Real Housewives of Atlanta Gets Soapy with Relationship Issues

Thanks and congratulations to Alyssa, who is, I hope, taking a break from unpacking and having a drink in her brand new pad.

Soap operas are on the decline (I mourn for all my older aunts who are losing their "stories"), but reality TV is just as reliable for cartoonish drama and stormy romantic relationships. And Real Housewives of Atlanta has some of the most ridiculous relationship situations. I'm not even talking about Gregg and Nene yet. I'm saving that mess for last.

After watching last night, I don't know which group is more delusional: the women or the men. With very few exceptions, everyone on this show seems to have some therapy-grade issues with the opposite sex: Kim's loosening ties to Big Papa (and her recently revealed pregnancy); Phaedra and the faint distaste she treats her husband Apollo with; Cynthia and her strangely low-key attitude toward her upcoming wedding.

Cynthia's fiancé Peter is adorable--and you can tell he genuinely loves her. But it seems like Cynthia's made a decision to stop putting off singlehood instead of starting a new life with someone. And I know every bride is different--some women obsess about the wedding so much they momentarily stop focusing on the marriage, and maybe that’s the deal with Cynthia. But I’m going to be pissed if she breaks Peter’s heart. (And what is up with her friend? Is he getting married?)

Watching Kim walk into a jewelry store to get her daughter an abstinence ring was both a pleasant and sad surprise. I know plenty of women who had children young and still managed to set a decent example for their daughters...but I don't know that Kim is one of them. And Phaedra’s whole outlook on motherhood is…disconcerting. Poor Apollo and Ayden (Adonis, though?) are in my prayers. "We'll see how this turns out"? Phaedra didn't buy movie tickets, she had a child. That poor little boy. And Sheree and Tai-Bo or whatever the hell his name is...he might not be a PhD, but he needs to seek help. "Sometimes women just need to shut up?" Child, bye.

Then…there’s Nene and Gregg. Real talk: I love my husband fiercely. But if I heard him describing me as a bad investment—on the radio—he and I would have a misunderstanding. That reading she gave him at the end of the episode was the least of what he deserved—his shockingly cold response warranted more than a raised voice. And was I the only person who was a little shocked that Nene found out about the radio interview online? Why didn’t one of her friends tell her? We watched them all listen to the recording. Nobody thought it would be a good idea to give her a heads-up?

Most of us will have to deal with breakups, anxiety about new babies, raising teens, and wedding stress. Very few of us will make those events as ridiculously dramatic as the women of RHOA. But that’s why I watch—if I can’t have my stories, I’ll take this.

Liking It Doesn't Make It Yours

Good evening! I'm happy to be back; thanks to Alyssa, as always, for inviting me, and to you all for reading.

It seems that writing about fandom is becoming something of a theme for me here, and apparently this time will be no exception, as entertainment journalist Jace Lacob has a piece in The Daily Beast about showrunners and Twitter. He talks to Hart Hanson of Bones, Shonda Rhimes of Grey's Anatomy, and Dan Harmon of Community about the dangers of the direct interaction with fans that Twitter invites:

"While I'm delighted that fans of the show think of it as 'their' show, that delight doesn't extend to any desire to listen to them tell me how I'm ruining 'their' show,” said Hanson. "The rude people—who are a minority but very vocal—are convinced that what they think about the show is what everybody thinks about the show and as a result they are furious when I don't do what they want. It's a kind of strange megalomania that becomes extremely wearing."

I follow Hanson and Rhimes on Twitter, and I've seen these tweets to them, and they're pretty awful. Of course, it's a no-brainer that people shouldn't go around being cruel or threatening people on Twitter. But I also reject the premise behind these Twitter issues: the idea that fans have some sort of creative ownership over shows (or movies or book series), and that the creators "owe" the fans something. I'm not sure whether the interaction with showrunners, stars, etc. facilitated by social networking has created this sense of fan entitlement, or whether fans always thought these things and are only now able to express them because of Twitter.

And I'll go so far as to say that it's good that fans have no creative control. I don't want to watch a crowd-sourced TV show. If I did want that, I'd watch The Bachelor or American Idol, where fans do theoretically control the "plot" with their votes. And, of course, viewer whims controlling an actual fictional plot would produce even more chaos and questionable quality than we already see on reality competition shows.

So no, Hart Hanson doesn't care what you think of the character development on Bones this season. And I don't want him to. I signed up to watch Hanson's show, not yours. If you really hate it, don't threaten the man's dog - just stop watching. Whether and what you watch is the part of this process you get to control, and that's where the power lies, anyway: the network executives might glance at Twitter occasionally, but what they really care about is ratings.

Be Our Guest

Because I am running around and collapsing into a heap of cardboard boxes today, the divine BabylonSista and Katie Welsh are going to help me out for the rest of the week. They're both beta of the site, so please be as excellent to them as you have been before--I know I'm desperate for BabylonSista's coming take on the Real Housewives of Atlanta. I'll pop in intermittently. But thanks to them for holding down the fort and to y'all for bearing with me.

Slimming Down

Sorry for the delay today, folks. In between the end of the holidays and moving, I'm running behind on everything. Starting tomorrow, there will be some familiar faces helping out here for the rest of the week (and I'll be around, too).

Over the Thanksgiving break, my brother took me to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. I've long felt some ambivalence about the Harry Potter movies, which have mostly been slavish recreations of the books, acts of reverence rather than living, breathing, independent works of art. But this is by far the best of the Harry Potter movies, and it's so good not just because the actors have grown into their roles nicely, or because the movie looks excellent, but because it's the first true adaptation of J.K. Rowling's work for the screen.

The stuff that goes is big. Rita Skeeter's Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, and Harry's generalized confusion about his late mentor, are reduced to a very minor role. There isn't a lot of angsting about whether Harry should race Voldemort to the Hallows or keep destroying the Horcruxes. And the long central camping sequence is edited down neatly: there's no encounter with the runaways in the woods, and less focus on hunger and survival. All of these elements are important to the tone of the book, but not necessarily to the plot, and the movie makes some deft substitutions, like Harry and Hermione dancing to a song on the radio in the wake of Ron's departure, finding very temporary respite in that aping of normality.

The one subtraction I really missed was Kreacher's redemption. To me, that subplot was a great illustration of Harry's development into a truly decent man. And damnit, I want to see Kreacher leading that house-elf battalion during the Battle of Hogwarts. But I think that cut isn't devastating. Rowling's work got less editing as it became more successful, and this movie is a retroactive slimming down. At its core, this is a novel about facing adulthood, which means death, disappointment, love, heartbreak, sacrifice, courage. Deathly Hallows is effective without every single illustration of what growing up means.

Thankful

I hope all of you are having a restful holiday. This Thanksgiving, I'm feeling culturally appreciative of the following things:

1) The bureaucracy nerd in me is thankful that we're getting a movie based on Team of Rivals, and that Daniel Day Lewis is going hard by starting out in Illinois. The bureaucracy nerd in me is also concerned with who will be playing Lincoln's Cabinet secretaries. Lincoln's important for that story. But the men behind him are critical too.

