Pop Culture Round Up: October 25 - 31

Grab your footie jammies, every body! Sleepover at the Guggenheim!

"Is fiction inherently capitalist?" Um, maybe? You could always go to the library and "borrow" a book for "free" like a dirty commie.

Who's up for this challenge?

Heh. We're too poor to make better shows!

I like the idea that the Independent is running around solving Big Questions for us.

Hurray! More returned art!

"Modeled after Walt Whitman?" Sure! Who doesn't associate the transcendentalist with vampires?

Prison Break (2005 - ?)

Since the last TV Thursday was devoted to Heroes, it seems like I should write a little bit about the other competition for my attention Mondays at 9: Prison Break.

Or as I called it in season 2: Prison Broke.

Then in season 3 it was Prison Break (Panama Edition).

Now in season 4 it's Stay out of Prison by Taking Down the Company, which isn't really as catchy, so I just call it Prison Break.

There are quite a few things that PB has in common with Heroes, and, although Heroes has been better in the last two episodes, PB still does those things better.

1) The Company

In Heroes' land, the Primatech Paper is a front for the shadowy and mysterious "The Company," a nefarious organization behind pretty much every bad thing that happens on the show: the virus, the formula, kidnapping, murder, synthetic abilities. You name it, they did it. The Company on PB is much the same: an overarching, multinational corporation that is responsible for every bad thing, ever. In season 1 we learned that they sent Linc (Dominic Purcell) to prison, and they've been behind everything that has happened to the brothers ever since (although it's kind of funny that Michael's (Wentworth Miller) the genius who engineers prison breaks and all manner of escapades, but they still consider Linc a serious threat). Both Companies can be difficult to swallow at times (just like the hotels in Monopoly), but the difference is the way they are treated on the shows.

In Heroes, the Company is a catch all. The bad thing (e.g. the formula) is invented first and then linked it back to the Company (turns out they used it years ago to create synthetic abilities, felt bad about it for unspecified reasons, and hid the formula rather than destroy it).

On PB, however, the Company is the show's driving force. What the Company does and why is almost a Macguffin at this point, but it's existence is enough. What they've already done (put Linc in jail, killed his ex-wife, set up his son for her murder, put Michael back in jail, Head in a Box,* etc.) is reason enough to want to take the Company down. Their nefarious dealings in Laos or anywhere else are just the icing on the evil cake. Each person as his or her own personal reason to want revenge, which makes it all the more interesting to watch. It's not just blathering about heroes and villains.

2) The Brothers

At the centre of both shows are a pair of brothers: the older, former bad boy (Linc, Nathan) and the idealistic, fatally loyal younger one (Michael, Peter). Nathan's conversion from bad to good happened onscreen over the course of season 1, while Linc's seems to have happened before we even met him. Linc was never that bad a person to begin with (he never plotted to blow up New York and his brother), but he's still trying to be a better person, brother, and dad. He's even put aside his quest for revenge against the man who killed his father, Alex Mahone (William Fitchner), and offered to help Mahone track down the man who killed his son instead.

Michael's a tougher nut to crack and, like, Ventimiglia, also had trouble with the Blue Steel early on. Miller's less reliant on it and more expressive as the seasons go by, and he gets to do something new this season: jokey Michael! When Scott Tobias pointed out earlier this year that, "as an actor, Ventimiglia seems incapable of having any fun," it was one of those thunderbolt moments for me. That's totally the problem. He never smiles or laughs ever even when it would be appropriate, script-wise. Miller, on the other hand, now gets to joke at least once an episode, and it allows him to keep sharpening Michael as a well developed person.

Though both shows have large casts, Michael and Peter are definitely their central characters, and it can be limiting to build a show around an actor who is, well, limited. Kristen Bell could take whatever the Veronica Mars writers threw at her (the subject of another TV Thursday, I suppose); others cannot. Despite the outlandish plots, the PB writers respect that they have a genre show/live action graphic novel on their hands and have carefully and slowly developed their characters (for the most part) accordingly.

Also, they are not afraid to kill a bitch. Roland, Whistler, and Cameron are characters that died just this season. Who will be next? That's half the fun of watching.

