I haven't spent that much time in Los Angeles. But I imagine if you're a reasonably good-looking actor, which Theroux definitely is, it's relatively easy to just get by on that. If you're someone like Seth Rogen, forging a different path as a schlub sex symbol, getting into writing and producing makes sense so you can create the roles and plots that other folks aren't going to create for you. If you're Theroux, you don't need to do that. And you definitely don't need to be writing movies that you aren't straight-up starring in, as he's done with Tropic Thunder and now with Iron Man 2. You do that if you enjoy writing. It's not a deep observation. But I admire that.
TV Shows, Not Sequels
The kids these days are so smart. Jamelle is, of course, completely correct that what The Incredibles needs is not a sequel, but a spin-off television series. Call it PostModern Family.
Hate and Beauty
I've been meaning to link to this just ridiculously good piece by Erik Tarloff about how to reckon with hateful language and themes in great art without censoring or abandoning it. This story about Mahler conducting Siegfried, and reinterpreting Wagner's intentions to allow the piece to stay alive and vibrant is particularly interesting:
When Mahler first conducted Siegfried in Vienna, the singer who performed the role of Mime came to an early rehearsal with an interpretation that was a coarse anti-Semitic caricature. Mahler quickly stopped the rehearsal and told the singer not to do it. He then said something along the lines of, "I have no doubt that is what Wagner intended, but I will not permit it in my house."
Which is all well and good, and in Mahler's Viennese production the hateful subtext of the opera was thereby suppressed, if not expunged. Mahler, himself a Jew, was no doubt responding to a deliberate and mischievous provocation on the part of a singer as well as a desire to spare the sensibilities of a substantial portion of his audience. But he still conducted the opera. In fact, he worshiped Wagner, and conducted him regularly and lovingly.The impact of art is difficult to fully reckon with. Nat Hentoff's The Day They Came to Arrest The Book (Also, OMG they made a CBS Schoolbreak Special of the book, written by Melvin Van Peebles. If anyone can help me get my hands on this, I would be eternally grateful.) is a great primer, especially for younger readers. But this strikes me as a real must-read short meditation. Art flows from its creators, and lives a, glorious, complicated existence far beyond their reach.
Cheap and Easy
I Watch Stuff is a little concerned about Marvel's plan to develop movies based on characters with smaller followings in projects with $30-40 million budgets, saying the initiative will produce "either more interesting superhero films or a legion of Roger Corman's Fantastic Fours." Ultimately, though, Corman's Fantastic Four was made for a $1.5 million, and was never really intended for distribution. The Fantastic Four movie that followed was made for $100 million and was terrible. But you know what was made for $30 million? District 9. I often think superhero movies would actually be a lot better if the people making them had to work with some constraints, thinking about what effects they not just want, but need, and how best to achieve them, if they had to make sacrifices, if they needed strong dialogue and characterization because they can't count on distracting audiences from flaws in them.
Plus, I'm psyched about the possibility of a Dr. Strange movie. And hey, someone could make budget on a 1602 movie by repurposing costumes from a bunch of period pieces, right?
Plus, I'm psyched about the possibility of a Dr. Strange movie. And hey, someone could make budget on a 1602 movie by repurposing costumes from a bunch of period pieces, right?
Urban Studies
I'm fine with a Monsters, Inc. sequel. But as one of the commenters on io9 says, I'd be much more excited by a sequel to The Incredibles. I watched Monsters, Inc. (well, part of it) again last weekend with Jamelle and Tess, and one of the things that impressed me about it was the extent to which Pixar populated an essentially normal-looking urban center with a wide variety of critters. The Incredibles also is a movie about a standard-looking metropolis that's secretly full of extraordinary people. But the questions The Incredibles raise about how talented people fit into and alter society are wider-ranging (as well as questions of aging, romance, and Anna Wintour Parody), more deeply-explored, and I think ultimately more interesting than the way Monsters, Inc. explores how children are becoming more jaded at younger ages. And the commentary on the superhero genre was simultaneously witty and useful. I want to spend more time in that city, and on those issues. Monstropolis is cute, but it's like a slightly scarier Sesame Street. I'm familiar with it, I'll look back with nostalgia--but I don't feel an urgent need to revisit it any time soon.
Crazy Eyes You Could Drown In
So, I went to see Death at a Funeral This Weekend. I can't say it was a good decision. In particular, Danny Glover, (pardon my language) have some fucking respect for yourself. Good Lord.
But it did validate a theory I've been formulating for a while about James Marsden. Dude is delicious. But he's also a much better actors when he's playing, well, a little off. Let's take, for example, his sort of dour and depressing turns as Cyclops in the X-Men movies:
Dude was so paralyzed alternately by jealousy and grief that he was impossible to watch. Some of that was just the part--there wasn't much Marsden was allowed to do but look supremely pretty and upset. But he still didn't show an enormous amount of range in the role: when Phoenix blew him away in The Last Stand, it was hard to even notice that he was gone.