2) I'm thankful we've got a romantic comedy coming out that's set in Washington. Any time I get to see Reese Witherspoon in my town, and Owen Wilson in a Nationals uniform, it's a good though.

3) I'm incredibly psyched that Ron Chernow's got another ginormous biography out, this time of our first president. I fully intend to alternate Washington: A Life, and Cryptonomicon.

And on a personal note, I'm so glad for all of you. Talking to you guys via comments and email, and getting to know some of you in real life, has been an incredible gift over the last year and a half. You make me a better writer, a better thinker, and on some days, a much better person. Thank you.

Amiable Nonsense

Time travel movies invariably make very little sense, and Source Code looks goofier and more arbitrary than is average:



I mean, why would you build a technology that lets someone go into dead people? And why for the last 8 minutes of their lives? How do you not die if you're in that person when they die?  Would a government agency really think it's acceptable collateral damage to sacrifice a train-full of people to prevent a theoretical future attack? Wouldn't you have more people working on it than this?

That said, I would watch Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright in pretty much anything. In a weird way, I think  Farmiga has a lot in common with Tilda Swinton. They're both supremely cool actresses when they want to be. Farmiga's not as much of an awesome acting alien as Swinton is, she's somewhat more approachable. But she's definitely a woman who can plausibly cut dead George Clooney, or run a sketchy military installation without a hair falling out of place. I'd love to see her really fencing with someone like Renee Russo did in The Thomas Crown Affair. We need more grown-up movies, and more smolder before the conflagration.

The Medium and the Message

I think Shani's probably right that cable companies are in serious-long term trouble due to a failure to adapt to multiple new platforms. That said, I think the solution is actually pretty simple. If I were a cable exec, I'd do a couple of things. First, I'd develop a really terrific, flexible, strong player that will give viewers confidence that they can get the same credible user experience online or on their mobile devices that they get on a television screen.

Second, I'd move to a la carte subscriptions. I couldn't care less about most of the stations I have access to, but I'd definitely pay another $10 a month for BBC America. I'd probably pay $5 a month for access to all the installments of Real Housewives whenever I wanted to see them. I'd pay $10 a month for USA. And I'd definitely pay for Community and 30 Rock even if I didn't get access to any other NBC programming. I bet plans like that would lure viewers who have dropped their cable back. Across the board, cable profits might go down some, and I bet iTunes profits would go down a lot. But if I could pay networks directly and immediately for what I want from them, that might not be such a terrible tradeoff for those networks. And anything that gets me more Kandi Burruss and Bethanny Frankel is a good thing.

Hungry Like The Wolf

As with all cinematic attempts to translates fairytales for adults, and into live action movies, this looks a little bit silly:



But I'm really happy for Amanda Seyfried that she's got a role where she gets to be sexual and brave again, and doesn't have to be innocent and sweet and adorable. And as much as wolfmen, or mermaids, or whatever might not look great or feel plausible on-screen, fairy tales are a reminder that whatever security concerns we have now, the world used to be a much more dangerous and unstable place. A world in which violent men attempt to wrest safety out of the wilderness is ripe for magic, and drama.

Squeaky Clean

I have essentially no sympathy for Family Edited DVDs, a company that's being sued by a coalition of studios for editing theoretically objectionable material out of major releases and re-releasing them as family entertainment. It's not just that it's plagiarism, though of course, it is that, too. It speaks to a larger laziness.

Nobody has a right to insist that art contain only what they want it to be in it. Art doesn't exist by committee. I may think that the Lupin-Tonks relationship in Harry Potter is implausible, or that the Spider-Man 3 should only have one villain in it, or that it's really, really gross and beyond one of my personal boundaries that Neo gets his eyes poked out in the last Matrix movie. But it's not up to me to decide any of those things! Experiencing art is about submitting to someone else's vision, to fall into someone else's world. Good art leaves you yearning for me, leaves me wanting more of the world behind the mirrors in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, more of the dissolution of society in The Passage. And it surprises you. I watched Heartburn over the weekend, and found myself just drop-jawed in admiration when Mike Nichols shot a pivotal scene like something out of a horror movie. Lack of control is the price you pay to be truly entertained.

I understand that parents may want to watch movies with their children, and that they may want their children to be able to participate in mass cultural phenomena. But bastardizing entertainment to suit kids is a lazy solution. Even if, say, you cut the sexy or most violent bits out of Iron Man, kids aren't going to understand a movie about military contracting and moral responsibility. Editing down something like Date Night is beside the point: that's a movie that's meant to entertain married couples and folks who are looking forward to the day when they'll be married, for people who understand action movie cliches so they can appreciate things that subvert them. The response to the problem of finding appropriate entertainment for kids isn't editing down adult entertainment to cut out the bits that are blatantly inappropriate for them. It's looking hard for smart children's entertainment, or going back in time to expose them to movies like The General or The Lady Eve that have a ton to offer both parents and children, that have physical humor and social humor.

And as much as I respect people who are trying to live by strict religious rules or principles, I don't think they have the right to edit down entertainment to meet their principles, either. There's no question that there are not a lot of great alternatives out there for people who are looking for movies that reflect the way they're trying to live. But if you're supposed to avoid secular entertainment, editing it down is cheating. You don't have the right to condemn Hollywood and then steal from it to suit your own needs or meet your own compromises.

Well, If You're Going to Invade Randomly...

If you are an alien civilization, and you are going to invade Earth just for the hell of it with no particular plan to hit major cities or anything, it would make a reasonable amount of sense to start in the Old West:

Of course, it's a great idea to make sure that Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are not in the vicinity. And Clint Eastwood, too. I feel like, shiny bracelet or none, Blondie would cause some alien life forms some serious trouble.

Homeland Insecurity

One of the consequences of Americans' increased concerns about terrorism and the rise of an enormous American security state has been a corresponding (if not casually related) rise in entertainment about that security state. We don't just have shows about cops anymore. We've got shows and movies about intelligence analysts, and field agents, and the politics of intelligence. Apparently, even Claire Danes is getting in on the market with a starring role in a Showtime series about a Department of Homeland Security analyst in a vaguely Khost-like situation.

What I'm curious about is whether the popular backlash against the Transportation Security Administration will affect any of this popular enthusiasm for terrorism-busting shows. My sense is that it won't. Americans haven't been particularly concerned on a broad level about the expansion of the surveillance state as long as it doesn't touch them, be it physically, or in the form of inconvenience. I do think a lot of the folks behind National Opt-Out Day are concerned about both civil liberties and a sense of physical violation and inconvenience that comes with airport security. But I don't think that this protest, even if it changes policies, which I hope it will, is necessarily going to be part of major shift in either our politics or our entertainment. Even if folks were going to make the connection between TSA screeners and the snazzy terror-fighters on their screens, I think we'll still collectively enjoy seeing whether we can beat the bad guys too much to turn off the TV every time the Department of Homeland Security comes on-screen.

He'll Be In The Sky

Is it me, or is this video a little...introspective for B.o.B. at this point in his career?

