Movies August-September 2009

Five Deadly Venoms
I came to this movie out of duty, because it is a "classic" of Asian cinema in America. But then I liked it. The dubbing was awful, but beyond that, the movie is lean and low. It starts fast, and gets where it's going. The who's who plot is so ambitious, I didn't expect the movie to follow through on it like they could have -- it just would have been wildly confusing. But because of that, the gears of the story were in the open. There's no character development or storytelling filigree to distract from how things go down. A major character dies, and you keep on rolling. Superb.

Knocked Up
I didn't find the main story here terribly enjoyable or believable. The performances that stay with me are Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. Their relationship and interactions and thought processes are fascinating. They're not a great couple.

You know these people? They don't work well together. Their habits and tendencies and preferences fight on a fundamental level -- they drive each other crazy. But they're still hanging in as a couple. They're holding it together through main strength. Fantastic depiction of that dynamic.

Like Pineapple Express, I listened to the commentary track hoping for creative insights, and the string of anecdotes that Apatow and Rogen deliver disappoints a little. But the more I think about it, the more instructive it becomes. It's not class. The learning is between the lines.

30 Rock, season 1, disc 3
Slightly less funny? But only slightly. I feel bad for Liz Lemon that her boyfriend moved away. The commentaries were awful. One person, alone, who basically just watched the episode, laughed sometimes, and complimented every new actor that appeared on screen.

3:10 to Yuma
This was a fine western, and a fine movie. Great characterization. S'funny that the two lead actors in this story set in the American West were British- and New Zealand-born. Also, Ben Foster did a bang-up job as Charlie Prince. I want to see more of him now.

Kung Fu Panda
Sometimes I'm torn, because if I had one really good character, and I made scads of money playing that one good character very well, I would consider it a blessing and a virtue. But When Jack Black does it, it seems boring and lazy.

Miss Potter
Here's what I found most interesting about this movie about Beatrix Potter. There was very little resistance in the main character's arc, and what little came about was mostly solved by other characters. She didn't have an arc, she had a long line, and then a violent bend about 3/4 of the way through the movie. Beatrix Potter in this story was a prettified cipher, and talking to her animated paintings made her appear to the viewer as psychotic rather than charmingly imaginative. Maybe I'm being too harsh? If you're reading these words, I haven't changed my mind yet. The animation was lovely, however. Wish there'd been more of that!

Heroes of the East
Another Shaw Bros. martial arts movie, and another fun kung fu story. More please!

Frederator cartoons: RHOMBUS!

Seems like a long time ago when my friend, Scott, sent me a link to a cartoon short that circumscribes a 12-year-old boy's mindset so thoroughly, that one knows, intuitively, that only an extraordinary man-child could have created such a thing.

The thing is Adventure Time. I found out today that Adventure Time will become a regular series on Cartoon Network later this year (or early next year).

Faltering laurels I strain to frame around Adventure Time will be inadequate. You just need to see it. Block out the next 7 or 8 minutes for this -- minutes which will surely be among the best of your day.

Since you've got 6 or 7 minutes left on your break, also watch The Bravest Warriors by the same man-child:

D&D TV?

Hasbro teams up with the Discovery Channel to have its own TV network.

The consumer protector in me cringes at the thought of having a toy and game company broadcasting from its own media outlet. (I'm less bothered about separation of church and state than I am separation of editorial and advertisement in modern life.)

But everything else in me thinks this is such. a great. idea.

I hope it works!

Lost, and the way of the gun

M and I watch Lost on DVD, so we're working on season 4 now. Last night, I finally figured out why I am so annoyed any time somebody pulls a gun on that show.

First, nearly everyone's character is loosey-goosey on the show.* But that's about why people draw guns. I'm talking about the guns themselves.

In drama, a gun is a promise from the writer to the audience: "I promise that this character is in serious danger." Anton Chekhov's famous principle is in literal play -- "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

For the first three seasons of this show, no one was seriously thinking of firing a gun. A main character was never safer than when locked in a tense gun standoff. You could practically summon another character to interrupt you by pointing a gun at a random friend. (Shannon was killed accidentally, and I don't count Ana-Lucia as a main character.)

So the promise of the gun got more and more meaningless. Characters calling each other's bluffs came way too late for me to continue suspending my disbelief.

M was alarmed when I was so VERY happy that a bunch of people got killed on the beach at the end of season 3. The fact that those characters were barely named blunted my joy, but main characters finally fulfilling the promise of the gun was such a relief.

Now in season 4, with the show seemingly out of stasis, guns have a little menace again, although we're still stuck with some tired standoffs. Any character with a flashforward is certain to be in no danger from a gun in the "present." Yawn.



* Whenever I put on my drama critic shorts, I can't figure out what several of the main characters' overarching goals are, or what they're afraid of. Those things seem indistinct from episode to episode. Alliances and motives shift, not based on a character's choices, but seemingly according to what somebody thought might be cool in the writers' room. Sawyer's arc in particular stumbles all over the show like a drunk donkey.