On the other hand, consider his role in Hairspray. It's a supporting part. But as an integrationist dance-show host with a slightly maniacal grin plastered across his face, Marsden made much more of a mark than he did as Cyclops:
Similarly, he's utterly dull as the slightly devious swain in 27 Dresses:
But playing a prince who is out of his element and out of his damn mind in Enchanted, he's hilarious, loose, engaging:
And in the midst of all the ridiculousness in Death at a Funeral, as Zoe Saldana's nervous fiancee, Marsden has far more fun than anyone else in the movie playing a guy under the influence of a designer drug. A scene of him cuddling with a bunch of garden statues is both sweet and supremely weird. It was probably the most unforced laugh in the movie. I really hope Marsden does more comedy: I Hop, which stars Russell Brand as an Easter Bunny who gets hit by a car sounds like a risk with potential. And I'll probably see him in the remake of Straw Dogs. But dude has a way with the laughs underneath those insane good looks. It'll serve him long after they go.
But it did validate a theory I've been formulating for a while about James Marsden. Dude is delicious. But he's also a much better actors when he's playing, well, a little off. Let's take, for example, his sort of dour and depressing turns as Cyclops in the X-Men movies:
Dude was so paralyzed alternately by jealousy and grief that he was impossible to watch. Some of that was just the part--there wasn't much Marsden was allowed to do but look supremely pretty and upset. But he still didn't show an enormous amount of range in the role: when Phoenix blew him away in The Last Stand, it was hard to even notice that he was gone.
On the other hand, consider his role in Hairspray. It's a supporting part. But as an integrationist dance-show host with a slightly maniacal grin plastered across his face, Marsden made much more of a mark than he did as Cyclops:
Similarly, he's utterly dull as the slightly devious swain in 27 Dresses:
But playing a prince who is out of his element and out of his damn mind in Enchanted, he's hilarious, loose, engaging:
And in the midst of all the ridiculousness in Death at a Funeral, as Zoe Saldana's nervous fiancee, Marsden has far more fun than anyone else in the movie playing a guy under the influence of a designer drug. A scene of him cuddling with a bunch of garden statues is both sweet and supremely weird. It was probably the most unforced laugh in the movie. I really hope Marsden does more comedy: I Hop, which stars Russell Brand as an Easter Bunny who gets hit by a car sounds like a risk with potential. And I'll probably see him in the remake of Straw Dogs. But dude has a way with the laughs underneath those insane good looks. It'll serve him long after they go.
Internal Logic
Wait, so, when a witch turns you into someone "as aggressively ugly on the outside as you are on the inside" as punishment for your vanity and cruelty, you get to keep your washboard abs? Who knew:
Sad thing is, I will probably see this at some point any way because Neil Patrick Harris is involved in this. And by "involved" I mean playing a rich dude's eccentric blind tutor. Lead us not into temptation, dude.
Sad thing is, I will probably see this at some point any way because Neil Patrick Harris is involved in this. And by "involved" I mean playing a rich dude's eccentric blind tutor. Lead us not into temptation, dude.
Gifted Tongues
Max is reading The Savage Detectives and liking it, which means that I should probably give in and put it on the list. He notes, however:
This is the first translated novel I’ve read since Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk, which is not to say that I have a distaste for translated fiction in general. I read a ton of translated fiction under ordinary circumstances, but last year I decided I would make more of an effort to read Americans writing English. This has paid huge style dividends – there’s no better place to learn a language than at the feet of the masters, and the language spoken, and prose written, in America is different than that spoken and written in England and throughout the international world.
Immersing myself in Faulkner, Hemmingway, Steinbeck (oh, Steinbeck!) has been a joy, and excellent for my writing, but it’s fascinating to return to worlds where the main characters do not speak English at home, and where a different set of giants tower over the literary landscape.
I think Bolano has one of the better translators I've seen. Another person who's been very well-served by their translator is Arturo Perez-Reverte, who despite initially refusing to have his books translated into a language other than French, relented, and ended up working, at least on some of his projects, with Sonia Soto, who is just a G. The Club Dumas, one of her jobs with him, is a gorgeous piece of English prose.
Sugar Sugar
I can't even begin to express how happy I am that the Archie comics are finally getting a gay character. As I've written before, Archie & Co. are to a certain extent, the participants in some of the most iconic relationships in American pop culture history. Adding a gay character to that roster is, in a small way, validation of the idea that gay teenagers are a standard feature of American high school life. I don't think it's too much to say that Archie comics instilled in me the idea that the ideal friend group would be comfortably mixed-race and mixed-gender. Obviously the comics were somewhat late to add black characters like Chuck Clayton and Nancy Woods, who were introduced as token characters in the 1970's, and became more prominent in storylines in the 1990's, when I was at the height of my Archie obsession. But with Archie dating Valerie Brown, the smartest of the Pussycats, and this latest character, the comic has, albeit belatedly, embraced a progressive vision of how kids today date. If the 6-year-olds who start reading the comics today take for granted when they get to high school that there will be gay couples, and interracial couples, that'll count as progress.
The Kids Do Stand A Chance
It figures that it would take the combined forces of Janelle Monae and B.o.B. to make me like something touched by Vampire Weekend. "The Kids," which samples Vampire Weekend's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance," is vastly better than its source material:
Where VW's vocals stay, typically, sort of languid and thin, B.o.B. has a nice bounce over the music, and Monae sends these loopy, gorgeous spirals around and through the bass and drums. And I really like sci-fi imagery, whether it's a cry of despair: "We're trapped inside the Matrix / Forced to play our hand / We're filled with so much hatred / The kids don't stand a chance." Or a way of explaining being a kid alienated from the normal ebb and flow of social life and school: "I abandoned my old planet / And I landed on earth / As a kid I never understood what I observed...Always in detention / For the lack of my attention / You can call deficit / Really I just didn't listen."