B.o.B - New Music - More Music Videos

I understand that the process of getting famous has become dramatically accelerated in the age of the mixtape and the internet, and that it is probably pretty overwhelming to rise this fast. But "Don't Let Me Fall" is both a reflection on fame and B.o.B. at the top of his game. He could stand to be a little more exuberant about it. It's not bad to be this famous and successful! And I'd hate to see him go the mopey way of Drake at just 22.

Questionable Content

I feel like I've been ragging on Jeph Jacques' Questionable Content a lot recently, both in my writing and in conversations with friends who are long-time readers of the strip. I thought Jacques had essentially punted on a major potential plot development that had been a long time in coming. And so I feel like I have an obligation to say I was wrong, and that Jacques surprised the hell out of me last week, delivering one hell of a narrative punch in the process.

I absolutely love the process of discovering a new webcomic and reading through the archives in a tear. But last week's QC was a reminder of how satisfying serials are. Of course, we have the serial experience on television. But I have this intense nostalgia for what it must have been like when novels were routinely serialized before they were published. I can only imagine what that anticipation and communal cultural experience must have been like. I want a world where we're all rushing out for the newspaper or the latest installment of a literary magazine because we've just been left hanging, and we're going crazy, and we're collectively desperate to know what happens next and to talk about it. I want it to feel like the night of a Harry Potter book release all the time.

Magic At Work In the World

I can't really rouse myself to be exceptionally excited about a modern-day Merlin. The legend isn't exceptionally ripe for an update given current events as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. And we're awash in magic-inflected pop-culture people these days. It's a bit hard to remember what made Merlin unique other than advising King Arthur in the midst of all these vampires and wizards and werewolves and whatnot.

I always thought one of the great innovations of The Mists of Avalon was making the Merlin an office, rather than a person. It let Marion Zimmer Bradley switch aspects in and out, while making different characters accountable to a similar set of rules, and showing them succeeding or failing to meet those obligations to varying extents. I'd be curious, but doubtful, to see if a new adaptation places a similar emphasis on office and the conflict of office with personality. But if you don't come up with a good concept, jumping Merlin into the future mostly means you get a wizard in board shorts:

Predictable

You know what might be interesting?  A movie where Angelina Jolie played twitchy and nervous but ultimately effective, and Johnny Depp played calm and collected to the point of ridiculousness. This is not that movie:



Oh, and where Paul Bettany played something other than menacing.

With the exception of voice work in cartoons, and maybe Franky in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it's worth noting that Jolie's never really done a straight comedic role. It's a huge lapse in her resume, and I'm surprised she's never tried to rectify it. Maybe vamping's easier. But it's also lazy, and frankly, only one kind of fun. Gut-level laughts are good for the soul, no matter what kind of package said soul comes in.

Is Originality Possible?

I think io9 is a little quick to dismiss the similarities between the Harry Potter books and some earlier works in this analysis. But I don't think that makes J. K. Rowling some sort of plagiarist, either. Rather, it's a matter of a monkeys and typewriters.

There are a lot of people out there writing a lot of fiction. And in the age of the internet, there are even more people disseminating it. Within the context of extent technology, class systems, gender roles, institutions, etc., those writers are going to come up with most of the possible ideas for things that can happen, staircases that people can live under, dynamics that can develop between small groups of people. And those extant technologies, class dynamics, gender roles, institutions, etc. help shape, direct, and constrain our fantasies and our sense of what will be plausible in fantastical and speculative fiction.

The real possibility for originality lies not in a single, novel concept, then, but in the juxtaposition of contexts. It's not that a smart girl, or an orphan boy, or a magical school, or a poor but kind family, are novel creations. It's the combination of them with centaurs, souls, vaults, prophecies, snakes, and London that matters. That alchemy is less hard to achieve than a truly new concept, but it's still hard. It's just too bad that more people and entertainment companies don't even aim for that.

Rebels

One of the reasons British shows and movies about journalists are so great is that the English accept a raffishness in reporters and editors that we Americans normally only deem acceptable in cops. Which is the main reason I'm so excited to hear that Dominic West is playing a journalist in a high-end British television series. Take Dan Foster from State of Play:



Add some muscle mass, and subtract a successful if inexplicable marriage, and you'll have a journalistic Jimmy McNulty: swaggering, ethics-bending, and extremely effective. And compulsively watchable. I just hope the stories in the series are good. The work should matter as much as the interpersonal relationships, or rather, the interpersonal relationships should be defined by the work.

Context Matters

I quite like the Pet Shop Boys' video for "Together," and I think it illustrates a useful point:



The video works on two levels: first, it's a sweet, slightly sad, particularly English fantasy, with the Boys themselves standing around as slightly menacing Lords of the Dance. Second, it works as an exercise in context. Dance scenes that might seem like cheesy hip-hop battles or a rip-off of Bollywood gendered dance conversations read differently in an English industrial setting, and Regency dances in formal rooms are different when the people performing them are working-class kids in modern clothing. The rituals of conversation and courtship vary, but the emotions involved, that desire to close the distance between two people, stays the same. Those subtle differences make us see new things in well-established movements.

Sexual Revolution

I like Natalie Portman just fine, but it strikes me as somewhat characteristic that she'd mistake writing and starring in movies about ladies who like to have sex as somehow raunchy and edgy. As much as she's done interesting work in movies like Closer and now The Black Swan, she's always seemed to have a somewhat bland, commercial streak. Sure, her lines in the Star Wars prequels were dreadful, but her line readings didn't improve that sorry excuse for an entertainment much. She's the model for the vexing archetype of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Maybe the movie she'll be writing is better than No Strings Attached, the similar-sounding movie she's starring in. But wanting to get laid doesn't make a lady a revolutionary, or even interesting.  And making movies about women who want or enjoy sex doesn't make you a daring filmmaker, just someone who recognizes the basics of the human condition.

Book Club Part II: Let's Get Started

Alright folks, Cryptonomicon it is. And as a side note, can I say how glad I am so many folks came out of the woodwork to vote on this one? It's nice to meet you all!

Programming notes:

1) Next week is Thanksgiving, and the week after that, I'm moving because I did a terrifying and grown-up thing and bought an apartment. So how 'bout we shoot for the first discussion starting on December 3? There's going to be an awesome crew of guest-bloggers that week, but I'll be back for the 3rd. Once I get my hands on the book and get a sense of the pace, I'll let you know where we'll read to.

2) If you're going to buy a hard copy of the book, would you consider buying it through this Amazon Associates link?

I realized that I've never asked something like this before, and if it feels weird, or you'd prefer to get it at your local bookstore or whatever, I am totally down with that! But I've kept this blog ad-free for a year and a half, and things like Amazon Associates make it a little easier for me to keep running this. Thanks for your consideration!

Rats Saw God

I know I need to get started on Veronica Mars, so much so that it's on my list of New Years Resolutions and in my Netflix queue. And because I know many people I respect love both that show and Party Down, I suppose I'm happy that Rob Thomas is getting a new television show.

