Monthly Archives: October 2007

Three Random Funny Things

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1. James Lipton, charmingly sycophantic host of Inside the Actors Studio, used to be a pimp in France. This is quite possibly the best news story ever written. From the article: “This was when I was very, very young, living in Paris, penniless, unable to get any kind of working permit…I had a friend who worked in what is called the Milieu, which is that world, and she suggested to me one night, ‘Look, you’ll be my mec…’ We would translate it, perhaps…as pimp.”

At another point in the article he says that the johns were young American boys who were nervous and unsure, something that was surely not helped by seeing Lipton grinning at them and winking salaciously. He’s always been slightly creepy — Will Ferrell’s impression captured his tractor-beam stare, uncomfortable pauses, and tongue-bath style of ridiculously hyperbolic praise — and somehow it’s hilariously perfect that he used to be a pimp. I can just imagine him asking the john his preferences: “I like to start with a questionnaire invented by Bernard Pivot. What turns you on, excites you? What turns you off? Moi? I enjoy tattoos and being shamed.” And as the nervous but sated john emerged from the seedy hotel room: “Your enthusiastic lovemaking sounded scrumtrulescent. I have never in my twenty years heard such wild and energetic enthusiasm. You, sir, are truly a remarkable genius of the fleshly realm.”

2. Shamelessly stolen from The Lake Street Get Down (but it’s okay because Adams took “Goldfinger,” plus she’s a Cillian Murphy fan. He’ll eat your soul with his creepy blue eyes, Adams!!!), the best Jeff Goldblum impression ever. I now love Elon Gold, whoever he is, almost as much as I love Jeff Goldblum.

[ETA - I just looked on Elon Gold's Wikipedia page, and whoever edited it last has said that Gold is known for his "adequate" impersonation of Jeff Goldblum. Adequate??!?! Can someone get that PDA out of Lindsey Lohan's booze-soaked mitts, please? That impression is superb - Admiral Neck]

3. The Guardian weekend magazine’s “Experience” column. This is supposedly a column where an everyday person (as opposed to a professional writer) tells an interesting story about his or her life, usually anonymously. You’d think we’d get a fair mix of stories — some sad or gruesome, some funny, some about strange coincidences or interesting anecdotes. Instead we get a weekly parade of unending misery. It’s always a tasteful but eye-catching all-caps headline, accompanied by a shot of the week’s author, usually with his back turned to the camera or part of her body artfully draped in shadow. The layout of the page is so ridiculously mournful-looking and the subject matter so unrelentingly bleak that you have to wonder if the magazine’s editors have some kind of bet going on. This week it was I Had To Choose Between Two Mothers, which told of a woman’s struggle between her adoptive mother and her biological mother; the former was jealous of the latter, and the latter became too affectionate, and eventually the woman had to agree to never see her biological mom again so her adoptive mom would be happy. The capper on this story was that the article was supposed to be anonymous, but they ran her name in the magazine, and have only corrected it in the online edition (and when you search for the story, her name still shows up. Good work, geniuses!).

Other recent headlines we’ve had included I Am a Narcoleptic, I Lit My Father’s Funeral Pyre, I Don’t Regret Giving Away Every Baby I’ve Had, My Best Friend Drownded [sic] While We Were on Holiday (nice misspelling there, ever-vigilant Guardian subs), I’ve Made My Home With Monkeys, I Had Cancer of the Penis, My Brother Was a Pimp (a Lipton sibling writing under a pseudonym?), and my personal favorite, Herpes Brought Us Together (the perfect Experience love story).

CSI: Miami Watch – "Backstabbers"

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Remember the awesome episode where H blew up a truck bound for the nuclear power plant at Turkey Point? We sure do. Canyon recapped that one, with the silly kidnapping plot that turned into a really really bad episode of 24. Seems we’re not done with that story yet. You may recall that H apprehended the glamorous Sonya, evil terrorist mastermind with a smirk and a flirty gleam in her eye. Obviously that outrageous sexual tension between her and the Orange Pimpernel worked so well she got dragged back to continue her nefarious schemes. Of course, we have to get her trial out of the way first. It’s held in a cathedral-like courtroom, and it was this outrageous monument to justice that started me thinking; is H the modern day Judge Dredd, except he’s not just Judge, Jury and Executioner, but Forensics Expert and Bomb Disposal Hot Shot as well?


As soon as H gets onto the stand, we get a flashback of him blowing up the truck, cutting back and forth to H and Sonya giving each other sexy stares. The prosecutor asks H to explain what Sonya said to him at the end of that episode, and hilariously H sits mute while her voice is looped in. Yet another disastrous directorial decision in this most inept of shows. At this point we find out that she’s not working for al-Qaeda. Instead she’s allied with al-Qadir, who I assume is al-Qaeda’s Floridian cousin.