I realize I'm going nuts over these two. I'm genuinely sorry if I'm boring anyone out there. It's been a long time, I have to admit, since I've felt like there was this much new music out there that I was insanely excited about, and I've become the toddler who opened her Christmas stocking and kind of can't fathom that there's a whole tree with presents under it. I'm really invested, as a critic and as a listener, in the conversation between hip-hop and pop. Efforts like this make me feel like I'm not just crazy, but that I'm seeing the emergence of something exciting, a genuine step forward for both genres.
Hulu Hoop
Hulu's move to a paid premium version seems eminently reasonable to me, and entirely expected. But the key factor in making the decision for me will be whether I can play things on my television through my Blu-ray player. That option has made my Netflix subscription not just nice but essential (although it's definitely cut into my disc rotation rate considerably). Without it, or the possibility of stuff that's on Hulu never showing up on Netflix either as discs or on Instant Watch, I probably won't pull the trigger on the Hulu subscription.
True Love
I've always thought it was too bad that more of the stars of Buffy didn't go on to have wildly successful careers. I'm very happy for Alyson Hannigan and David Boreanaz, of course, but I always regretted that Sarah Michelle Gellar apparently decided horror was basically it for her, and have missed Nicolas Brendon and Emma Caulfield quite a lot (I've always wondered how much the latter's quite conservative views stymied her career. I don't think those things are a barrier if you're already established, but I imagine they might have some impact if you're an actor on the cusp). Fortunately, Caulfield's back, with an indie that looks quite sweet:
I do think an obsession with romantic certainty is probably really bad for us as a society, though I'm less sure about the impact, whether positive or negative, of dating websites. I do think it would be pretty frightening to live in a world with less spontaneity, and this low-key way of exploring that idea is interesting.
I do think an obsession with romantic certainty is probably really bad for us as a society, though I'm less sure about the impact, whether positive or negative, of dating websites. I do think it would be pretty frightening to live in a world with less spontaneity, and this low-key way of exploring that idea is interesting.
This Is How You Make a Trailer (And Really, A Movie)
I'm extremely intrigued by Get Low, this slightly insane Bill Murray-Robert Duvall-Sissy Spacek extravaganza:
The trailer reveals a whole lot about the movie's frame narrative, but gives precisely nothing away about the characters' motivations and connections to each other. More trailers should be cut like this, and more movies constructed the way this seems to be. I don't necessary mean we need more twist endings, just stories that take time to develop, like the relationships between people do in real life. Emotional verisimilitude is underrated.
The trailer reveals a whole lot about the movie's frame narrative, but gives precisely nothing away about the characters' motivations and connections to each other. More trailers should be cut like this, and more movies constructed the way this seems to be. I don't necessary mean we need more twist endings, just stories that take time to develop, like the relationships between people do in real life. Emotional verisimilitude is underrated.
Thinking of Her That Way
So, I'm a little embarrassed I missed that Olivia Wilde was the women in all of those Tron: Legacy glamor shots of a chick stretched out on a couch in a form-fitting jumpsuit. Now io9 says the movie could be the thing that makes her the next big action star. I'm still thinking about whether I buy it. I've always found Thirteen, Wilde's character on House, to be somewhat annoying and manipulative (though not, sadly, in an interesting way like Anne Dudek's Amber), but I do have to admit that I think it's a complete and fairly deep performance. If the question is who's the next Sigourney Weaver, though, which is how io9 framed the question, I think that's a harder bar to clear. Wilde is so insanely stereotypically gorgeous (Google "Megan Fox," "ox," and "bare hands" for a laugh along those lines) that I'm not sure she's developed the flintiness that made Weaver both really sexy and completely plausible as an action heroine. Fragility does action heroines no favors.
Nobody Wants to Be Lonely
I don't know if any of you experience this, but I occasionally have a revelation about an artist I've loved for a long time that makes my love for them perfectly clear and articulate. With Robyn, I think that just happened with her new song, "Dancing On My Own":
Update: Video's dead, but you can listen to it here.
Update: Video's dead, but you can listen to it here.
She's mastered the art of expressing loneliness while vehemently rejecting the corollary that means she ought to be pathetic, too. What she's describing here: "I'm in the corner / Watching you kiss her / I'm right over here / Why can't you see me? / I'm giving my all / But I'm not the guy you're taking home" are pretty awful things to feel. But while she's specific about that awfulness, she's still dancing. It's a quieter form of dance-as-lifeline, as is "Dancehall Queen," than Madonna's "Vogue." But it's basically the same message: like sharks, if we keep moving, we live.
Origin Stories
Continuing my streak of B.o.B.-love, I am quite fond of "Airplanes pt. 2," which features the intriguing combination of Hayley Williams of Paramore and Eminem:
A couple of thoughts:
1) I really like the details in this song. "Let's pretend like it's '98 / Like I'm eating lunch off Styrofoam trays," is particular enough to situate the narrative, but general enough that we can nod along in recognition. Eminem's half of the story is similarly situated in the steps in his particular rise. I like the counterfactual approach both of them are taking to their verses, listing all the things that made both of them who they are now, while leaving intriguing negative space instead of explicitly explaining what their lives and the musical world would be like without them.