But I kind of wish the guy would get back to high school, particularly to the work he did in two of his young adult novels, Rats Saw God and Slave Day that are two of the most important books I read as a young teenager. The first book tells the story of a troubled but talented kid writing an essay about a failed relationship that lead him to move from his father's house in Texas to his mother's house in California. The latter takes place at a high school that holds, instead of a date auction, a fundraising slave auction.

The conceits sound fairly generic, told that way. But those novels were, as a shy suburban kid, some of the first hints I had that high school, and life, could be different. The main characters in Rats Saw God are outcasts in a Texas high school who form a club called the Grace Order of Dadaists. They had cooler lives than I did, but not in a Gossip Girl kind of way: they make art, and actually go to rock concerts, and drank in high school. And Slave Day, though it's less acclaimed, is maybe even more brilliant and uncomfortable. Set again in a Texas high school, the book moves through the lives of a kid who lives in a trailer park but wants to act, an aspiring black militant, a bitter teacher in the midst of a divorce, and an outwardly golden couple on the cheerleading squad and football team with equal fluidity. It's a great portrait, and again, gave me a sense that life was richer and more complicated, or at least it would be some day if I sought it out.

These are among the books I'll give my kids someday for that reason, and because they're honest about sex, poverty, image, and authority. One of the reasons I find the Twilight series so frustrating is what they represent in terms of escape. They're a retreat from complexity, rather than the promise that in complexity lies choice, and the chance to define a new identity, and liberation. There are a lot of teenagers out there who want, and deserve the latter.

Hero With a Thousand Faces

I'll leave it to other critics to argue whether or not Keri Hilson does a good job of mimicking her inspirations in the charming video for "Pretty Girl Rock":



But I have to say, I quite like this. Hilson's played with archetypes before, as she did with Kanye West's hipster artist and Ne-Yo's polished gentleman in the video for "Knock You Down." The director is Joseph Khan, who has done work for everyone from Mariah Carey to Eminem. Here, he's being a good deal gentler with cultural signifiers than he was with Lady Gaga's hot-and-sweaty-in-the-Seventies-subway video for "Love Game," and subtler than the glitz and feathers he deployed in Katy Perry's video for "Waking Up in Vegas," though to be fair, he was being pretty perfectly literal there. I don't think the video's exceptionally high-concept or deep, but I like it, mostly as a testament to Hilson's malleability, and as a reminder that there are a lot of ways for women to be beautiful, and they can all work in the same era.

Dread and Drood

I read Drood in a state of perpetual anticipation last week, expecting some kind of terrible and dramatic conclusion, only to end up feeling gypped. As a book about Wilkie Collins' opium addiction, it's fairly interesting, though I would have liked to know more about his most significant hallucination, the "Other Wilkie." As a book about the inspiration for Charles Dickens' last novel, it's only mediocre. And as an examination of fear in literature, it's quite interesting.

I tend to think of horror as something that sometimes, but not necessarily, overlaps with fear. The idea of a lady with considerably tusks stalking up and down a stairwell and occasionally attacking the occupants of the residence is pretty awful to think about, but I'm not concerned that it's going to happen to me. Similarly, I find the events of the Holocaust nauseating and essentially impossible to comprehend. But I don't harbor serious concerns that I will be the victim of a similar effort at extermination. On the other hand, I find the possibility of the kind of murder Collins contemplates for much of the book simultaneously horrifying, and something I do think of as a frightening possibility, probably because I watch too many crime shows.

I tend not to find entertainment rooted solely in disgust-based horror engaging or watchable. I don't find the events of movies like the Saw franchise plausibly frightening, but I've got no desire to watch them go down, either. I am not entertained by seeing disgusting, sadistic things happen to other people. If I'm going to watch that happen, I usually need some sort of moral reckoning, though the scale isn't necessarily critical: the personal revelation of The Last King of Scotland, which I found hard to watch in sections, was definitely enough. Art that's more about fear than about depictions of violence is harder to identify, I think. Zodiac works on that level, I think, because it's not simply about fear of murder. It's about fear of failure, of insignificance.

Drood is about some of those kinds of fear, mostly about fear of human capacity for evil. Wilkie's scared of—and intrigued by—the possibility that Charles Dickens has committed a murder. He is scared of what will happen if he kills Dickens, and perhaps even more frightened of what will happen if he doesn't. He fears the exposure of his domestic situations, the loss of his literary powers, being forgotten by history. By putting those fears on a scale, the book makes murder seem more accessible, just another bad thing that might happen in a potential litany of bad things.

But I think the book ultimately fails by retreating into ambiguity. I assume that the doubt about what had actually happened, and what is just Wilkie's addiction-induced hallucinations is meant to leave readers nervous and uncertain, itchy with fear. Instead, it just feels vague. We don't actually have an expanded sense of the capacities of these two great men for evil. And given how long dead they are, it's hard to fear them, or what may have been their collective phantasm.

Lost and Found

It really is quite unfortunate for The Eagle that Centurion came out earlier this fall. I'd pretty much guarantee that in every possible way, the earlier movie will be more: much more violent, weirder, and must more suspenseful. As much as I like me some Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender is a more grown-up sex symbol:



The thing is, there's a lot of potential for awesome movies about Rome that don't need to be set in cold, rainy, pre-Medieval England and populated with a lot of fetishized Picts. Some brilliant children's movie director should really make a franchise out of Henry Winterfeld's Detectives in Togas and The Mystery of the Roman Ransom books about a plucky group of Roman gentlemen's sons (actually, someone should recognize the Hunger Games-induced potential of Trouble at Timpetill, Winterfeld's book about a town where the parents abandon their children, leading to fascinating struggle between anarchy and civilization). You could do a ton with the whole Roman wife trope. Hell, we could go back to gladiatorial stories. We could even tell stories set back in Rome about the loss of the Ninth Legion, as The Mystery of the Roman Ransom is. In any case, maybe The Eagle is good. It's just that of all the waves of movie topics to have, the Ninth Legion is one of the stranger possibilities.

Point of Entry

Battle: Los Angeles certainly looks high-end and glossy, and I do rather like Aaron Eckhart, even though he sometimes embarrasses himself by being in very silly things:



But it illustrates a variant of the general problem with alien invasion movies. If you're going to make the effort to invade a planet, traveling across time and space to do so, wouldn't you want to do the basic reconnaissance to figure out where it makes most sense to strike? The Pentagon seems like a reasonably important thing to take out. If you want to disrupt the communications apparatus of the nation, New York makes a reasonable amount of sense. But Los Angeles? Why in God's name would aliens prioritize destroying the world's producer of mind-numbing entertainment? Hell, if you're an invading force, you might want to preserve the narcotizing power of Hollywood.

And why would the military in Los Angeles be uniquely poised to strike back? The Long Beach Naval Yard's been closed since 1997. There is an Air Force facility in Los Angeles, but why would it be uniquely innovative? Why would you focus on folks there in a wider invasion scenario? I hate to be a nitpicker. But it's just so lazy, even if it is satisfying for the rest of the country to watch Venice Beach explode.

