Monday, December 14, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
"3 Idiots"
Stars Aamir Khan, R. Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Kareena Kapoor, Boman Irani; produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra; directed by Rajkumar Hirani ("Munna Bhai MBBS"); music by Shantanu Moitra ("Parineeta"). Releases December 25.
Promo sez: "'Zoobi Doobi' is a retro Bollywood track that draws references from the Shammi Kapoor rock ‘n’ roll era."
Friday, December 11, 2009
Torchwood
The show winks at itself so often that parody seems superfluous. But still.
UPDATE: An old school TV writer-producer of some fame, with hit sitcoms dating back to the early '80s, came last year to the Great Metropolitan University that pays my rent, to speak to a screenwriting class. He offered cool practical wisdom about writers' rooms and the manipulation of idiot executives. Turned out 30 Rock was a pet peeve of his. He said he was deeply offended that a show could become so acclaimed while violating every rule of continuity and common sense, the standards he'd felt honor-bound to adhere to throughout his career. Bottom line for him: "None of the things that happen on that show have any consequences."
He was right, of course. A typical episode of 30 Rock is an anything-goes collection of sketch comedy gags, lightly stitched together by a plot that is presented almost sarcastically. Because Tina Fey and associates are much too cool to take those old fashioned conventions seriously. 30 Rock flagrantly takes advantage of the "flexible continuity" we've grown accustomed to on The Simpsons. Homer is an astronaut this week and Mo is a cross-dresser, but by next week we'll have forgotten these things ever happened. By failing to understand this, our distinguished show-runner revealed himself to be an old fuddy-duddy, a stickler, a sitcom traditionalist, a pre-post-modernist. In short, a square.
I don't think the creators and producers of Torchwood have knowingly adopted "flexible continuity" as their code, but they might as well have. At times the tone of the show suggests an undergraduate theatrical spoof of a sci-fi TV show being presented with a straight face. Imagine the cast and crew huddling backstage, convulsed with giggles, waiting for the audience (or the BBC) to catch on.
All the standard, literal-mind complaints about Torchwood are well-founded. There are plot holes you could drive a Tardis through, personalities and motivations that seem to shift opportunistically from week to week, pseudo-scientific shop talk that is transparent gobbledygook. But in the end, none of this matters. In fact, what I enjoy most about the show is its casualness, its relaxed attitude toward continuity, its willingness to embrace the odd, often lewd non sequitur. Torchwood is great fun to hang out with.
The most intrusive of the smutty jokes harp on the characterization of head gatekeeper Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) as a emissary from mankind's supposedly omni-sexual distant future. During one of Jack's pre-spin-off appearances on Doctor Who, he was shown coming on first to a woman, then to a man and then to a blue-skinned and tentacled alien. (The Doctor seemed only mildly annoyed.) My favorite of these gags so far, though, was not on Jack, but his on "time agent" nemesis, John Hart, played by Buffy and Angel icon James "Spike" Marsters.
GWEN: "That's a poodle!"
The show has such a wide open premise (puzzling creatures and artifacts constantly spilling into present day Cardiff through a space-time rift) that there aren't all that many hard and fast details to keep track of. Half the stuff that pops through remains mysterious even to our heroes, the gatekeepers of the rift. ("How does this thing work?" "I have no idea. It just does.") Either they are implying, or I am inferring, that while they could easily have concocted a long-winded explanation for the workings of, for example, the steam-punky piece of mechanics called the "rift manipulator," they realized at the end of the day that as we've all grown weary of this sort of balderdash, they'd be better off taking it as read. We can think of much more enjoyable ways to spend the time. Wink, wink.
I can understand as a critic being offended by the cavalier attitude of a show like Torchwood. We may not expend as much energy as showrunners do on mastering the immemorial rules, but still, it can make the whole enterprise seem pointless when a show that brushes the rules aside with a sneer doesn't just get away with it, but wins awards and becomes a cult.
So. Faced with the grim truth that art and entertainment are, like life, often unfair, what are serious people to do? Best available advice is relax and enjoy.
Muffy St Bernard, excellent on Torchwood Season 2.
And for all John Barrowman completists...
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Books I never really got started reading
"In his mind, he kept playing Sara's phone call over and over in his head...." -- Karin Slaughter, Blindsighted, p. 16.
Recommended by Sarah Weinman, no less. Here's her best of the decade list. I feel quite smug that I've already read and liked about half of these.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
25 Years Ago
And, not being a Time Lord, I had to live through every one of them. (Click on the image to see full size.)
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Last Temptation
Astonishing how much power the revered classics of pop culture can still dredge up when they happen to fall into the right hands.
British TV sifu Russell T Davies ("Queer as Folk") took charge of the revival of "Doctor Who" after a 16-year hiatus, and despite being a deep-dyed fan who honors the program's traditions and revels in the fine points of its mythology, he has improved and updated the series in ways that continue to surprise me as I watch my way through the episodes of the third new season, the second in which The Doctor is portrayed by the great David Tennant, a true heir to the antic spirit of Tom Baker.