2) Maybe it's just that she's not a soprano. Or that her chorus acts as a strong frame device rather than wisp of something pretty tossed in to break up the rhymes. But I really like that Williams is an equal in this song. One of the things that I appreciate about B.o.B. is that he often has a dude singing hooks, or has something like this. Listening to him made me realize that I often feel like the samples of women's voices, or the women brought in to sing choruses on hip-hop songs often feel marginalized to me. It's not that they don't work aesthetically, but I like this alternate presentation.
3) This is not the best guest-verse Em's ever done. Any time he's relying on a single profanity to fill up space, or complains about his mother, that's a sign to me that he's backsliding. That said, I appreciate the harshness of the self-examination. And the intense focus on how to provide for family, and the shame of not being able to do it when you want to, in this line: "He's going to have a hard time explaining to Hailey and Laney / These food stamps and this WIC shit." "Mockingbird" is a better song overall about being white and working class (the description of stolen Christmas presents he's unable to replace makes me tear up every time). But I'm glad he keeps humanizing poverty, even though he's so far removed from it now.
A couple of thoughts:
1) I really like the details in this song. "Let's pretend like it's '98 / Like I'm eating lunch off Styrofoam trays," is particular enough to situate the narrative, but general enough that we can nod along in recognition. Eminem's half of the story is similarly situated in the steps in his particular rise. I like the counterfactual approach both of them are taking to their verses, listing all the things that made both of them who they are now, while leaving intriguing negative space instead of explicitly explaining what their lives and the musical world would be like without them.
2) Maybe it's just that she's not a soprano. Or that her chorus acts as a strong frame device rather than wisp of something pretty tossed in to break up the rhymes. But I really like that Williams is an equal in this song. One of the things that I appreciate about B.o.B. is that he often has a dude singing hooks, or has something like this. Listening to him made me realize that I often feel like the samples of women's voices, or the women brought in to sing choruses on hip-hop songs often feel marginalized to me. It's not that they don't work aesthetically, but I like this alternate presentation.
3) This is not the best guest-verse Em's ever done. Any time he's relying on a single profanity to fill up space, or complains about his mother, that's a sign to me that he's backsliding. That said, I appreciate the harshness of the self-examination. And the intense focus on how to provide for family, and the shame of not being able to do it when you want to, in this line: "He's going to have a hard time explaining to Hailey and Laney / These food stamps and this WIC shit." "Mockingbird" is a better song overall about being white and working class (the description of stolen Christmas presents he's unable to replace makes me tear up every time). But I'm glad he keeps humanizing poverty, even though he's so far removed from it now.
If You're In the DC Area...
And don't have plans for tomorrow night, this film festival looks pretty great. And benefits a good cause, too.
So, I'm All for More Female Superheroines...
But I'm not sure we need another one who is totally crazy. Although the pop-culture metaness of the whole enterprise does have me intrigued...
Just When I Thought I Couldn't Love Janelle Monae Any More...
This cover shoot and interview she did with Honey came out. The look is great (although the transparent photoshopping onto the backgrounds reminds me more of this insane, multi-hour photo shoot my friends in Cambodia went on for kicks while I was there than anything particularly convincing). And I want to join the Wondaland Arts Society so bad it hurts. I mean, come on:
My creative space is the headquarters for The Wonderland Arts Society. We have floating bookshelves, green grass, very beautiful pianos that we write songs on. We have lots of fish mounted on the wall, more importantly we just have really interesting people. It’s a headquarters for artists, who have super powers. We come up and try ideas. We wear black and white and we try to lead by example and try to change the world. It’s a very peaceful environment. Sometimes when we create music it gets very rowdy, it feels like an African tribe. When your artist, you don’t go home, you stay and you create all day and night.
But more than that, I think the multiplatform approach to her album is just right:
We are shooting a video for every song on the album, The ArchAndroid. We are creating a very strong narrative. We have a graphic novel coming out at the time of the release. This is a very special project.
Given the rise of filesharing, and of YouTube (there is just a huge amount of music where I'll loop the YouTube video while I'm working in another window, because I just don't need it enough to buy it), I think it's smart for artists to plan to make their money by catering specifically to devoted fans, and by treating merch as a serious extension of the art, and of the narrative behind the art. I haven't pre-ordered Monae's new album yet, though I imagine I'll pick it up at some point, but given how interested I am in her aesthetic, I'm very likely to purchase the graphic novel. Casual fans just aren't going to be financial engines for artists anymore, except for rare global phenomena like Lady Gaga. That may mean a smaller revenue base, but it may also spur seriously expanded creative output. And I'm all for that.