Reformation

AV Club is making fun of Nicole Richie for getting a hip-mom sitcom. While I definitely find the daughter-of-privilege-jumps-the-creative-process-line thing annoying (one of the Kardashians recently did it too, landing on One Life to Live), I actually don't feel as vexed by this news. More so than her buddy Paris Hilton, Richie's drug problem appears to have been serious and debilitating rather than recreational. She But she also appears to have put the work into turning herself into a productive adult and mother. She broke with Rachel Zoe amidst rumors that the stylist was encouraging her to stay unhealthily thin. These days, she seems cute, and kicky, and a devoted mom, and if she wants to get back into working closer to full-time, who am I to mock her for pursuing something commercially viable?

Redemption narratives are, themselves, a commercial product. It's impossible to know how genuine the changes in Richie's life are, or what they mean to her. But they sell magazines, and talk-show interviews, and gossip columns. They sell us on the idea that we want to see someone succeed, and so we turn out to watch their television shows and see their movies to see if they really have it together, and to make ourselves feel good for supporting someone who has improved their life via willpower, by which we mean expensive rehabilitation facilities. We get to think we're moral participants in their success, we're virtuous for enjoying junk.

Love Story

I went to see Morning Glory on Friday with a group of female journalist friends, including Shani Hilton and Latoya Peterson. I think we expected it to be a guilty pleasure, a lot of Rachel McAdams being adorable, Patrick Wilson being delicious, and Harrison Ford being grumpy, and of course it was all of those things. But we found ourselves howling in the theater; I can't remember the last time I've laughed so hard. It's one of the truer movies I've seen about the practice of journalism, particularly the daily grind of non-investigative journalism (which normally gets the most screen time). And it's a delightfully non-punitive movie about a woman who loves her work.

A number of the critiques of Morning Glory have compared the movie unfavorably to Network. That leap makes a certain amount of sense: they're both about the news business. But I think Morning Glory is just weird and sincere enough, and just fluffy (folks who have seen the movie will get the joke) enough, that its true predecessor is Soapdish, the terrific 1991 movie about life on a soap opera set that starred a cast even more ridiculously accomplished than Morning Glory's: Sally Field, Kevin Klein, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Downey Jr. before the drugs, Elisabeth Shue, a young Terri Hatcher.



Both shows are just a little bit over the line. Morning Glory has an escalating serious jokes about the gimmicks McAdams' producer subjects her weather man to, while Soapdish is based around the soaps come to life. Soapdish is probably the better movie if only because Morning Glory would have benefitted from embracing its weirdness a bit more. High emotional keys stick out less in melodrama.

But Morning Glory's real strength is that it's a romantic comedy that could have cut out its romance entirely and still have been a successful, entirely engaging movie. For once, the main character's passion for her work is a genuine, consuming, fully-developed passion. And as a result, it's much easy to see how her love interest finds her interesting and how they have real problems—even if he's not that interesting himself.

North Star

Over the weekend at The Atlantic, I took a look at Sarah Palin's Alaska, which premiered last night. As I wrote, it's no great shakes as a political statement or a conservationist documentary, but as reality television, it's pretty promising:

In the first episode, that family—particularly the Palins' younger, less-exposed daughters Willow and Piper—make an for an appealing supporting cast.

"My mom is super-busy, she is addicted to the Blackberry," Piper announces prior to a salmon-fishing trip in bear country, nailing a parody of her mother pecking away on her smartphone. In another moment, she calls her mother "Sarah," to needle her, and later roars enthusiastically at a bear who gets a little too close to their fishing boat, even as her mother warns her "If you hook the bear, he would get ticked off."

With Bristol (and perhaps conveniently, her son) out of the house in the first episode, Willow gets to be the source of the standard complement of teen-hijinks jokes. "This gate, it's not just for Trig, it's for no boys allowed upstairs" Sarah declares when Andy, who appears to be Willow's boyfriend, comes over for a visit and finds himself blocked by a safety gate for Palin's two-year-old. "You can text her up there."

I should probably take the show, and Palin herself, a bit more seriously than this. But if I were her, and got paid millions of dollars to do work like this, I'd never give it up. Being president is an awful, stressful job that ages you prematurely and exposes your family to a terrible and tremendous tide of criticism. Going fishing and hiking and hanging out on a gorgeous lake, even with a nosy neighbor, sounds a lot better. 

Book Club: Let's Do This

No new nominations, guys? In that case, let's vote on the options we had last time, plus a couple of extra things I'm throwing in the mix. Voting closes at the end of next Tuesday. So, what shall we read?

-The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

-The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

-From Hell, Alan Moore

-The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami 



-Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Rent Is Too Damn Old

I wore out my Rent soundtrack once upon a time, but can we all agree that maybe New York needs a new touchstone musical, rather than a revival of the show? In the Heights wasn't transgressive enough, however much I loved Passing Strange it was a little too artsy in its transgressiveness (and too international for its dreams to seem attainable). We need something, though. Rent's beyond canon, into cliche, and it's time for it to get shoved off its pedestal.

London and Heartland

As much as I found myself frustrated by Perdido Street Station, I did very much enjoy reading it around the same time that I got to watch Sherlock. In conjunction, and as I've been reading Drood, they were a reminder of one of the things I like best about both real and fictional London, its capacity for mystery, its resistance to complete mapping, discovery, and explanation. London may be a mess in fiction and in truth (though very much less so in truth these days), but the trash contains wonder, if not treasure.

It's a quality very much particular to the mythos of that city, and I was struck by it reading this review of two new major Bob Dylan surveys. Giles Harvey writes:

Dylan’s songs (there are now more than five hundred of them) seem to unearth a strange, alternate, subterranean America, an antic shadow country of dirt roads and frontier towns, abandoned mines and teeming plantations, a land inhabited by outlaws, vagabonds, crapshooters, confidence men, vigilantes, and religious fanatics, to name only its most conspicuous citizens....al happenings of the day. They no longer partitioned the country into moral factions, with arms dealers, corrupt politicians, Southern racists, and conventional bourgeois society on one side and the young, the poor, the downtrodden, and the guitar-and- harmonica-wielding troubadours on the other. They no longer asked—as Florence Reece’s pro-union protest song of the 1930s had done—”Which Side Are You On?” Instead, Dylan began writing a kind of visionary nonsense verse, in which the rough, ribald, lawless America of the country’s traditional folk music collided with a surreal ensemble of characters from history, literature, legend, the Bible, and many other places besides.

I sometimes wonder if Dylan owes his popularity to a wildness we wish was still is ours, to a more raffish origin story that is solidly cloistered in the American past and that is no longer part of our essential nature. 


Maybe it's that a city is the largest structure we can build on a foundation of catacombs and labyrinths, and countries require more stable foundations. London is counterbalanced by the more (theoretically) wholesome English countryside. America has its sinkholes and its mystery cities, and its (theoretically) wide-open, sound heartland. Enigmas pale in the sweep of larger countries.

You Know What's Boring?

Movies that purport to be about people defying sexual and relational norms but are really about how sexual compatibility+friendship=soulmates with as much certainty and inevitability as a mathematical equation:



You know what's even more boring? Two of them:



When even Mindy Kaling doesn't change things, you know there's trouble. Would it kill someone to make a movie with a messy ending about a couple that doesn't end up choosing romance?