All of that is great, but sadly she’s in the dock on the far more interesting charge of kidnapping the Kinkella family and extorting them. Screw all that blowing up a nuclear reactor and irradiating Florida nonsense, we want justice for the Kinkellas! Sonya’s weasel lawyer brings this up after H has gone to the trouble of damning her by associating her with the sabotage plot, but he still manages to get at her reputation by continually pointing out that she only gave out information in order to reduce her sentence, even when the weasel lawyer goes all, “Objection!” on his ass. It’s very Phoenix Wright. He metaphorically dances with the lawyer for a while, but against H, the lawyer has no chance. Instead of dropping charges, the judge sets her bail at $1m. Naturally, this is paid instantly. At this point I figured that the terrorists really do make a lot of money from sales of illegal DVDs and ciggies, but there will be a shocking twist later on. No, seriously. It is shocking. Shockingly stupid.

Seriously, H and Sonya can’t stop staring at each other throughout this entire scene. She looks only at him, and wears this sexxy expression through the whole thing.


H, she’s either horny or hungry, and who knows how al-Qadir rolls. Anyway, outside the cathedracourt, Peter Kinkella is super-pissed about her bail release, and angrily confronts H, who promises they will deal with Sonya eventually. Not good enough! Kinkella storms off, leaving H free to follow Sonya and her lawyer to his car, where they simmer at each other a little more. Suddenly, before they can go from staring to pouting and blowing kisses, OMG! Another car comes out of nowhere and shoots the lawyer! H is shocked to the core, and even goes so far as to make the effort to change his expression from self-satisfied to horrified, which is always a big moment in CSI: Miami history.


Sonya takes to opportunity to leap into the lawyer’s car and speed away, and H comes out shooting, as usual. He gets off a few shots at both the assassin car and Sonya’s car, but the latter time he uses incendiary bullets or something. Like Judge Dredd! See? He’d make a great Judge Dredd. Plus, the helmet covers his face and offers some protection against that evil sun.


As a result there is no payoff line prior to credits, just a shot of him looking piiiiiiissed. We were more pissed than him, actually. We live for this quipping shit, if you can call it that. Still, once the credits have finished yelling at us, we do get an awesome shot of H reflected in a bullet casing. It’s rare to see H deign to do any actual detective work, so it’s a big deal, but then in the next scene he’s running the plates of the shooter’s car! This must mean he’s taking the case personally! Excellent. It’s always great when he gets all moody. Moodier. Whatever.


H traces the car to a kid called Craig Edwards, and he is brought in. During the intense interrogation scene, he tries to come up with some lame excuse that his friends took his car, but after a single tough line from H, he starts ranting about how corrupt the legal system and the US are. Doesn’t he know who he is talking to? He’s talking to Justice Incarnate! This is the literal red rag to the literal bull. Not literally, though. A little bit of gunshot residue is found on him, and immediately he starts ranting about how happy he is the lawyer is dead. Lawyers and US law suck! Then, two seconds later, his own lawyer appears and he’s all over him. I love that the show thinks that this shows up the hypocrisy of the terrorists. They hate our freedoms until they need them. Bastards! Where’s Gitmo when you need it?

Anyway, the lawyer is a sleazebag in a pink shirt and cheap leather jacket, so he must be one of those liberals who love abortion and Castro! On this show? SHOOT HIM, H! Don’t let that bastard live! H is amused by Craig’s hypocrisy. As are we. And probably Bill O’Reilly and that weasel Hannity and some other right-wing douchebags, if they’re watching this and not listening to the ever-more deranged shrieks of the famous Lesser-Brained Coulter Vulture. I guess after all of these comments I don’t need to reiterate how right-wing this show is. Or how clumsily written.

Meanwhile, Calleigh and Wolfe are en route to Sonya’s car, which has been found somewhere with a guy in it. He’s called Hector Ramirez, and is played by Rick Gonzalez, currently to be seen as bird-hating Ben on Reaper! Awesome! He’s great, and is actually the first guest actor on this show to exhibit some inner life. Also at the crime scene is the documentarian, Doyle, who has been assigned to follow Wolfe around in episodes passim, thus setting up the most memorable moment of the episode later on. Wolfe uses super-detectivity to find a corpse in the boot of the car. Things are looking bad for Ben. Sorry. Hector. He’s immediately arrested, and slowly the scene is resolved under the oppressive orange sky. Yes, this scene features the most out of control orange filter yet seen in this show, and that’s saying a lot. It’s as if someone spilled Lucozade on the lens and didn’t clean it off before it dried.


Back at the lab, Boa Vista pays a visit to Alexx, performing an autopsy on the dead lawyer. They realise the bullet (or, as Boa Vista calls it in a rare moment of professionalism, the “projectile”) is not there. As usual, no one noticed the guy has two enormous holes in his neck, which would suggest one of them is an exit wound. What else could it be, gills? Couldn’t they have figured that out at the crime scene and sent someone to look for it then instead of doing it hours later? God! Anyway, H and Natalia return to the crime scene and while he stands around looking as cool as an orange cucumber, Natalia finds the bullet handily stuck in a tree just a few feet away from where the lawyer was standing, thus saving the show time and money setting up a big scene with them scouring the area. Brilliant. They also realise that the shot was not aimed at the lawyer, but was meant for Sonya. The assassin in the killer car missed, and the “projectile” ricocheted off a metal pole. These al-Qadir assassins suck, man. At least at drive-bys.