Sympathy for the Massholes
Of course the Jersey Shore ripoff would have to be about the guidos and guidettes of my fine state, the Massholes. I'm actually a little more sympathetic to this idea than I thought I would be. Getting dressed up to go to a Red Sox game is the one form of stereotypical attire I have totally mastered. The uniform of player-name T, short denim skirt, and ginormous hoop earrings is something I have down, and when I wear it, I know I fit into a crowd for once. To a certain extent, these are my people, and I am one of them. That said, they best stay away from my two favorite towns on Cape Cod. I don't like to share, whether with reality television crews (the Real World DC cast invaded the pool in my apartment building. I was BITTER.), or the tourists who get turned on to a place later.
Show Him The Money
I'm so ridiculously excited to see The Losers this weekend. And this Times interview with Idris Elba has jacked my crush on him, and my anticipation for the movie, up to a whole other level. As I've written before, I kind of respect folks who are honest about their commercial intentions, something Elba absolutely is. But I also hope Elba gets to a level where he can be extreme well-remunerated and also do that only in excellent projects. One of the folks interviewed in the profile notes that “I think he deserves to have his own franchise, like James Bond or something.” I would have loved to see Elba as a black Captain America. Or in a Black Panther franchise that did awesome things with Storm. Or as a Bond-like character in the CIA or contemporary MI-6. Or really in almost anything. I really hope it happens for him. And for all of us watching.
Pretty Girls
Commenter Arjun is annoyed:
I've thought about this quite a bit, and I wanted to lay out a couple of reasons I think the argument he's making doesn't work. I realize this may seem like I'm beating a dead horse, but I actually think the emergence of this line of argument is a significant development. So I'm going to go there.
1. Tina Fey's character isn't actually frumpy or ugly. She may wear jeans on a fairly regular basis, and sweatshirts when she's ill, but when she's in the office, she also wears well-tailored dresses and skirts just as often. She's got decent, up-to-date accessories. Her clothes fit, and generally highlight the best parts of her body. Her hair isn't always always Clairol-commercial perfect, but it generally looks pretty good. Other than the sex-line commercial, in which she did look unattractive and poorly put-together, there isn't a clear impact to Liz taking bad care of herself. She doesn't have visible acne from eating badly. She's certainly not overweight, even though she rarely exercises. When Jack guesses her weight accurately in the first episode, it's something like 117 pounds, which is, uh, very skinny. She might get lettuce in her hair, but that's pretty much the only effect her eating has on her.
I do think it's possible to make good jokes out of bad health habits. In the Ocean's 11 franchise, Brad Pitt's character is constantly eating some sort of horrible junk food. But the movies don't need to linger on it. Instead, the juxtaposition of a gorgeous guy in a beautifully-cut suit with unnaturally yellow nacho cheese is enough of a gag. The harping on Liz's habits seems gender-specific to me, to have a specific moral tone, because it sure isn't impacting her appearance. Tina Fey has talked in real life about the intense discipline she imposed on herself under to lose a lot of weight: the jokes about Liz's habits seem like retroactive judgement upon her real-life self, a means of psychological reinforcement, rather than an effective means of humor.
The show consistently pretends that Liz is physically unattractive (in addition to joking about her weird personality). But only the personality jokes are plausible, or frankly, interesting. They're the ones that are simultaneously believable, and that promise character growth, which the show seems to have basically given up on, despite nods in that direction earlier in the series.
Which leads me to:
2. Ugly jokes are lazy. Personality exploration is not. Folks may not "see how that’s even possible" that anyone could believe Lea Michele is ugly. But then it's not particularly clear why the show's creators use those kinds of jokes, even though they do. In earlier teen movies, which focus more on class, outcasts get made fun of because they have bad clothes, out of poverty or choice, or they drive the wrong cars, or listen to music that expresses feelings the dominant characters can't relate to, or are into art rather than football. Movies and television can plumb the psychological roots of all of those things: why a character chooses to dress poorly even though she could dress more conventionally, how a character copes with poverty, what emotions their interests reflect. In other words, you can take those things pretty far. But you can't go much of anyplace with the looks someone's born with. In Glee, Rachel's personality provides plenty of targets for insults and for growth. So why go there with her looks at all, when such insults are both implausible and totally non-clever?
3. When it comes to looks in Hollywood, moving the ball matters. Given how narrow the window of what women can look like in movies and on television is already, repeated jokes about how beautiful women are actually hideous, even if they aren't plausible, are actively harmful to the important cause of diversifying what actors and actresses look like. Those repeated jokes sink in. They have an impact. Especially when the women in question are very good-looking instead of gorgeous, cute instead of outright bombshells. If we convey the impression, even facetiously, that only women who are clones of Angelina Jolie belong on our screens, we run the risk of making what appears there even more repetitive and monotone than it already is.
I'm getting tired of the accusation that the portrayal of the main female characters in 30 Rock and Glee don't work because the actresses playing them are, in fact, extremely pretty.
Tina Fey's character is frumpy because of the way she carries herself: eating vast quantities of junk food, terrible posture etc. Liz Lemon is someone who is pretty (for starters, she dated a guy played by Jon Hamm whose claim to fame was that he was shallow, dumb and attractive) but typically takes very poor care of herself. I’m sorry, but I don’t care who you are – if you do a commercial for a sex line where you’re wearing terrible clothes, have horrible lipstick on your teeth, and creepily eat pizza – you’re gonna look awful. The joke, at least to me, isn’t that Lemon is a horribly disfigured skank (I’d take issue with that, especially the use of the work skank); it’s that she’s completely disheveled.