Over The Threshold

Annalee Newitz has a fascinating, but I think ultimately incomplete, essay on the strengths and weaknesses of portal fantasies up at io9. I agree that heading into a perfect fantasy world doesn't make for terribly interesting fiction. But what makes portals interesting is the transition. You've got to choose to step across a portal and into another world, uncertain of what you might eventually find. Or you find your way across a threshold by accident, and no matter what you find at the end of your journey over it, the terror and anticipation of the journey through it are interesting in themselves.

As with most science fiction, the particulars of what you find at one end of a portal or what you leave behind at the other aren't particularly the point. What matters is what the traveler knows of him or herself, his satisfactions or dissatisfactions, his courage or lack thereof, when he takes that first step, and what he finds in, or lacking in himself, on the other side. It's easy for the vehicles for those revelations to be simplistic—unhappy modern lives or a kingdom falling under Christianity's sway—and for the means of revelation to be simplistic as well, be it a Christ-like lion or a matriarchy. Better inventions tend to lead to better revelations. But it's the desire for discovery that's often the most salient thing about the heroes and heroines of portal fantasy.

The Crowned Head

I have a slightly irrational thing for Jonathan Rhys Meyers (so cute! and with those dead eyes and the alcohol problem, so scary!), so in the course of skimming through a number of television shows that have been languishing in my Netflix Instant Watch queue, I figured I might as well try out The Tudors.

It's a vastly silly show, or at least the couple of episodes I watched seemed rather vastly silly. There are a lot of sex scenes, but not much eroticism, a lot of period costumes and skulking about but little conviction of the blood and dirt and differing mores of the time. Meyers is sort of wonderfully petty, but I'm bored by him as a man who, with very little variation, has gotten everything he ever wanted in life.

I think this is why I liked Wolf Hall so much, and why I like Kenneth Branagh's Henry V so much. Exercising absolute power isn't that difficult, and whim and irrationality aren't terribly interesting. Staying alive under such a monarch, bending the arc of that capriciousness to reason, that's what's fascinating. And it means that the men who serve kings are inevitably more interesting than the kings themselves. The show has some promise of that, I suppose. I like Jeremy Northam (utterly excellent as Randolph Henry Ash in Posession) and James Frain both tremendously, and if there's going to be a genuine clash of wills between them as More and Cromwell, I'll stick around. But I'd rather be at Wolf Hall than see Henry get tarts delivered to his room and wreck staterooms. Children tire easily. Men are fascinating for the long game.

Dumb and Dumber

This is clearly not my week to be pleased with the movie-making universe:

Seriously, first off, this movie is based on the dumbest, ugliest pick-up ploy of all time. How many women in the world get turned on by married schlubs (in a universe where they don't recognize said married schlub as Adam Sandler)? How can a woman who is as theoretically great as Brooklyn Decker's character is supposed to be (and I assume the movie makes a nod at her being something in addition to hot, just for courtesy's sake, since studios do tend to do that) be this stupid? Who are we supposed to sympathize with?

Adam Sandler's been in sillier movies, for sure, but as goofy as 50 First Dates was, the concept was charming, born out of some genuine sense of affection and commitment without manipulation. This is up there with the ugly ones, though. This looks uglier and dumber than The Ugly Truth. Maybe Sandler just wants to test how far he can get with his brand. Maybe we'll find him doing avant garde theater at some point. I only wish I could write this off as the result of a conscious experiment.

Milk Toast

The big selling point of Pink's video for "Raise Your Glass" was supposed to be the image of her officiating at a same-sex wedding. Instead, the video's kind of a mess of mixed messages, and the one that comes through most clearly is actually one of animal-rights advocacy:



Pink has a tendency to do this: she likes to do mixed narratives with a party montage in which a theoretically representative sample of viewers stands in for her. This, I think, is one of her less successful efforts. I'm not necessarily on the same page with her when it comes to her PETA advocacy anyway, but I find the images of blindfolded women being milked to feed a calf coercive and off-putting rather than convincing (and I feel the same way about the briefer image of the matador's execution.

I honestly think I would have minded less, though, had the images of the wedding not been so brief and mailed-in, and had it not been sold so heavily as a piece of marriage equality advocacy. I'm all for pop culture figures as advocates and as champions of the gay community. But I also tend to think that if you're going to claim credit for political work, said work has to be effective. This isn't. I hope she'll do better in the future.

Cultural Literacy

I was watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie the other night, and as much as I enjoy it, it strikes me as the kind of show that could only be make in England, and is only accessible to a certain kind of audience. The range of jokes in a single episode, from faked and exceedingly funny cultural criticism, to satire of pretentious businessmen, to dead-on knock-offs of Australian soap operas, requires a broad and particular kind of cultural literacy.

Obviously, cultural literacy in the E.D. Hirsch Jr. sense is not unproblematic. Attempts to draw up a clear catalogue of what all Americans, or all educated people, or whatever dividing line one chooses to set, ought to know will inevitably exclude some set of knowledge, will inevitably result in some sort of difficult and tippy balance. Do we include comprehensive knowledge of hip-hop but leave out Native American traditions? Do we include English history and leave out pre-Colonial Africa? There's no way to create a canon that includes deep knowledge of a fairly broad range of subjects without leaving anything critical out.

And yet, having some knowledge in common is such a gift to comedians. If you can assume your audience knows certain things reasonably well, you can use that knowledge, build on it, rely upon it, riff on it. The comedy of inference is available to you, and not simply the inference of family dynamics or behavior, but the inferences based on culture, history, custom. A show like Community does extremely well within the realm of popular culture, but I can't really imagine an American show that's as broad and rich as British sketch comedies like Fry and Laurie seem to be.

Perhaps This Is A Dumb Question

But why not do a live version of Tintin? I imagine the cost of motion-capture would balance out with the cost of special effects, and it would look vastly better than this. Just because Gollum worked out doesn't mean a technology's perfected, or that everyone's going to nail the execution. I genuinely don't understand why the filmmakers went this route. It's not as if folks are more committed to Tintin as a cartoon than they were to Spider-Man or Superman as a cartoon.

Downfall

This is so depressing:



When Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis become pathetic schlubs who can't cheat on their wives and can't muster the energy to make marriage interesting either? This just makes me feel ancient. Owen Wilson was hot and indie and intriguing when I was sixteen: I could understand why Gwyneth Paltrow would cheat on Bill Murray with him even though she was clearly meant to be with Luke Wilson (who hasn't exactly kept up appearances and reputations himself). Am I old? Is this going to be my life? Why is everything so awful?

Lurking In the Basement

I've been thinking a bit about horror and the role of fear in entertainment some lately (more to come later this week once I finish reading Drood and processing some insights left over from The Walking Dead) since bad nightmares have generally lead me to avoid art that viscerally frightens me. But one exception in the past couple of years, as I've tried to push my own boundaries, is The Devil in the White City. For those of you unfamiliar but seeking to avoid spoilers, it's the story of an extremely prolific and macabre serial killer who operated during the Chicago World's Fair. And it is scary.