*Sadly not as cool as Chief Head in a Box, largely because the head in question turned out to be a fake.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Premise: Kym (Anne Hathaway) leaves rehab to attend her sister Rachel's (Rosemaire DeWitt) wedding to Sidney (TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe) at their father's (Bill Irwin) estate.

This movie might be the hardest I have ever chosen to review because it feels like the hardest to explain. I saw it without reading any reviews, and I read three in preparation to write to you now. I'm still unsure that I have a handle the movie.

The lyrical way Declan Quinn's camera follows characters around the house, never afraid to cut them out of the frame, lends an authenticity to the movie that's difficult to transcribe. It's as real as any movie in recent memory and more so, for Jonathan Demme delicately picks up Jenny Lumet's screenplay and weaves colour, texture, and life into her carefully selected words. It catches the temporary suspension that many would like to go with a wedding and acknowledges how it only seems to underline longstanding tension and long held resentments.

There's a decade old tragedy at the centre for these characters, and everything that happens seems to grow out of it, pushing the characters forward while pulling them back in. DeWitt, as Rachel, struggles to find a place for herself that isn't defined in contrast to her junkie sister, and she creates a mix of compassion, anger, and forbearance. The movie isn't "about" how difficult it must be for Rachel to have a sister like Kym, and DeWitt's nuanced performance never suggests it should be.

There's a wonderful matter of fact/this is life quality to the movie gives the sense that, in fact, there's nothing it "should" be. It just is. Hathaway, in a difficult role that would be easy to overplay and even easier not to like, brings that same level of authenticity in a way that she has rarely had the opportunity to in the past. If we're lucky, it's only the beginning.

If we're really, really lucky, it's only the beginning of Debra Winger's return to film as well. What a relief to see her again. A

Pop Culture Round-Up: October 18-24

Another accidental hiatus? I've got a problem.

That's all well and good, but who will design their costumes?

Ha! I mean, you know, saving lives is good, but laughing is good for your health, too.

None of these responses are sufficiently crass, Les Grossman style answers, as one would want.

Sad.

Well that sucks.

This is a little bit gross, but it also might be the funniest thing I have read all week.

If you've found yourself wondering whatever happened to Christo, wonder no more.

"Like Freud and Betty Crocker, the name 'Emily Post' became shorthand for authority itself." As well it should be.

By showing it in the thrall of a violent attack, of course!

Beats me. He's too cute to hate.

Oh, please let them. I would love to hear that.

Pop Culture Round-Up: October 11 - 17

This week went much better than last week, round up-wise. I checked my folder last Friday afternoon to discover that I had bookmarked absolutely nothing. I guess I was too busy/bored last week.

I don't know if one article is going to shake up our opinions, but he's got a few good points. I do want to see Lost Boys: The Tribe, after all.

What the? I don't know how I feel about this.

Hee! It's funny 'cause it's true. 'Cept that violin thing was a total rip off of Ironside's character on Seaquest. (Yeah, that's right. Seaquest.)

I saw this trailer before Nick & Norah but had a slightly different reaction.

I could get behind that. But what about The Daily Show? Not that we see much of Sam these days.

"Has appeared in films"? Ouch. It's like when people say "a number."

Music of the future!

Why is Jude Law playing Hamlet in the first place?

Despite the fact that this is a blatant rip-off of the greatest episode of Angel ever, it was the greatest episode of Angel ever (probably), so I think the awesomeness will transfer.

Aw. The Batman theme rules.

Heroes (2006 - ?)

First I saw Sarah's DVR Break-Up, and I thought, "I didn't think it was that bad." Then the rotation of TV Clubbers have been (not unfairly) hating. Couch Baron even outed the show as a soap opera. Last Monday's episode was the final straw for me.

SPOILER (ish) Alert: If you haven't already watched the episode that aired on Monday, October 13, 2008, read no further, as I intend to discuss it at length.

I talked up Heroes to pretty much everyone I knew when it premièred two ago. It was the one new show you had to watch. When it went off the rails in season two, I stuck by it, sure that it could pull itself out of its funk. When Tim Kring apologized and promised that he could do better in season three, I took him at his word. As it turns out, that was a mistake.