Among the "production values" that Davies has ramped up are the dramatic ones. Tennant helps, of course, committing to the role whole-heartedly, but so do the radiant actresses who play his companions, Billie Piper and Freeman Agyaman. What they give us is not quite psychological realism, although the characters they play do have a full complement of grown up emotions. Put it this way: Tennant is young and attractive enough that the sexless, school-msterish relationship between the Doc and his companions is no longer the only option.
I thought it would be hard to match the impact of the season two finale, in which The Doctor and Piper's Rose Tyler are wrenched apart. But it was trumped by the two-parter in season three, "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood," in which the two-hearted alien Doctor conceals himself from some implacable enemies by transforming himself into a human -- a fubsy private school instructor in England circa 1913 who has no knowledge or memory of his extra-human nature.
The obvious echos are, I think, completely intentional. Not pretencious. Not offensive. Just obliteratingly great.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
If you were there now....
A newsstand in 1935. Full image here, large enough to browse. Lots of movie magazines, and generic detective and western magazines, but there's a Doc Savage; and Flying Aces looks good, and what about Horror? and The Spider? Just my luck, they seem to be sold out of Weird Tales... No, but wait! There it is.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Malarkey? or Effective Way?
Courtesy of the comments to Caustic Cover Critic, I have discovered the wonderful "How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?" by Hiroyuki Nishigaki (author of "Rejuvenation and Unveiled Hidden Phenix: Carlos Castaneda Shamanism Plus a after His Death". The two books are frequently bought together, which suggests a new meaning to the word "frequently").
Pretty eneffable stuff, perhaps best exemplified by the following Statistically Improbable Phrases (Has there ever been a more precise description?)
happy lucky feeling, dirty stickiness, old black excrement, central energy pipe, denting navel, dirty energy bodies, constricting anus, white lukewarm water, dent navel, sticky inner space, bitter love trouble, subtle unpleasant lamp, times everyday following, bad stickiness, dirty energy body, peculiar inner silence, useful third attention, heavy oil sea, proper exercise everyday, constrict anus, sticky bloody pus, black solid excrement, bad bowel movement
People on my Christmas list may find a treat (or two!) under the tree.
Friday, November 27, 2009
The Man Who Loved Women
Salander... is a witch, and that is I think the secret of the novels’ extraordinary popularity. Her magic is known as “hacking” in the books, but it has nothing much to do with real technology. Her gadgets give her magical powers. She can read anyone’s thoughts off their hard disks, and listen to anyone’s conversations from their email or phones. The untraceable theft of a few hundred million dollars is the work of a couple of weeks. Even lying paralysed in bed with a bullet hole in her brain, she is able to communicate with her familiars all around the world and to discover and foil the villains.
All blockbuster novels of this sort are fantasies in which the heroes acquire superpowers; Larsson’s originality was to discover a new fantasy."
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Still more Stieg Larsson
I have to bump this one up....
David quoted Vargas Llosa below regarding the 'happiness and feverish excitement' with which he read the Millenium trilogy.
I have to say that I have been reading volume three (available from Amazon UK) with great h. and f.e. and I insist that everyone else do the same. Laughably readable.
A not-very-secret clue to the success of these books can be found here. If I were the father of young girls, I'd read the linked book (not Larsson) to them until they could read it themselves. Couldn't help but be good for them.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Let's anchor the noise a bit
Charles Mingus Sextet in the early sixties. The amazing solo by Eric Dolphy on baritone sax begins at about 4:31. His playing makes sense because you know the tune when he starts and because he's actually playing the tune in a looped and fragmented way. Imagine watching this without the statement of the melody by the other players. You may think it was noise, even though it's completely structured and completely tonal.
UPDATE: The customer is always right -- even when the customer is a lazy dimwit... No more jazz -- just postings about the wonderful world of ham radio...
FURTHER UPDATE: I have been contacted with the suggestion that the phrase 'lazy dimwit' is offensive. Perhaps. In the spirit of the holiday, I will withdraw it in favor of the less provocative phrase 'The customer is always right -- even when the customer isn't --'
This explains it all.
The Tulkinghorn disease of obnoxious bluntness and snobbery has an etiology, discovered in an essay by Tory provocateur and climate change skeptic James Delingpole in this week's Spectator:
Diplomacy has never been my forte. Partly it’s because, despite my nostalgic affection for the old order, I’m an instinctive rebel; partly, it’s because since early childhood I’ve had this weird mental affliction where I’ve assumed everyone can read my thoughts just by looking into my eyes, so I’ve never thought it worth my while to practise lying.
Ellroy denounces Ellroy
Perhaps that armor of aggressive buffoonery is more easily penetrated than one thought:
American Tabloid was the novel we were here to discuss, but soon its sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, was mentioned – a novel that despite several attempts, I've never managed to penetrate beyond the first 50 pages. It's the gunfire short sentences that get me every time. I can sort of see the reason for such rat-a-tat-tat prose as "He ran a kitchen-help union. He rigged low pay. He had coin. He had pull." But it's just so relentless. And I suspected that Ellroy would have short shrift for those who found it too much to bear. Instead, he simply admitted that he had made a mistake, taken his style too far. It was both a surprising and fascinating admission.