It'll be very, very interesting to see what it looks like for Leonardo DiCaprio to play said extremely prolific and macabre serial killer. If the movie sticks to the historical facts of the case, and to the book based on it, it's going to be an extraordinarily hard role to turn into a sympathetic, or at least understandable to an audience, Hannibal Lecter-type killer. H.H. Holmes may have been charming to his victims, but there's no particular evidence, at least that I remember, that he was more broadly charismatic, or that he performed any particular act of justice that could counterbalance his crimes. In that case, it'll definitely be a new step for DiCaprio to play someone almost entirely unsympathetic, even repulsive and horrifying. I'll be curious to see if he loses weight or wears prosthetics for the role—that's a famous, and famously attractive face and physique he'll be committing to new ends.

Modernization

Given the slight Sense and Sensibility kick I'm on, I was a bit concerned about the upcoming modernization of the series with a Latina twist, From Prada to Nada. Fortunately, we've got a trailer I can agonize over:



I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this. Sure, the main characters before they lose their money have more in common with the novel's social climbers, and they're a bit unfortunately stereotypical.

But I do think the decision to make the movie focus more clearly on the sisters' adaptation to their new lives is smart. In the novel, the characters essentially get rescued from poverty after a brief hiatus: their virtue and charm rescues them from any serious reconciliation with poverty. Here, it's not just reduced circumstances, but ethnic identity (and with it, work ethic and a lack of wastefulness) that the characters have to come to understand, and to understand in a way that's part of their core values and self-expression. I have no particular personal insight on whether this is a sensitive, or stereotypical, portrait of urban Latino family life, but the "immigration!" jokes and references to Latino gangs seem to be executed in a reasonably understated way so far—this reads more like Ugly Betty than Our Family Wedding to me, at least in extremely condensed form.

I think a slightly more complicated take on identity is probably worth the sacrifice of the more byzantine romantic subplots which, rooted as they are in a time when large parts of the aristocracy simply didn't work, and adults were far more financially dependent on their parents, probably wouldn't translate well to the screen. Modernization is the easy part—it's finding a truly appropriate translation and transmogrification that's hard.

Go South. And West.

Are any of you watching The Walking Dead? I braved my extreme fear of horror movies and bodily grossness to watch the first three episodes of the show for a big piece about the Western tradition, the Civil War's role in it, and the series' similarities to Gone With The Wind at The Atlantic on Friday:

The essence of a Western is the void and the the unpleasant things that lurk in it. Sometimes that void is physical emptiness: the stretch of land between a man and a train he desperately wants to catch, a remote graveyard where no one will know or care if you dig. And sometimes the vacancy is moral, a place where men and woman have passed beyond the rule of law, and the rule of law scrabbles to regain its hold.Deadwood is such a place, as is the San Francisco of Dirty Harry. To create a void like that today, film and television artists have three choices. They can go back in time, as the Coen brothers are doing in their remake of True Grit. They can find contemporary echoes of past lawlessness, as FX did with neo-Nazism and moonshine on Justified. Or they can scour the landscape with an apocalypse and literally recreate the sparsely populated North American continent. Only this time, the Indians are victims too, and the predators are monsters.

It's this third choice that's been most popular recently in books like The Passage and Year Zero, and movies like Monsters. The Walking Dead is situated squarely, and consciously, in the same tradition. From the moment Rick Grimes (the excellent Andrew Lincoln, utterly transcending his sweet blandness in the role he's best known for in Love, Actually) awakens—gut-shot, in an abandoned hospital, only to find the parking lot full of executed corpses, a vivisected body crawling through a neighborhood lawn and his family gone—we're waiting for him to shower, get back in uniform and ten-gallon hat, and mount a horse headed back to Atlanta.

Anyway, despite the fact that it's not directly up my alley, the show is a considerable and impressive work. I'm considering checking out the comics (my understanding is that they follow a fairly familiar pattern of authoritarianism in extreme crisis) for further reference—any recommendations as to whether I should or shouldn't?

Taxonomy

As I imagine many of you can tell, I've been thinking quite a bit about how to construct narrative, story and character over the last three or four months. So I quite enjoyed this essay by Chris Braak that io9 republished over the weekend on how to understand evil characters, and providing a taxonomy of kinds of evil and how they affect the appropriate responses in the fiction in which they appear (A side note, I think Gawker Media's republishing program hasn't gotten nearly the attention that it deserves. The company may publish a lot of morally repugnant things, but this program gets promising voices out to new audiences, and increases the diversity of perspectives on their sites. I'm generally, without knowing anything about compensation agreements, a fan.). Braak writes:

Obviously, there are a lot of borderline characters.  Is it right to call a serial killer an Id Monster, or an Ego Monster?  The serial killer is fulfilling what are, in a sense, deeply-coded functions; base desires that he may not even consciously understand.  Likewise, depending on the nature of his psychosis, he may not even be capable of recognizing other human beings as human beings at all.  Is this a product of an adapted narcissistic egoism?  Or simply an undeveloped consciousness?

Michael Myers is a serial killer; I wouldn't call him an Ego-Monster.

Hitler was a raging Ego-Monster - but his sense of self was so forceful that it became the purpose of innumerable Nazis that worked for him, and thus became Superego-Monsters.

In this light, something like Moby-Dick is kind of fascinating to me.  Melville has set up Ahab, clearly a kind of Ego-Monster, up against an Id-Monster - the former is so deeply self-obsessed that he doesn't care if he kills everyone around him to get what he wants; the latter represents the most unconscionable affront imaginable to a rampant egoist - a monster that refuses to acknowledge him.

There's an extent to which this is sort of an interpret-by-numbers theory of literature that suggests some unfortunate predictability. But I think it's true that, within the limits of human psychology, there are only so many stories we can tell. Understanding why they follow familiar patterns is useful: it's not that we're unoriginal, it's just that there are certain ways the universe works. I'd be particularly interested in what folks who did the Perdido Street Station book club think of this taxonomy in particular.

Osmosis

Reading this interview with Rupert Grint, you have to wonder how it's affected the lives of the actors who play the main Harry Potter characters to spend a formative decade of their lives impersonating some of the most famous literary figures of the era. Grint sounds sort of Ron-like, living at home with his folks, without definite direction, but cheerful anyway. Daniel Radcliffe's been doing very serious theater and taking on some movie work. And Emma Watson is, Hermione-like, at Brown.

I mean, obviously there's more to all of them than that. But even if they're not method actors, which I don't think any of them are, these aren't parts they've been able to discard and replace with another version of pretend after a while. They've had to keep coming back to these characters over, and over again. I have no real acting experience (I did choreograph a bunch of a production of Schoolhouse Rock, Live! once upon a time, though), but I'd be curious to hear from those of you who have. Just like I sometimes feel while I'm reading fiction that it's hard to come back to the real world, are there parts it was difficult for you to leave behind, characterizations you decided to keep after the performance was over? I tend to be curious about how we construct ourselves more generally, so the thought of having the opportunity to try on different personalities for the sake of art is something I'm interested in but can't really envision the experience of.