Lea Michelle's Rachel is grating in that special musical-theater way (I say this as a recovering orchestra dork). Her personality and apparel are by far the most frequent targets for insults. The times I can recall her looks being called into question all stem from her low social standing. I think it is a case of the popular kids seeking to cruelly reinforce the social order rather than the creators of the show asking the viewers to pretend that Lea Michelle is plain. But maybe that’s because I don’t see how that’s even possible.
I've thought about this quite a bit, and I wanted to lay out a couple of reasons I think the argument he's making doesn't work. I realize this may seem like I'm beating a dead horse, but I actually think the emergence of this line of argument is a significant development. So I'm going to go there.
1. Tina Fey's character isn't actually frumpy or ugly. She may wear jeans on a fairly regular basis, and sweatshirts when she's ill, but when she's in the office, she also wears well-tailored dresses and skirts just as often. She's got decent, up-to-date accessories. Her clothes fit, and generally highlight the best parts of her body. Her hair isn't always always Clairol-commercial perfect, but it generally looks pretty good. Other than the sex-line commercial, in which she did look unattractive and poorly put-together, there isn't a clear impact to Liz taking bad care of herself. She doesn't have visible acne from eating badly. She's certainly not overweight, even though she rarely exercises. When Jack guesses her weight accurately in the first episode, it's something like 117 pounds, which is, uh, very skinny. She might get lettuce in her hair, but that's pretty much the only effect her eating has on her.
I do think it's possible to make good jokes out of bad health habits. In the Ocean's 11 franchise, Brad Pitt's character is constantly eating some sort of horrible junk food. But the movies don't need to linger on it. Instead, the juxtaposition of a gorgeous guy in a beautifully-cut suit with unnaturally yellow nacho cheese is enough of a gag. The harping on Liz's habits seems gender-specific to me, to have a specific moral tone, because it sure isn't impacting her appearance. Tina Fey has talked in real life about the intense discipline she imposed on herself under to lose a lot of weight: the jokes about Liz's habits seem like retroactive judgement upon her real-life self, a means of psychological reinforcement, rather than an effective means of humor.
The show consistently pretends that Liz is physically unattractive (in addition to joking about her weird personality). But only the personality jokes are plausible, or frankly, interesting. They're the ones that are simultaneously believable, and that promise character growth, which the show seems to have basically given up on, despite nods in that direction earlier in the series.
Which leads me to:
2. Ugly jokes are lazy. Personality exploration is not. Folks may not "see how that’s even possible" that anyone could believe Lea Michele is ugly. But then it's not particularly clear why the show's creators use those kinds of jokes, even though they do. In earlier teen movies, which focus more on class, outcasts get made fun of because they have bad clothes, out of poverty or choice, or they drive the wrong cars, or listen to music that expresses feelings the dominant characters can't relate to, or are into art rather than football. Movies and television can plumb the psychological roots of all of those things: why a character chooses to dress poorly even though she could dress more conventionally, how a character copes with poverty, what emotions their interests reflect. In other words, you can take those things pretty far. But you can't go much of anyplace with the looks someone's born with. In Glee, Rachel's personality provides plenty of targets for insults and for growth. So why go there with her looks at all, when such insults are both implausible and totally non-clever?
3. When it comes to looks in Hollywood, moving the ball matters. Given how narrow the window of what women can look like in movies and on television is already, repeated jokes about how beautiful women are actually hideous, even if they aren't plausible, are actively harmful to the important cause of diversifying what actors and actresses look like. Those repeated jokes sink in. They have an impact. Especially when the women in question are very good-looking instead of gorgeous, cute instead of outright bombshells. If we convey the impression, even facetiously, that only women who are clones of Angelina Jolie belong on our screens, we run the risk of making what appears there even more repetitive and monotone than it already is.
Sacred Sounds
I normally write about popular rather than sacred music. It's just what I know about. But a friend of mine who is living in Israel for a bit right now has a wonderful post up about praying with, and in support of, women at the Western Wall. It's a powerful meditation, and made me think a bit about the impact of song. He writes:
I imagine this will be particularly interesting to those of you who are Jewish, but I really encourage everyone to read the whole post. Music is a weapon, and a tool of liberation, whether it's played on the radio or sung at sacred spaces.
the ultra-Orthodox men (there were probably now more than 50 of them) began also reciting from the book of Pslams. They however, were not singing Hallel. There were wailing the saddest parts of the book, normally reserved for times of intense mourning and hardship. It was as if they were begging God to forgive them for being near this spectacle.
As they began to sing louder, so did we. I could hear the women singing in front of me, and joined them as loudly as I could. I've never been that afraid while praying before. I kept saying to myself, "Look forward toward the Kotel and keep praying. You are here to worship God on Rosh Hodesh. What you are doing is normal and regular, albeit in an exceptionally special place."
...
After the services at the Kotel, one of the older women approached me and said that today was the first time when she could hear male voices behind her singing along with them, and how wonderful that was. I thanked her, but said that the honor of being there with them was all mine.
I imagine this will be particularly interesting to those of you who are Jewish, but I really encourage everyone to read the whole post. Music is a weapon, and a tool of liberation, whether it's played on the radio or sung at sacred spaces.