Back at the morgue, Calleigh and Alexx confer about the body in the trunk. Seems he is called Gabriel Cervantes, and was “28 years young”, as Alexx intones, pompously. This guy’s daughter is sitting nearby, and in a weird change of pace, Calleigh goes over to patronise her and make her a promise she cannot keep. For at least 75% of the first three seasons, H would have a scene where he creepily talks down to some orphaned kid and promises to bring the killer of his/her father/mother to justice, but for some reason this week the responsibility falls to Calleigh. She is slowly starting to replace H, as her horrid season 5 transformation into a snotty judgemental scumbag has shown.


Of course, the kid saw the killer stab her father to death, and is terrified that they will get at her if she testifies. Naturally Calleigh promises her that will not happen, which is really ill-advised. While she makes that terrible mistake, H deduces that Sonya’s lawyer has no phone on his body, which means Sonya must have picked it up. Also, Delko reveals that Craig didn’t shoot Sonya, even though he’s covered in gunshot residue (I can’t remember why this is. Something to do with cutting-edge science, I’ll wager), and is taking the fall to lead the team away from the real killer, who is still out there looking for Sonya. That duplicitous America-hating bastard! H calls Sonya on the lawyer’s phone, and desperately begs her to give herself up so he can save her from herself. Of course, because she is a criminal mastermind, she reckons her chances of survival are good, and so she hangs up. Rude! Oh, and I loved this shot. This is how H dials a phone. He even has a trademarkable method of making a call. That is acting genius.


Wolfe and Documentary Doyle interrogate Hector, and he confesses to carjacking Sonya and being a sleazy dick who keeps winking into the camera, but denies the murder of Gabriel. He’s obviously lying, and Wolfe reckons there will be evidence on his clothes (this is the standard bit of detective work done on this show. If it’s not looking for rock dust, it’s spraying clothes for blood stains).

Before we get to that memorable scene, H and Delko go to the scene of the carjacking, and find a car rental place from which Sonya probably got another vehicle after losing the lawyer’s car. She bought an Escalade with tinted windows and no GPS, which doesn’t seem suspicious at all. H takes a security tape from camera on the lot to look at later. Meanwhile, Wolfe is showing off to Doyle, doing a Luminol test on Hector’s jacket, but his usual amount of spraying doesn’t show up on camera, so upon Doyle’s prompting he has to go nuts and practically empty a bottle on it. This, of course, destroys all the DNA, so the evidence is now useless. As usual, this is a purely mechanical way to stretch the episode out in length and to create some silly drama for Calleigh, as the kid will now have to testify, thank to the loss of their conclusive evidence. The only thing I like about this plot development is that Valera gets to chide Wolfe in front of the camera, and the arrogant little jerk gets to look stupid. Yay Valera!


Calleigh gives him a little grief, but really not nearly enough. How unprofessional does a Miami CSI have to be before they get in trouble? The only person in the show who ever got properly punished for not being professional was poor Speedle, who was punished by God by being killed in a gun fight. That showed him. Turns out Gabriel’s corpse has tattoos over his chest, and Tripp gets to do more than just spout exposition to H by spouting exposition to Alexx and Calleigh. He reveals that one of the tattoos represents his retirement from gang life. Great! Except in gang culture that’s a suicide statement, and therefore another gang member would then have to kill him. Harsh.

This leads Calleigh to gang boss Rulon Domingo, a hard ass currently in jail. In possibly the most preposterous scene of the week (or even season), Calleigh goes to see if he ordered a hit. Of course he tells her there is no way he’s going to cooperate, because, you know, he’s a hardass. Calleigh reasons that because he has 3 life sentences and nothing to lose, he should reveal it. So without any further prompting or bargaining he does. WHAT? This is beyond ridiculous. Calleigh’s argument is that he’s already in for life, what’s another count of murder? WHAT? He then arrogantly says she should tell Hector he made his bones by killing Gabriel, and she says, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you tell him yourself.” Stupid line, but the best thing is Rulon’s response, which is like, “Oh man, I never thought of that!” Dumbest. Gang boss. Ever. No wonder he’s in jail. What did he think was going to happen? GAH! This could very well be the stupidest moment in CSI: Miami history. I don’t think I need to tell you there is a lot of competition.