Last week, Hiro and Ando dug up not-at-all-dead Adam Monroe's (the always welcome David Anders) grave, thereby undoing the coolest thing that Hiro has ever done on the show (other than be Future Hiro, of course). This week, Hiro spends several of my viewing minutes popping Adam in and out of the coffin during their negotiations. Why, pray tell, did Hiro and Ando have to dig up the grave in the first place then? It's time consuming and difficult, and, as Hiro just proved in the very next scene, completely unnecessary. Exactly how brain-addled are the writers that they can't establish internal logic for a single subplot?

This development also goes against the graphic novels that have never have (and probably never will) tie into the show on air. Early this summer, back when I used to read them, an entire issue was devoted to Adam's many wives over the years, and it ended with his conviction that his current wife, whoever she might be, would rescue him. Since he was still down there when Hiro went to pick him up, that didn't happen. No doubt, we will never meet this mysterious wife nor will she be mentioned again. She can live on the Beach of Dropped Plots with Micah, Monica, and Caitlin, the girlfriend Peter is content to abandon in the future. Her family's dead, too!

Adam leads Hiro and Ando to a bar and shakes them off his tail. So Daphne shows up. Alright, fine. We've had a quite of bit of Daphne in this episode, but I don't care. I don't know a damn thing about Daphne, and I don't care if that ever changes. I liked Brea Grant on Friday Night Lights last year, but there writing's not there to back her up when it comes to Daphne. She's a construct, a cardboard cut-out, and she'll probably stay that way.

Somehow, this latest confrontation between Hiro and his "nemesis"* leads to Hiro killing Ando. For real. Hiro murdering his best friend for the greater good has the emotional devastation of a paper cut. No one stays dead on this show. If they do die, the actor just comes back as another character (hey, Ali!). That's what makes this show a soap opera. It's not that I don't loves me a soap. It's that I don't love a soap that takes itself so seriously yet never pays out.

What happens every season, really? Someone goes into the future, sees something terrible, and heads back to prevent terrible thing (explosion/world ending, virus/world ending, formula/world ending) from happening in the first place. It ends with Peter going nuclear. Maybe Peter will destroy a lab full of the formula in nuclear explosion come May sweeps.

The problem with characters changing personalities and loyalties to fit the episode's needs has been around a while and well covered elsewhere (from Monday, for example - Claire wants to take bad guys down, Claire wants to help them reunite with their families, Claire hates Sylar and wants to kill him, Claire doesn't want her dad to kill Sylar. Huh?). Let's move on to the final moment: Arthur Petrelli lives.

Listen, it's not that I don't want to more about Pa Petrelli. I'm sure that it would be interesting to know more about the early days of the Company, what Pa's power(s) might be, how he was with his sons, and what they know about him. There was an arc over several graphic novels way back in the day about how the elder Petrelli and Linderman met (short answer: Nam), which was probably my favourite. It's just that . . . reviving a character that established to be dead in the pilot? What's the point? Let's bring back the elder Suresh while we are at it. I bet he could find an antidote.

I'm probably not at the breaking point just yet; I am getting very close. I have lost any confidence that the show could take a development like that and make it exciting. They've already used it poorly: paralyzing Angela. She's one of the good (read: interesting to watch) characters! Maybe Elle can come back and zap her out of it. Sigh. I miss Kristen Bell.

*Which, Hiro is supposed to be my age, if not older, right? Adults do not talk this way. The time gap between Hiro and Future Hiro is closing, but the personality gap remains vast.

"I've always said that glasses weren't a good enough disguise."

If it's time to go on the run, then check out my latest Culture article, and learn how to disguise yourself, movie-style.

Over in the advice column, Miss Smartypants tackles boyfriend issues, girlfriend issues, and bedroom disguise issues. See what I did there?