The New Girl In Town
I caught the trailer for USA's Covert Affairs over the weekend, and it looks extremely promising:
I have loved Peter Gallagher pretty much forever. I'm glad to see Christopher Gorham, henpecked and hidden behind nerd glasses on Ugly Betty (and lord did I hate how that show treated Jayma Mays, who deserves all the sugar she's getting on Glee) come out from behind them and get to be the hot handler. My one misgiving? That Anne Dudek, who has a lead role on the show but isn't featured in the promo, doesn't have the lead role that instead has gone to Piper Perabo. I'm not a big Perabo fan: she was annoying in Coyote Ugly, itself saying something considering how bad that movie is, sickly sweet and not very smart in newlywed-discovers-she's-a-lesbian flick Imagine Me and You, and so forgettable in The Prestige that I didn't even remember she'd been in it.
Dudek, in contrast, is memorable every time she steps onto the screen. Dr. Amber Volakis on House was one of the smartest, toughest, most textured female characters to show up on network television in a long time. From what I saw of her on Mad Men, she was delightfully tart. Why she hasn't gotten some of the love Alison Brie has is a bit of a mystery to me. As the lead in this CIA-recruit-with-a-troublesome-boyfriend show, she'd be less of a coquette, and flintier than Perabo will probably be. I'll watch the show anyway. But I'll certainly wonder what could have been.
I have loved Peter Gallagher pretty much forever. I'm glad to see Christopher Gorham, henpecked and hidden behind nerd glasses on Ugly Betty (and lord did I hate how that show treated Jayma Mays, who deserves all the sugar she's getting on Glee) come out from behind them and get to be the hot handler. My one misgiving? That Anne Dudek, who has a lead role on the show but isn't featured in the promo, doesn't have the lead role that instead has gone to Piper Perabo. I'm not a big Perabo fan: she was annoying in Coyote Ugly, itself saying something considering how bad that movie is, sickly sweet and not very smart in newlywed-discovers-she's-a-lesbian flick Imagine Me and You, and so forgettable in The Prestige that I didn't even remember she'd been in it.
Dudek, in contrast, is memorable every time she steps onto the screen. Dr. Amber Volakis on House was one of the smartest, toughest, most textured female characters to show up on network television in a long time. From what I saw of her on Mad Men, she was delightfully tart. Why she hasn't gotten some of the love Alison Brie has is a bit of a mystery to me. As the lead in this CIA-recruit-with-a-troublesome-boyfriend show, she'd be less of a coquette, and flintier than Perabo will probably be. I'll watch the show anyway. But I'll certainly wonder what could have been.
Switcheroo
I think it's charming, but not especially surprising, that the role Jane Lynch just murked in The 40-Year-Old Virgin was originally written for a man. Movies like that, and like Salt, where Angelina Jolie is playing a character initially written for Tom Cruise:
Should really go some way towards making directors, producers and writers assess how gender-determined certain roles actually need to be. There are some situations where it obviously make sense to have certain characters played by men or women. If you want to explore a woman's attitude towards pregnancy, or a man's attitude towards towards the particular gender roles and expectations foisted on early-21st-century men, you can't easily make substitutions with the gender of the actor. But if someone is a spy motivated by concern for their family, the manager of a general-interest retail store, a tough lawyer working a hard case, or any number of other roles where gender is not the key subject the movie is exploring, then there's no absolute need to cast men and women in certain kinds of roles.
And I think gender-neutralizing certain kinds of roles could also broaden the range of physical appearances folks can have and still make it in the movies. One of the things I find interesting about Angelina Jolie's immense physical beauty is that even though she's quite thin, and while she's toned, is definitely not ripped, is that her wildly exaggerated femininity doesn't translate into weakness for most viewers. She's turned those looks into the plausible tools of an action hero. Conversely, someone like Lynch (who is gay) might be stereotyped into plain-lady or lesbian roles because she's tall, has short hair, is not visibly particularly curvy. But she gets cast as someone's heterosexual mom in Post Grad, Julia Child's surprisingly sexy (and also hetero) sister in Julie & Julia, the fearsome grandma in Talledega Nights, and the sort of omni-manipusexual in Glee. We need more diversity of all types in movie: of place, of narrative, and of actors. In their own weird ways, both Jolie and Lynch are pushing that cause forward. One can only hope the rest of the industry will get in line behind them.
Daddy's Little Girl
So, I went to see Kick-Ass last night. It's about as violent and exaggerated as you'd expect. Roger Ebert's basically right about the extent to which the movie lacks a moral compass. As my friend Alex Remington pointed out to me when we walked out of the theater, it's not clear how pain works in the world, much less the extent to which it's okay, rather than simply aesthetic, to kill bad guys. Aaron Johnson is a bit of a blank spot in the midst of the movie, which is okay since he's at least a likable blank.
And in spite of those considerable flaws, I enjoyed it. Kick-Ass may be the best father-daughter movie I've seen in years. In most movies with strong father-daughter relationships, the father is a protector, the daughter an alien but loveable creature. The conflict comes about when her father needs to let go of her, frequently in the form of giving her away, either formally in marriage, or simply by granting her independence.