Tech hero Cooper has been hard at work tracking Sonya’s phone, and they find the signal coming from a warehouse. Unhappily for our heroes, so has a cadre of evil al-Qadir hitmen! H and Tripp and a bunch of cops rush to the scene, but the swarthy Middle Eastern bad guys are already there. Cue vaguely exotic music with wailing and sitars or something. Pretty offensive stuff, but then the only contact the showrunners have with Muslims is casting them as terrorists, so it’s not surprising. Turns out, Sonya is a smart cookie. She left the phone as a trap, so the law and the terrorists would get into a shootout. And they do! Bullets whizz, but of course it’s H who gets first blood, shooting a terrorist to shit while destroying a handy sheet of glass. Super-dramatic!


Then Tripp blows someone away too. Good week for Tripp. the other cops just run around a bit. How will this terrifying bloodbath get resolved? H wings another guy and they all surrender. Seriously. It’s awesome. Then we get a cool shot of H looking fearsome, standing over the wounded terrorist with the enormous warehouse behind him. The perp is reaching for his gun, and upon seeing that he simply growls, “Wrong.” See what I mean about Judge Dredd? That movie needs to be remade, stat.


H interrogates the guy while he’s on the floor and threatens to kill him. He’s so bad ass this week. Turns out the terrorists now think Sonya is a narc, but no, you silly bad guy, she really is an evil terrorist. Is he pissed because she broke some terrorist code? You’re bad guys! All of this “honour amongst thieves” stuff is just so much bunkum. Or are you just pissed because she outsmarted you, you misogynist asshole? Tripp’s response to this accusation of her being in cahoots with his fellow cops is great. “Fat chance!” Yes, because she seems to be pretty smart. She’d never gonna get a job in Miami Dade law enforcement. They only employ righteous idiots.

Such as Wolfe, who tells Calleigh that due to his ridiculous mistake the kid has to testify, and she’s understandably horrified. Wolfe really times his screw-ups to maximise the drama in the B-plot, doesn’t he. Video expert Cooper has managed to get the car rental security tape running (tough job, eh Cooper?), and OMG Hector isn’t just a carjacker with a body to hide; he’s in on it with the evil and brainy Sonya! The gang is in league with al-Qadir! Turns out that a bit of scientific deductive work reveals that his shirt may not have DNA on it any more, but it does have plastic explosive residue on it. He worked on the truck that was going to blow up the power plant in the previous episode! Ridiculous. I mean, exciting!

H interrogates Hector, and his excuse is that it was good money, ignoring the fact that if the plan had gone ahead he would only have been able to spend the money on irradiated churros. Sadly he doesn’t know where Sonya is. H threatens him with the line, “Under the PATRIOT Act this is your last hour of freedom. What do you want to do?” Only on CSI: Miami (and 24) is the Patriot Act seen as a good thing. Still, it works. It scares Hector into considering confessing, and so he asks for a deal. Great! Except H says no. Probably because he doesn’t deal with terrorists. Good work sticking to your ideals, H, but now what are you going to do?

Time to get the B-plot out of the way. Calleigh tells the orphaned little girl that the man who killed her father is going away, though she doesn’t tell her it’s on a charge of sedition, not murder. Would the kid care? Doesn’t matter. Time to wrap this shit up. H does something unusual; lab work! Usually he just orders the others around and then materialises behind them when they’re finished, but either this week he’s taking it personally, or he doesn’t trust his team to get it right. After Wolfe’s mistake, he probably has a point. Of course, it’s also possible he just can’t wait to see her sexxy smouldering sex face again. He tests some of the guns found during the warehouse shootout, and one of them has blood on the slide. Someone who has never fired a gun before got his hand caught in the slide. It has a technical name; a slide bite. This is not the first time they’ve done this. Who was the drive-by assassin? The lawyer! He’s in so deep with al-Qadir that now he’s shooting people for them. I know tuition fees can leave you in debt for a long time, but jeez, there’s a line you don’t cross, dude.


H is so pissed about this he snarls, “Book these two animals!”, and the lawyer and the al-Qadir guy he winged get dragged off. With that resolved, our heroes resume the search for Sonya, and finally think to see who posted bail for her. Who did they think it was, Moscone Bail Bonds? Actually, that would be awesome.

That digression doesn’t disguise my annoyance with this revelation. Sure, it’s another stupid artificial way to stretch out the plot, but this really does make the team look like a bunch of chumps. Why didn’t they think to check this earlier? It’s a pretty big deal, right? Perhaps there’s a law against it, but seeing as how H is throwing the PATRIOT Act around like a really cool Top Trumps card, you’d think they’d just go for it. But I, again, digress. Turns out the bail was provided by Peter Kinkella, the guy whose family was kidnapped on her say so in the previous episode. He’s used his yacht as collateral, so H goes to the marina.

Kinkella has a brilliant and devious plan to kill Sonya for being so evil, and he’s trapped her by promising her a trip in his boat. Which is surely under the control of the Miami Dade justice system, right? Man, this is making my head hurt with its relentless stupidity. What’s worse is she has gone along with this, which means she’s either less smart than we thought, or way more cunning. I hope it’s the latter. H needs a new arch-enemy. He’s killed all of the others.