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

Story: Nick (Michael Cera) is taking his breakup with Tris (Alexis Dziena) badly, but he agrees to play that night anyway. Norah (Kat Dennings)'s first stop on her quest to find Where's Fluffy, a mythic band that almost never plays, just happens to be Nick's band's show. When his bandmates (Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron) spy a romantic opportunity, they agree to take Norah's drunk best friend (Ari Graynor) home in order to force Nick and Norah together.

Accidental hiatus over!

While this movie a minor entry in the Into the Night/One Crazy Night canon, it's not without it's delights. I haven't hit Cera backlash yet (hopefully I never will), although I think I might be getting to the point of being over him. As lovely, funny, and sweet as that kid is, I'm sort of in love with Dennings now, and he's just going to deal with it. Although I did cheer in my head when I saw he got above the title billing. Good for him!

Mostly I am in love with how she has curves and hopes she keeps them and would really like her to tell me what lipstick she is wearing in this movie, but I also love how she's hit this sweet spot where she's an authentic teenager in her actions and speech. Even the running bit of Norah explaining her jokes that weren't funny in the first place, while it fell flat, was believable.

Otherwise, the supporting cast keeps the movie humming along even when the scenes between the leads drag, and there are a lot of unexpected cameos that pop up to distract the audience.

Unfortunately, Lorene Scafaria's screenplay, based on Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's novel, falls prey to a lot of rom-com trappings, notably demonizing the other romantic interests of main characters so that there's never any doubt about who we rooting for. I liked Dziena in Broken Flowers, and I think I've made my feelings about Jay Baruchel quite clear in recent weeks (love!), and they are playing these complete dirtbags. It's a nice stretch for Baruchel and takes wonderful advantage of the nasal quality of his voice (although it also made me wonder is being a Chipster is not the sole providence of WASPs, as previously thought), but a better movie would either exclude these characters so that we never really get a sense of them or make them people would could like, just not with Nick and Norah.

Ah, well. B-

Pop Culture Round Up: September 27 - October 3

Good-bye, Paul Newman.

Scary! The publisher remains undeterred, however, which is great news.

This is fantastic.

Hilarious news. Will he have to double his research?

"So is Don Juanism funny, or is it sad?" Both? Mostly sad, though, I think.

Why is this news? It'll be a better story if he doesn't make it into the unnecessary remake.

Hmm. I think I might be down with that.

"[John Stuart] Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind." Now that's a maverick.

Not an orphan? Not Dick? This is just not right.

Damn! Stupid good reasons to update technology.

Aw.

Whoo-hoo! Film renaissance!

What? Two Michigan stories in one post? This is crazy.

Pushing Daisies (2007 - ?)

During my TV on DVD summer gluttony, I found myself thinking that it would be nice to have a forum to talk about all these TV shows I watch. Sure, there are lots of places that I could talk about TV, but I wanted a space where I could work out my thoughts. Then I remembered my Angel post from way back in the day*, and I realized that I already have that forum! Thanks, blog!

I give you TV Thursdays, the day of the week on which I shall write about a TV show, currently airing or possibly not. My beloved Pushing Daisies came back to us last night, so it seems as good a place as any to start.

I picked up quite a few new shows last year, in some cases due to vacuums created by other, more beloved shows' cancellations (sniff, Veronica Mars) and in others due to writer's strike programming vacancies. Pushing Daisies was neither. I immediately forced two of my friends to start watching it as I was ensorcelled by the pilot (or Pie-lette, in PD speak). I could you that it appealed to me on multiple, vacant fronts: the dialogue's rat-a-tat-tat of a good Gilmore Girls episode, the mystery-of-the-week (MotW) of Veronica Mars, the surrealist bent of Dead Like Me.

Even so, to define PD by other shows would be a limiting mistake. It's thoroughly original. At its base, it's a procedural, but the MotW, while inventive, is never that important. The basics: Ned (Lee Pace) can wake the dead with a touch of his finger. A second touch makes the person dead, again, forever. If Ned doesn't administer the second touch within 60 seconds, the person lives, but someone else will die in his/her stead. That's how we got Chuck (Anna Friel), Ned's childhood sweetheart and current paramour, who walks around avoiding touching her boyfriend, so she can avoid dying again. P.I. and pop-up book enthusiast Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) uncovered Ned's secret and used it to blackmail him into becoming his business partner. On the MotW front, Ned wakes up the victim, gets the intel on the murder, and then Ned and Emerson solve the case for insurance money. It's a pretty good racket.