Jim Cramer on Jon Stewart

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart is typically acerbic in his segments, but gentle in interviews. This is because the guy is genuinely uncomfortable with conflict. You would think this a strange trait for a man who professionally mocks powers and principalities.

But nobody ever got funny by being good at confrontation. You get funny by thinking around things, not through them. Listen to Stewart talk about himself; you consistently hear him mention discomfort at creating or withstanding awkwardness. Certain issues get Stewart to come out of his congenial motley though.

What got us here: Stewart recently did a segment on CNBC show hosts making bad calls on investment, mocking their self-proclaimed expertise. Standard, cutting Daily Show fare, which the powerful and noteworthy routinely ignore four days a week. Jim Cramer, one of several skewerees, took particular umbrage at this and (no doubt backed by the network) began an NBC tour of programs defending himself.

Of course, this peacock display prompted an invitation to appear on The Daily Show. The segment that appeared on the show yesterday was 3 minutes. Forget that.

Instead, view this unedited version, about 25 minutes total, and watch a man held to the fire from the knees down.

Having swum in the American TV journalism pool for so long, I'm used to interviewers playing catch and release. They ask a pointed question, the savvy interviewee deflects it, and because there are only 3 minutes allotted to this segment, everyone moves on. (For that reason alone, I have virtually no use for television journalism.)

I'm amazed at how this fails to happen here. Every time a normal TV interviewer would be done, Stewart keeps going. He has not just a tenacity, but a clarity of thinking that refuses to be sidelined by mealy-mouthed interview subjects.

Stewart is tricky, because he jumps around a lot in the interview. But his thrust is: As a member of the media, you have a responsibility to promote truth. You may not be complicit with the corrupt and powerful.

Cramer behaves in a chastised manner, but see, the guy's on TV in his normal TV costume.* ("My sleeves are rolled up really high, because I'm ready to WORK!") By the end of the interview, when they're both making their preparatory closing remarks, it strikes me that Cramer hasn't even fingered, much less grasped, Stewart's point.

So we don't get reform in the media. The best we get is a vision that this is how somebody should be doing journalism.

===

I've started to think of The Daily Show as the 5th estate, our current best answer to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? He is the feudal-era jester, the guy who hung around important people and pointed out their flaws with a yuk and remained untouchable for it.

Therefore, it is wrong to call Stewart a journalist. As he himself will remind you (and as Cramer repeatedly crowed in the beginning stages of this dust-up), he's a comedian. But in the process of satire, he does journalist work. This is the distinction that people fail to make, and it's why young people and stoners (and some other notable demographics) love him like a folk hero. He's whipsmart funny. But if more journalists were doing journalist work, The Daily Show would be a footnote, not a keynote.

Link to full, uncut interview


* Compare his TV costume to the polo he's wearing in the clips Stewart runs -- watch how his persona is different out of his work clothes.

July Linkdump

Things I've left open in my browser lately:

I Was a Mad Man
From Design Observer, A true-life story about a guy who burned through the ad industry, and at least partially inspired a thirtysomething character.

Aside: Thirtysomething was set in Philadelphia. Maybe worth a hometown look.

More Creative Thinking on Solar Power
Specially stained glass "increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell 'by a factor of over 40'".

Thanks to $140/barrel oil, we're finally looking at more whens and fewer ifs on solar.

Crisis of Confidence
Speaking of playing catch-up on squandered opportunities, here's a link to Jimmy Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech delivered as President in 1979 -- somehow even more relevant now than 30 years ago. If you're cynical about your politicians, maybe you could stop shooting the messengers so much.

4e D&D Tools Roundup
This list will be out of date any second now, but it's a good one so far for fan-generated 4e stuff.

Guerilla Drive-In
I don't know much about this yet, but I aim to find out.

Conchordia

I watched the first season of Flight of the Conchords this week and the verdict is: Sufficiently Funny.

Here’s a clip from a comedy show they did, not from the series. I’ve watched this about a dozen times now, and it’s still my current favorite way to spend three minutes and fifty-eight seconds.

Robots

I'm No Superman

Yesterday morning in the shower (where the water is more creative) I was thinking about how much of my interior life contains cartoon cues. When I'm angry, I imagine a steam whistle burst out the top of my head. When something smells bad, I expect stink lines radiating from it. When I want to move fast, I imagine that I pedal the air for a second and leave a dust cloud behind.

Then I thought, "This would be a good premise for a half-hour comedy program. Just have the main characters react in ways that are hand-drawn animated. But it would have to be done with caution... it's easy to take over-the-top too far." I walked around with that idea for a while.

Then I watched the Scrubs Season 1 DVD my lovely wife got me for Valentine's Day, and it was like, "Oh, well I guess they sort of already did this." And then I also remembered Parker Lewis Can't Lose neither of which is exactly like my idea, but they both come close.