H confronts Kinkella and tries to talk him out of murdering Sonya, who is standing nearby, listening with a smug and sexxy look on her face. If she’s there listening, I have a feeling this plan is pretty much doomed. Kinkella says, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose your family?” which give H the chance to look pained. He talks Kinkella out of killing Sonya (which is dumb for the reasons listed above), and he walks away, leaving the yacht for Sonya to use. I’m not even going to point out how stupid that is. After a bit of sexxy banter with H she just gets in the boat and sails off, though promising to honour the terms of her bail by not leaving Miami waters. She’s all gloaty, but H is half-pissed, half-concerned for her safety, what with al-Qadir determined to kill her. This is why I love H; he’s a real chivalrous hero, something that Judge Dredd isn’t. Maybe I was wrong all along. The episode ends with her sails off into the really orange distance. H puts his glasses on, and walks away. Until the next time, Sonya. Until the next time.

“Backstabbers” Stats:

Horatio’s Send-Off Into Credits: None. A shocking anomaly in the history of the show. It left the entire episode spinning in chaos without it. Let’s hope it never happens again.

Ripped-Off Plot of the Week: This week they just ripped the story out of today’s headlines. PATRIOT Act, terrorism, shootouts, Cuban gangs doing grunt work for the notorious al-Qadir; this is life in the 21st century people, except life isn’t predominantly orange.

Natalia’s Awful Blouse of the Week: Natalia surprised us greatly with a tasteful cardigan, albeit a low-cut one. No bad blouse for us?


Wrong! Hector stole one from her wardrobe, somehow. What the hell is this monstrosity?


Perhaps the rule of the show isn’t that Natalia must wear a horrible blouse, but that at least one person has to wear a horrible blouse and her name kept getting picked out of the hat. This week, he lost.

Number of Caruso Two-Steps: About seven. By the end of the episode he was really packing them in.

Best splitscreen of the week: There was more complicated stuff, but this was gratifyingly symmetrical.


It is as if they are two sides of something that has two sides. Bread? It’s as if they are two sides of the same slice of bread. H’s side is buttered. No wait, that doesn’t make sense.

Most Patronising Dialogue From Horatio:
Craig: You think someone’s going to get a fair shake in the court system you’re kidding yourself. Your whole legal system’s corrupt, just like your country.
H: Son, aren’t you from Pensacola?

Five Random Things That Make Me Very Very Happy (2)

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1: Doctor Orpheus from The Venture Brothers.


There are lots of things to love about The Venture Brothers, which is pretty much the funniest animated series on TV right now, but the thing that is 100% guaranteed to make me laugh is Doctor Orpheus. He’s an obvious spoof of Marvel Comics’ Sorceror Supreme, Doctor Strange, but whereas that character is a confident and worldly force for good, Orpheus is plagued by insecurity, desperate for the friendship of Dr. Venture, and miserable over his inability to gain the attentions of an arch-enemy. Scared that his best years are behind him, and stuck looking after his grumpy goth daughter Trianna (who he loves but doesn’t understand), he rents a spacious room in the Venture compound and tries desperately to gain the acceptance of his landlord, even though Dr. Venture is an absolute dick. In the second season he reforms his superteam, The Order of the Triad, but even that is not enough to satisfy him.

He would be a great character anyway, but the hilariously overwrought voicework by Steven Rattazzi pushes him right over the top. There are many ways to deliver the line “Do not be too hasty in entering that room. I had Taco Bell for lunch!” upon exiting a toilet, but the way he bellows it as if delivering a hammy piece of Shakespearean verse is genius. Sadly Adult Swim are good at taking down footage from their shows from YouTube, so if you want to see him in action, I suggest you buy the DVDs. Strongly suggest, in fact. Actually, I order you. Immediately. You won’t regret it.

There’s only one drawback to this. I’m currently reading Austin Grossman’s fantastic novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible (an awesome birthday gift from Canyon), and the main superteam, The Champions, has on its roster a sorceror called Mister Mystic. Whenever he talks, all I can hear is that hilarious voice. I’m sure the character is meant to be taken seriously, but it’s just impossible. BTW, you should also buy this book. It’s fabtriffic.

2: The news that production on Mad Max: Fury Road has begun again.


When I was but a little boy, of the age where I would skip to school whilst wearing shorts and a cap, eagerly on the lookout for conkers while starlings and blue tits chirped in the trees, I really really enjoyed coming home and rewatching my knackered video copy of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, just to see the Feral Child chop off a guy’s fingers with a razor boomerang, or Humongous flexing his outrageous muscles like something out of a Roman gladiator movie, or Vernon Wells getting killed in a head-on collision between a tanker truck and a car.