Just Desserts

Two reasons this interview with Sigourney Weaver make me even more excited than I already was for Vamps:

1) Apparently, Weaver will be playing an unrepentant vampire queen. Weaver is unbelievably fabulous, funny, and tough. My real wish for Avatar was that she'd been the movie's main character. I love the idea of seeing her glam and evil.

2) I somehow missed that Justin Kirk was involved with this project. And let me tell you, I love me some Justin Kirk. He is utterly astonishing in Angels in America. He's delightfully creepy in his one-off on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He's been a lot of fun in the small roles he's had on Modern Family this year. I am not a Weeds person, but I hear good things about him there, too. It often seemed to me like everyone but Kirk got the bump they deserved from Angels. Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Emma Thompson didn't need bumps, of course, but Mary Louise Parker ended up with Weeds, Patrick Wilson earned himself a steady rotation of big movie roles, Jeffrey Wright may still be underrated but is working in things like the Bond series, and Ben Shenkman got Burn Notice, Gray's Anatomy, and now Damages. Kirk's tremendously talented, and deserves all the success that comes his way. I just hope there's more of it following this. The world only spins forward, right?

Riding the Red Line

Apparently, Farragut North is finally making it to the big screen as The Ides of March. I'll believe it when I see it. And more importantly, I'm not sure I care. Young-politico-rises-high-only-to-be-felled-by-sexy-intern isn't a unique story any more. At this point in our politics, where David Vitter can survive a hooker scandal and stay in office, it isn't even one that's true to the times. And perhaps most importantly, it has little to do with the rot that distorts our national conversation. It's a falsely fresh narrative.

Stovepipe Hat

I don't particularly think an Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter movie will be good (though the suggestion that Ty Burrell take on the title role, appearing in comments here, is inspired). But I do think the fact that we're getting an Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter movie is somewhat worth considering.

Over the past ten years, we've had three big-budget, marquee-name Civil War movies: Cold Mountain, Gangs of New York, and Gods and Generals, which made respectively $173 million, $193 million, and $12.9 million. Of those three, the first two movies, and the most commercially successful, deal with the core issues of the Civil War somewhat elliptically. Cold Mountain explores how non-planter Southerners survived during the war amidst the rising corruption of the Confederate Home Guard, and essentially ignores slavery. Gangs of New York takes place against the backdrop of the New York draft riots, and a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Union gunships play key roles in several plot points, but the movie is about underlying and separate ethnic and nationalist tensions rather than about the key issue of the war itself. One could blame Gods and Generals' lack of success on the fact that it's a more serious look at Stonewall Jackson, but really the culprit must be the movie's 214-minute running time (the director's cut, still unreleased, is almost 6 hours long).

But I do wonder if we're in a space where there just isn't the appetite for moral Civil War movies—and it's hard to know if there ever was. Glory, for example, only made $28 million, despite its three academy awards, and Gettysburg, even longer than Gods and Generals at 262 minutes, only made $10.8 million. As we've seen, time and time again, this country remains profoundly divided over the memory of the Civil War, and it's hard to see studios excited to make movies that risk alienating audiences on one side or the other of that divide, especially given past commercial performance.

The safer route is avoidance and backdrop, or not, apparently, parody. Abraham Lincoln's heroism can't be about reunifying a broken and bloody country, or about a morally complicated act of liberation. We can't handle that. But we can handle Lincoln staking John Wilkes Booth. Human or vampire, we can generally agree that Wilkes Booth sucks.

Cee-Lo Goes Noir

Looks like our rotund hero's going to have model troubles in his next video:



I think one of the things I love best about Cee-Lo is that he's a supremely confident underdog. He may be a pudgy dude who took a long time finding success to match his talent. But he's thoughtful, knows how to treat a lady, sexy in a way that were he a woman with his equivalent body type would get him labeled sassy, or something. It's a kind of self-assurance that's not grating, just a pure and accurate knowledge of one's worth.

Fantasy Lady Officials

I wasn't crazy about In the Loop, which was slightly past my caustic comfort line, but I did think the movie did an utterly phenomenal job with James Gandolfini's general, a man who wants to buck Washington's power structure and ultimately can't bring himself to do it. I hope Iannucci can achieve the same balance of intelligence, yearning for integrity, and clear-eyed sense of what the system is in the character he's creating for Julia Lewis-Dreyfus in the new HBO show they're doing together, in which she plays a Senator who becomes Vice President.

The description of the show itself, about Lewis-Dreyfus's struggles with a job that's "nothing like she expected and everything everyone ever warned about" sounds a little stupid because, duh, being Vice President is not a job anyone can adequately prepare for (much less being President). But we need someone who can do something a little caustic with a female politician character. My hope is that she won't be a moderate fantasy, like on Commander in Chief, and that the show won't need to linger excessively on the idea of a female political figure coming into her own a la Donna Moss. It's a tough balance right now: Iannucci needs to steer between Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell, Hillary Clinton, all the female politicians who have been unfortunately reduced to stereotypes. He can't make her dumb or people won't like her, but he sure shouldn't make her an ultra-competent saint, or an ultra-competent shrew. I genuinely don't have ideas for what should happen, I only know that I hope it will be good.

Friends Forever

David Brooks is right that there are an exceptional number of very good sitcoms about friendship on television these days. Emily Nussbaum is also correct that the last several seasons of television have breathed new and energetic life into the family sitcom. But I think where both of them are somewhat wrong is that they're drawing distinctions between friendship and family that are less relevant than they were in the early days of television. Brooks writes:

With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s, young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families, living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying — ripe ground for a comedy of manners.

 But I think there's a bit more to it than this. If family is both the people who are supposed to support you no matter what, but also the people you have to put up with no matter what, I think family relationships and friendships may be closer than they've been before.


Take the friends in Community. They tend to operate in a context relatively devoid of family ties, to the extent that Troy is living with Pierce even though he presumably has parents somewhere. The study group actively participates in helping Shirley spend more time with her children. The group provides both support to Abed in pursuing a filmmaking career and the checks and correctives on that ambition his family can't really provide because they've written off participating in that part of his life. Troy, Abed and Annie chloroform a janitor for Jeff. These behaviors, and the emotional investment the characters have in each other, aren't just a substitute for family ties—they're a replacement for them. 


On 30 Rock, Jack and Liz aren't married, and they're not related, but they're tremendously formative and supportive figures in each others' lives. On Bones, Angela and Brennan are sisters, people who are committed to their relationship even if they substantially hurt or misunderstand each other. Why are those relationships functionally different from ones formalized by blood or a legal ceremony? And in the real world, this is true for people whose families aren't crazy Florida Irishwomen, or on-the-run criminals. The friend whose wedding you stand up at can be just as close as a sibling or cousin without dysfunction, or anger, or distance in the family to create some sort of balancing equivalence. Television's just captured our expanding understanding of family, especially for people who aren't married, or choose not to marry, or have had marriages that don't work out.