None of this is anywhere near as exciting as Olive (Kristen Chenoweth), the sole waitress at Ned's pie shop, The Pie Hole, and Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz as Chuck's grieving aunts Vivian and Lily, respectively. Vivian and Lily Charles were, back in the day, celebrated synchronized swimmers until a rogue kitty litter accident blinded Lily in one eye, turning the sisters into a pair of cheese obsessed recluses.

Right about now you might be thinking, "How does one survive under the weight of all that quirk?" Friends, factors that combine to make the show not oppressive but transcendent:

A) Dead people. Every episode has at least one dead person, and, as bizarrely and humorously as they die, it's still murder.

B) Orphans. Ned's mother is died when he was 10, and his father abandoned him shortly thereafter. Chuck's father died when Ned tried to revive his mother, not knowing how his powers worked, and her mother died in childbirth. Except . . .

C) Season(s) long mysteries. At the end of last season we discovered that Chuck's mother didn't die in childbirth after all. In fact, she never existed! Lily is Chuck's mother, and only Olive knows the truth. Plenty of questions have been raised since that revelation, and only one was answered in last night's season premiere (Chuck's dad was Chuck's biological dad). We also learned that Emerson has a daughter, apparently estranged, and he writes pop-up books to help her someday find him.

D) Details. This show is bar none the most creative I've seen in a long while. Watch a single scene, and you will see the immense work that goes into art design. It's off the wall, old fashioned, and always detailed in such a way that weaves into story.

E) Cast. Obviously a good cast can make or break a show, and it's even more important on a show as out there as this one. It works largely because of everyone's ability to act like this is just the way things are. Sure, the script requires people to balk at something or other at least once an episode, but it's the snappy comic timing and genuine dramatic chops of the cast that make the show really sing.

I know a show centred around a pie-maker with the touch of life sounds crazy, but you'll find it's not if you give it a try. If anything, it's out of this world.

*Boy, I sure was hung up on in the idea for a made-for-TV movie. When am I going to realize that those sorts of rumours almost never come to fruition?

Casino Royale (2006)

I finally pulled the DVD off the shelf, so it must be time for a RE-view!

This was definitely a different sort of Bond and a thug, no doubt, but I found it sort of hilarious how everyone focused on the bodies he piled up and ignored that he was (maybe) a computer hacking super-genius as well. He broke into M's computer, her home, and her identity ('cause he knows her real name, see?)!

The only person who seems to care about these things is M herself, as she works in this strange vacuum/non-vacuum situation. Non-vacuum: co-writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and (shudder) Paul Haggis put a lot of effort into showing us that MI6 is infinitely more connected to the British government than what was shown in the past (M attends meetings and answers to the Prime Minister, apparently). Vacuum: none of these people seem all that real. Few of them have names, much less characteristics, that would help them stick in your memory after you see the film. They blend together and disappear.

It gives the movie a streamlined appearance when it is anything but. Which is not to say that it's bloated, exactly. It tells one story, and it tells it very well, which is more than Bond movies have offered in a long time. Both Jeffrey Wright and Mads Mikkelsen are welcome presences, and, from the trailer, it looks like Bond is still pretty focused on Vesper's death, so it's best not to forget about that one.

Only I kind of want to. It's not that I don't like Eva Green generally or in the movie, but Bond-in-love sequence drags and drags. And it's not even that long. I suspect Bond getting his revenge on will be infinitely more exciting to watch. Until then, I'll tentatively stick with my original A-.

P.S. Does anyone else find themselves missing Miss Moneypenny? I really like Craig and Dench's interactions. Thanks to Gwenyth Paltrow's fantastic turn as Pepper, the Moneypenny to Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark, though, I find myself wondering what Bond's long suffering secretary is up to. Mailing out child support payments?

P.P.S How long do you think an actor of Craig's calibre will stay tied down to the role?