Okay, I tell a lie. I was actually a teenager. The stuff about shorts and caps and conkers is true though. Maybe that’s why the cool kids kept throwing stuff at my head. I also remember playing Car Wars, the Steve Jackson game that emulated the same post-apocalyptic car battle scenarios. Many hours would be spent pushing tiny slivers of cardboard around a flimsy map, trying to beat my game-obsessed cousin, who was older than me and actually knew the rules, thus putting me at a disadvantage. Ah, memories. The worst part of this exposure to all the grimy angry vroom-vroom is that I now think that such a future is not only entirely plausible but inevitable. And I don’t even know how to drive! Man, when the world falls apart, I am so screwed. That said, I have a really bad arthritic knee and grey wings in my hair, so I’ve got that part of the Max Rockatansky shtick going for me.

Loving Road Warrior is not exactly controversial, but some of the guys I knew who were in the year above thought I was mad for also liking Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, as it featured kids and was therefore not as hardcore as Road Warrior. Perhaps they had a point. If I went back to it now I’d probably agree, but at the time it just made me want to live in a post-apocalyptic world as part of a community of warrior children and hang out with a murderous Mel Gibson while trying to avoid Tina Turner. She was on Radio 1 all the time when I was a kid, so I reckon it would have been a common fantasy.


It’s been years since I’ve seen them (mostly because Warner Brothers have not bothered to release proper DVDs, opting instead for barebones cheap-ass versions instead), but I still remember them fondly, and kept wishing directorial maestro George Miller would get the fourth film underway. Sadly for the fans, the project has had its fair share of bad luck over the years: Miller directing one of the biggest flops in film history (Babe 2: Pig In The City) and then being ostracised by the industry; budget trouble; African location shooting proving problematic; Mel proclaiming loudly that the Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills (I wonder if he thinks the Californian fires that menaced his house were a plot) and thus expending every last bit of good will I had towards him (until I saw the very entertaining Apocalypto, which has thrown me for a loop). I’d given up on it, especially as Miller is now working on the Justice League movie, but Moviehole have revealed the project is going ahead again, sans Gibson, and pre-production will be done during the Justice League shoot.

Miller is one of my all-time heroes. The closest he’s got to making a bad movie was The Witches of Eastwick; when people complain about the Hollywoodisation of a book I get so mad at the implicit snobbery in that phrase, but there is no other word for Michael Christofer’s adaptation of John Updike’s bizarre novel. All of the risk has been surgically removed, and the only thing that redeems the movie is Miller’s muscular direction. I still love it, and have seen it a trillion times, but it’s not the movie it should have been. Other than that, he’s made some great stuff. Lorenzo’s Oil, Babe 2, the Mad Max movies; all great. I even enjoyed Happy Feet lots and lots, and think it gets a ton of unfair criticism. Whatever. The master is back now he has an Oscar in his hand, and hopefully this second wind will see him restoring his reputation as one of the great storytellers of our age (and if you think I’m gonna apologise for the hyperbole, you can forget it), as well as making a movie set in a world that is more relevant than ever. I really cannot wait. Plus, the release of the new movie might spur Warner into giving the original movies a proper big DVD re-release, with all the bells and whistles! ZOMG!

Until then, check out Ain’t It Cool’s coverage; Merrick has been nice enough to put clips of the final chase sequence from Road Warrior. It’s not a clean, speedy scene with nimble cars doing outrageous things; it’s more a war of attrition, with outrageous violence and masterful stunts. Cinema at its best.

3: Frank Caliendo imitating John Madden on Letterman:

My only real exposure to John Madden is through playing the game, but you don’t need to know what the real guy is like. This works beautifully anyway. The fact that it’s an uncannily accurate impression is just a bonus. As with great Moments in Presidential speeches, this never fails to amuse.

4. Vern’s work in the field of Seagalogy.

Speaking of Ain’t It Cool, one of the site’s more entertaining features are the reviews by Outlaw Vern, which are works of chaotic, grammatically dodgy brilliance. For years he has been working on a book of Seagalogy, and it finally got printed this week (I think; well, I found it today, so I’m sticking with that). Criticism can often be such a perfunctory thing that when you come across someone with a singular voice, it doesn’t matter if you often disagree with them. It’s just good to find entertaining and thoughtful writing about pop culture. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O’Hehir of Salon, Moriarty from AICN, the AV Club guys; I head straight to them every week.

While they will review most things released, Vern focuses on the long discredited action genre, and treats it with the respect it needs. His particular area of expertise, obviously, is the filmography of Steven Seagal, and he has the same love/hate relationship with him that I do with David Caruso. All you need to know about his credentials is that he thinks Out For Justice is Seagal’s masterpiece, and it is, so he gets full marks for accuracy. Yes, I have often disagreed with him, but he makes me laugh even while I think he is horribly horribly wrong.

His entertainingly incoherent writing (almost certainly a pose, a bit like the wonderful Ami Angelwings) can be bought as real actual books or downloads from Lulu, and I heartily recommend them. Wow, I’m really trying to shill stuff out today.