Kick-Ass is not that kind of movie. Instead, it's a movie about a father and daughter working in tandem, finding that their minds work the same way. Maybe Nicolas Cage is brainwashing Chloe Moretz, and the lack of discussions about the mayhem they commit is troubling, but it didn't feel like she was a dupe--rather, he brought out something in her that was already there. I think it's rare in the movies, if not in real life, for fathers and daughters to look at each other and recognize themselves, but Cage and Moretz make it feel entirely natural. From the first moment, when he's teaching her how to take a bullet in a vest in the abandoned foundation of an office building, they have tremendous chemistry together. The dialogue's unforced, the profanity (about which much has been made) actually feels like an authentic expression of intimacy, an unfiltered way that people who are very comfortable around each other speak to each other. In fact, I was a little annoyed when Mark Strong's villian remarks to Moretz's Hit-Girl "I wish I had a son like you," as if she's playing some kind of male substitute, when throughout the movie, despite her fondness for sophisticated weaponry, she's very much a little girl.
It's another fine entry in Cage's string of idiosyncratic father- or big-brother roles. I loved him in Matchstick Men, where he plays a phobic con man who begins to get his life together when his daughter, played by Alison Lohman, appears in his life. And he's also very good as the arms-dealing older brother of Jared Leto in Lord of War. He's very good at playing someone who is providing horribly warped guidance, while clearly doing it entirely out of love and a sense that it's the right thing. It's a weird expertise for an actor to have, I suppose. But it provides a compelling mirror for the real challenges of parenting.
Butterflies
In honor of baseball season, though not the Red Sox deeply upsetting slump, my friend Mike Dubitzky and I have a piece up at Wunderkammer Magazine on the joy and mysteries of the knuckleball:
Has it really been fifteen years since Tim Wakefield arrived in Boston? His endorsement of Just for Men signaled that the answer was yes (even as the product erased the evidence of that passage of time). Wakefield’s consistency anchored the Red Sox through personnel changes in the locker room and management suite, helped the team win two World Championships, and witnessed the rejuvenation of Red Sox fandom. And he’s done it all as the predominant practitioner of baseball’s oddest pitch, a remnant of the eccentricities, inventiveness, and wildcat nature of the sport’s early days: the knuckleball.
“The mystery of the knuckleball is ancient and honored,” Roger Angell wrote in 1976. “Its practitioners cheerfully admit that they do not understand why the pitch behaves the way it does; nor do they know, or care much, which particular lepidopteran path it will follow on its way past the batter’s infuriated swipe. They merely prop the ball on their fingertips (not, in actual fact, on the knuckles) and launch it more or less in the fashion of a paper airplane, and then, most of the time, finish the delivery with a faceward motion of the glove, thus hiding a grin.”
Baseball used to be a more mysterious, less corporate sport. It's nice there's at least some of that spirit left.
Some Love For Newbury Comics
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of g55.
So, growing up in the Boston area produces an almost-inevitable odd mixture of emotion about the area's dominant record chain, Newbury Comics. The selection of both music and DVDs is uniformly great: it's terrific to be a teenager and be able to afford used stuff from the Criterion Collection. But the stores are also chock-freakin'-full of Hot-Topic-esque junk, ranging from Family Guy merch to slightly-more-acceptable Nightmare Before Christmas stuff. It's motley, and super-commercial, and weirdly out of keeping with the store's comprehensive, wide-ranging, and intelligently curated arts offerings. I always felt a little weird shopping there, as if someone would mistake me for the kind of person who badly needs a Peter Griffin collectible figure. But Paste's anointment of Newbury Comics as "The Most Likely Spot to Find Your Boxing Nun, Motörhead T-Shirt, and Sheila Divine Exclusive Under One Roof," rang both likable and true to me. If we have discretionary income as teenagers, we're all going to buy some stupid stuff along the way. Newbury Comics gave you the hookup for all that stuff, while also making sure there was great music and film around for you to stumble into along the way.
And working in media, it's struck me that Newbury Comics operates like a company like Conde Nast, where the consumer magazine support the New Yorker. All those Boxing Nun sales create a profit margin that allows Newbury Comics to keep around some slow-moving inventory until some dedicated listener is delighted to stumble upon it. And that's a great thing.
Go Big Or Go Home
I have to say, they may be ridiculous, but I really like the epic scale of Scissor Sisters' narratives. This latest track, "Invisible Light" bodes well for their continued commitment to their crazy vision. I'm very pleased.
A Complaint
I think this Salon piece grousing that Sex and the City sets up a model of unobtainable female friendship falls precisely into the trap that the author imagines she's avoiding by treating the franchise as if it's an Actual Model for Conducting Ladybusiness. And besides that, the argument is wrong on the details. A well-established part of the series is that the characters have wider pools of friends and acquaintances than simply their fabulous selves. Also, a fact-checker would have noted the deep imperfection of these friendships, the times they've been wounded so deeply it's not clear they'll recover, like when Carrie judges Samantha for her sex life, or Miranda hides a hurtful thing she says from Carrie and confesses it far too late for her to cope with it reasonably. I say this not so much to defend SATC, which I maintain needs no defense, but out of annoyance at the Church of the Counterfactual. If you're going to write, be it about politics, fashion, culture, sports, whatever, be sure the thing you're seeing that everyone else has missed is actually there.
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