My point, before I lose it completely, is that oh my sweet baby Moses is Scrubs funny. If this show was a person, you would accuse me of being a suck-up, because I laugh at everything it says.

I laugh out loud at even the only slightly funny jokes, and the really funny ones have me stopping the DVD player so I can laugh and repeat the line out loud several times and then laugh some more and then go to another room and regain my composure and then come back and watch the scene again and laugh again, but not quite as hard the second time.

One of my favorite aspects of the show is that it's full of jerks. Funny jerks. I first noticed this watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but maybe you noticed sooner than that--jerks are funny. You didn't notice? This probably says something awful about me. Probably something obvious that I'm just missing.

Even the nice characters you root for are occasionally funny jerks here, and the full-time jerks are most of the reason to watch the show. Dr. Cox's lines are so well written, I want to copy them into a notebook.

We're only five or six episodes into the season, and haven't watched any extras or commentaries, but I see myself sucking on this thing like a pixie stick, trying to learn how they make this show so funny.

Wonderfalls Flat

Wonderfalls was a short-lived TV series executive produced by Tim Minear, who has written for other things that my people have enjoyed, such as X-Files and Angel and the beloved, doomed Firefly.

Only four episodes of Wonderfalls aired, but they made 13, and FOX released them on a DVD in 2005. We've watched about half the set, and I'm not sure we'll finish it.

The shtick is that inanimate objects talk to the protagonist, Jaye, and tell her to do mysterious things that indirectly help people.

Which sounds clever enough, except for the bad execution. The objects give vague instructions, and for things to seem magical and otherwordly, you need your oracles to deliver specific cryptic messages. When the object says "Destroy her!" what, exactly, is it telling Jaye to do? Cut the antagonist's brake line, or just post unflattering pictures of her on MySpace? AND, though generative ends can (and do) come from destruction, it's kind of jerky for these spirit-guide inanimate objects to tell her to do cruel things, when the same ends could be achieved through other means.

Also, Jaye is not likable. The actress playing her is doing a good job of selling that she's a disaffected, self-absorbed semi-bitch. Because that's what's coming across, and that's not fun to watch. I mean, if there was some wink-and-nod subtext attached it would be different, but there ain't.

Further, the characters are inconsistent and act on poorly-explained motives.

And finally, the relationships are cartoons. There are lesbian characters acting out the cliche "gay characters are people too" storylines thrown into so MANY stinking dramas. Really, seriously, we've got enough of those. Stop now, please. Please?

Also, apparently, the key to relationship happiness is to stop working on the complex, broken relationship you have, and jump to another one, which will bring you instant, uncomplicated, lifelong joy. Because relationship hopping, that works out well for most people, right?

The show isn't terrible, but it's annoying when it's bad, and that might put me off watching the rest of the series. We'll see.

I Like My Name Is Earl

We’ve been watching season 1 of My Name is Earl on DVD, and it’s not the bestest ever comedy, but I’m entertained. Plus, the guitar part from the theme song is lodged in my head like a shell fragment.

What’s even more interesting to me though, is how much the show resembles a meditation on living a life trying following Christ, and how Earl’s (I don’t want to be so grandiose as to call it a journey) journey toward redemption parallels the behaviors and thought processes of a new believer.

Except Earl is following karma. Off and on, he refers to karma as an active force, something that pays attention and rewards him when he does good things, and punishes him when he slacks or rebels.

Earl’s grip on the subtleties of karma is loose, but he has a firm, manly handshake with moral behavior. He has a list of all the bad things he’s done, and he’s checking them off as he makes amends for them.

When his brother was trying to convince him to blow off the list on a technicality he said, “It doesn’t work like that. The list isn’t stupid.”

This is a guy bent on repentance. If this weren’t a sitcom, it would be the story of a guy running headlong at God. Hell, it still could be.

There are times when Earl mouths the word “karma” but is clearly talking about the living God. Other times, he treats karma like a cosmic vending machine. The fact that God set up in the universe in this Garbage In/Garbage Out kind of way makes this an understandable stopping point on the way to wisdom.

I’m fascinated and occasionally edified watching this show. Holy crap.

Meredith has pointed out that Jaime Pressley is the most believable person on the show, and she’s right. Jason Lee is funny and likeable, but I never quite buy that Earl is all that reprehensible. It’s partly the writers, who probably can’t make Earl as horrible as he should be, and partly because -- you can tell -- Jason Lee is just not one of these redneck people. He don’t got that jenny say kwa.

Jaime Pressley as Joy on the other hand, is thoroughly reprehensible, gleefully white trash, and packs comedic chops you never saw coming. She weaves between being Earl’s ally and enemy, an inept, yet menacing bitch, who somehow maintains a sympathetic humanity.

Don’t run out and watch My Name Is Earl. But when you get a chance, don’t pass it up.

BONUS: The List, in incomplete numerical order.