5: We Both Reached For The Gun by Kander and Ebb, from Rob Marshall’s Chicago:

Canyon recently recommended I watch Rob Marshall’s film version of Chicago, and though a few years ago I would have said, “But the NO!!!”, this time I jumped at the chance. Since seeing Once More With Feeling and Guys and Dolls (with Ewan McGregor and Jane Krakowski), I’ve started to love the genre. Chicago was better than I had expected, and I wonder if the lukewarm reviews it occasionally got at the time had more to do with the garishness of the visuals compared to the starkness of the stage version. As far as I could tell, Marshall did a pretty good job of mimicking Bob Fosse’s directorial style, and though it was a little flashier, it worked very well.

Of all the songs in the show, We Both Reached For The Gun is my favourite (with Mister Cellophane coming close behind), but it was the scene itself, with the conceit of Roxie and the attendant press corps as puppets at the whim of Billy Flynn, that appealed to me most. If I’d give the movie an 8, this scene gets an 11. It’s just genius.

Once

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On Monday night, we saw Once, another movie that came out roughly two million years ago in the States and is probably already being remade with Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale (along with those “Irish” gangsters from Heroes as their band members). It comes out on DVD there in December and we could have just bought it then and had it sent over, but we’d waited months to see it already, listening to increasingly fervent reviews all the while, and couldn’t wait any longer. Any longer than Monday night, that is, because our weekend was already booked up with Guitar Hero.

It was a wonderful movie, the kind that makes you glad to be alive in a world where people make films like this, and if you haven’t yet seen it, please do, and then come back here and thank me, and maybe PayPal me a little of your gratitude as well. I also accept gift certificates — we’re not picky here at Shades of Caruso.

Anyway, though it was a beautiful movie in sentiment, that wasn’t the case when it came to locations, filming style, film quality, or leading actors (sorry, Glen Hansard; you are a very talented musician and singer, but your eyes are wicked googly).


The film was obviously shot handheld on digital video, and apparently they didn’t always get permits to film and had to shoot on long lenses for public scenes and use friends’ houses for others (apparently it only cost $160,000 to make, and I’m afraid it shows, though happily it’s grossed more than $11 million). The camerawork was distractingly bad in certain scenes, especially an early one in a piano shop, which is shot as if someone’s dad is holding the camera and breathing heavily after one too many Coors Lights. I know this movie was low-budget, but guys, you couldn’t have shelled out for a tripod? They cost like twenty bucks. You could probably return it after you were done, since your movie was shot in two weeks and most places give you a month if you’ve got a receipt. I’m just saying. For Twice (the sequel, of course).

Luckily these distractions soon become unimportant, and the unprettiness of the locations was integral to the story. Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s characters both live in flats so depressing that they sent us both into bad-memory spirals as we recalled some of the unsavory places we’ve lived or visited and unfortunate characters we’ve known. No wonder they want to get out of Dublin (to go to London, which seems better until you realize that’s where Hackney is). And though the movie is a sort-of musical, the songs (especially at the beginning) are recorded quite badly — they often seemed on the verge of blowing out the camera’s mic, and even sounded rickety on the theater’s speakers. Again, though, this works for the movie — the sound is bad when Hansard is busking on the street at the beginning of the story, but by the time he and his makeshift band go into a recording studio, the songs are recorded beautifully, and are as smooth as a cat’s eyeball (sorry — as I write this, our cat Sydney is staring at me with her usual expression of insane confusion).


The story is a fairly simple one, though you may not want to read on if you haven’t seen it yet. Guy and Girl (for those are their “names” in the movie) meet, Guy is a broken-hearted hoover-fixer-sucker guy who busks at night, perpetually lugging around his worn-in guitar; Girl is a flower-seller who plays the piano. They begin to make music together, eventually recording some demo tracks so that Guy can go to London to try to make it. They both clearly begin falling for each other, but Hansard’s character is dismayed to find out that Irglová is still married to the father of her child (though he is back in the Czech Republic); in truth, he himself is still pining for his ex-girlfriend, who cheated on him. The ending of the movie is bittersweet; the characters part, having never so much as kissed each other (though Irglová’s character confesses at one point, in Czech, “You are the one I love”), but having changed and bettered each other immeasurably. Perhaps it’s better that they don’t end up together, as the time they spent together was (as the title implies) a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (a la Lost in Translation, another sob-inducing chaste romance). Still, I can’t help being cheered by the fact that Hansard and Irglová are dating in real life. Aw! Bet that wouldn’t have happened if they’d cast Cillian Murphy, as they’d originally wanted to. That creepy blue-eyed replicant.


As I mentioned, Once is a semi-musical; there are no flights of fancy where the characters suddenly break out into song, but musical conventions are cleverly sneaked into the fabric of reality — Hansard and Irglová begin falling for each other when they play a song together for the first time; Hansard reveals his troubled romantic past with an impromptu song on a bus (an especially nice character touch, as it’s easier for him to evade a real answer by singing instead of talking); Irglová sings along to a track she’s listening to on a CD player while the camera follows her. And the music itself is absolutely lovely — beautiful folk-pop songs that come alive when Hansard and Irglová croon to each other. The fact that both of them are professional singers, not actors, was an excellent choice — they both have amazing voices, can handle difficult songs easily, and most importantly, infuse the songs with gallons of emotion. Their naturalistic acting styles fit the tone of the movie perfectly, though obviously Josh Harnett would have been my first choice.