The article goes on to discuss what you should do when a writer calls the middle book of a trilogy mistaken... (I read it with pleasure myself and look forward to "Blood's A Rover", which is volume three. You all owe it to yourselves to read at least "American Tabloid")
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Martin Beck, Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo
Who would have thought that by 2010 the American hard boiled detective novel would have entered its rococo phase -- elaborately self-referential, nostalgic, decadent, rule-bound, (dare I say it?) dead?
What lives is the European model: Zolaesque examinations of society and its structures, political, leftish, unromantic (if not realist) -- what we used to call the 'gloomy police procedural.' Larsson, Mankell, Rankin, and Indriason win prizes and make millions.
The Chandler/Hammett of this new model were Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, whose novels about Swedish police detective Martin Beck are still compelling thirty years after publication. Wahloo died in 1975 and I've never read anything about them or their collaboration until this, which has a great photograph of the now 74-year-old Sjowall. Too many cool quotes to excerpt, but success-mongers should take note of this:
Today, Maj Sjöwall walks barefoot through her studio in a suburb in the south of Stockholm. Her hair is long and grey, and she's wearing a loose-fitting linen smock. The room is light-filled and simply furnished: carefully chosen pictures, notebooks, pens, everything placed just so. One might describe it as monkish, but Sjöwall's life has not been monkish, as I will find out. This is where she still works, aged 74, as a writer and a translator. There's a single bed, a fridge, a hob, for when the small apartment that she rents nearby is too stuffy during the long Swedish summer. She lives modestly. She can not afford a car. Unlike Rankin or Mankell the books she wrote with Wahlöö have not made her very rich. There has been a modest income recently from foreign sales, but the royalties she receives from her Swedish publisher are based on old contracts. She does not sound bitter about this. "Rather free than rich," she says.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
More Moorcock and The Doctor
Nice essay by Michael Moorcock in the Guardian. He's appropriately humble and provides the perfect answer to my snit about sequels and derivative movies:
......the vast potential of what I can write is beginning to dawn on me. Far from thinking in terms of fun I've become a little scared. All time and space is open to me. I have to mix comedy and melodrama while telling an epic adventure story featuring a complex protagonist capable of ranging across the entire multiverse. I'm increasingly overawed as I consider what I must live up to. Hardcore fans are already questioning my qualifications. I can only hope I'm equal to the job.
He's also working on an autobiographical trilogy, picking up some themes oft discussed here:
I have begun a series of autobiographical novellas and novels in which I examine my taste for romance and fantasy: my characters are thinly disguised versions of writers and others associated with New Worlds magazine in the days when we tried to find new approaches to literary novels by using the methods and ideas of science fiction. This trilogy of books, featuring a version of myself in a somewhat re-invented London, is intended to examine the appeal of fantastic adventure stories of the kind inhabited by my most popular character, the albino sorcerer-prince Elric of Melniboné. Elric is my Sherlock Holmes – a protagonist better remembered than most of my others, but in my case not the burden Conan Doyle felt Holmes to be. I'm very grateful that Elric continues to keep me in my old age
Friday, November 20, 2009
YAWP
About five years before this clip was shot, Sun Ra and his Arkestra took up residence in a store- front theater on West 23rd Street in New York, and performed most Saturday nights from about 9 to 3. Since it was about a five minute walk from my apartment, I used to go in all the time. Changed my life.
A couple of things: The girl dancing in the aisle at about 3:00 understands everything. The guy playing the baritone sax at about 5:00 is the father of the current governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick.
This is what Walt Whitman meant when he said:
Larsson
"Writing in El País last week, Mario Vargas Llosa explained the Millennium trilogy's success by saying that Larsson had produced one of the great stories of "just avengers" in popular literature. He had read the 2,100 pages of the trilogy with "the same happiness and feverish excitement" with which he had read Dumas, Dickens and Hugo as a boy, "wondering as I turned each page, 'And now what's going to happen next?'"More here
Cf. C.S. Lewis' claim that all the best supernatural fiction is written by Christians...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Coolest movie ever made?
You can decide here. Trailer on the right of the page will play without being told to.
It's called "Assault Girls", and I do not believe that it is based on "Red Harvest."
A picture of the eponymous "Girls" ....
Shocking? Not really
Take a quick guess. How many of the twenty highest grossing films of the decade were original properties, neither sequels, remakes, nor based on material from another medium (as they say)?
Check the answer here.
Now a lot of this is unfair, of course. Pirates of the Caribbean is derivative in name only. And there's not necessarily anything wrong with derivative movies. LOTR was pretty good. But really.
Cool quote:
Out of the top 50 grossing films of this decade, there are only 9 movies based on original properties. And five of those nine films were created by Pixar Animation Studios.
If you're curious, the two non-Pixar, non-Dreamworks-animation original films in the top fifty are:
Hancock
The Day after Tomorrow
Have a nice decade.
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