I think my favorite thing about the movie, though, was that it was a low-budget indie that avoided all the usual indie cliches. No wacky dysfunctional families, no tweeness, no overly coincidental plot contrivances, no miserably “real” couples (tangentially, Tell Me You’ll Procreate With Me is getting a bit better on this front, though nowhere near where it should be. Once basically kicks its ass in this arena). In fact, the only indie movie it reminded me of was Before Sunrise (and its sequel, Before Sunset), and that’s no bad thing, as both of those movies are quite possibly my favorite movies ever, and the only reason I think Ethan Hawke shouldn’t be squashed like the little rat-faced terrier he is. Both stories show us a heart-burstingly beautiful story of two people beginning to fall in love, and the movies ring so true that it’s hard to believe they’re fiction.

Now I’m off to watch 40 Days and 40 Nights.

Goldfinger!

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Peter Serafinowicz’s sketch show has been on for a few weeks now — as the Admiral explained earlier, our damnable semi-broken Sky+ box (the closest you can get to TiVo in this country) deleted the second episode on a whim (and yet has kept several movies the Admiral keeps trying to get me to watch even though I don’t want to — why have you turned against me so, Sky+ box?). We attempted to get the second episode from the equally-damnable-but-not-redeemably-awesome BBC iPlayer, but that failed too, and apparently it’s not worth repeating a brilliant sketch show when you can show Car Booty on an endless loop instead (I found out through hard experience that that show is not nearly as interesting as the title suggests).

Anyway…the show is full of very funny sketches (amid a few real clunkers) and tons of brilliant impressions, including Michael Caine, Kevin Spacey (couldn’t find any YouTube clips, I’m afraid, though this is a pretty meta impression, as Spacey is a genius impressionist himself) and Alan Alda, the latter so eerily accurate it’s not even really funny so much as like actually listening to Alan Alda. If you’re not in the UK, it’s definitely worth seeking out (though it’s hard to find whole episodes online, there are quite a few sketches on YouTube — the Butterfield and Darth Vader sketches are particularly worth watching).

During the latest episode, there was a song parody that made the Admiral laugh so hard that his forehead turned red and some scary veins stood out on his temple. Come to think of it, he may have been having a stroke. I give you Ringo Starr’s “Goldfinger”:

And speaking of excellent song parodies, I can’t go without mentioning Chris Morris’s dead-on Jarvis Cocker impression. If you, like me, were largely ignorant of Pulp, because your pathetically inept musical education in the mid-90s consisted of hastily learning the lyrics to “Motown Philly” so you could know a “cool” band’s songs, I invite you to watch this video of the insanely catchy and altogether wonderful “Common People”, to know and love Jarvis Cocker like a proper British muso.

So now you’re familiar with Jarvis Cocker’s strangely charming Elaine Benes-esque dancing, as well as his propensity for overly literal hand gestures (the fallback of many a bad male dancer) and writhing around in large novelty shopping carts. But though it seems impossible to love anyone more than Jarvis Cocker after that, I give you Chris Morris’s parody from Brass Eye, a groundbreaking news-parody show. If you don’t know who Myra Hindley is, Wikipedia is happy to provide you with some of their usual conspiracy-theory-based liberal claptrap.

Come back, Chris Morris, and we’ll even forgive you Nathan Barley. Not the part where a cat got a pair of scissors stuck in its head, though. Thanks for searing that image into my brain for the next 50 years. If you’re not satisfied with that Pulp reimagining, though, I leave you with the unholy alliance of William Shatner, Ben Folds, and Joe Jackson. You’re welcome.

This Week in TV: Week 4

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Boy, was a lot of this week TV miserable. I’m not saying it was all bad (though of course some of it was), but in the fourth week, shows either went for pathos or started to introduce darker themes. Perhaps this is something writing teams know about; three weeks of establishing the status quo, then in the fourth week, set up the big problems and season arcs.

The Office was darker than ever, to the point that it overshadowed the obvious comic highlights (the hilarious conference-room discussion about the difference between whoever and whomever that gave everyone a chance to shine, the visit to Shrute Farms). Nathan Rabin wrote an excellent review of it that hit on a lot of the good points of the show, especially the heartbreaking moment between Jim and Dwight. Having Jim and Pam become his protectors and semi-friends is perfect (Dwight probably did more to bring them together than they realise, just by being the subject of their mockery), as was his post-talk acception/rejection in the office. As for Michael’s depression, the show crossed the line between humour and horror, and then edged back again. Just.


I respect the showrunners for doing that, but while watching the show, I just felt horrible. Nice that they’re acknowledging the currently miserable lower-middle-class job situation, though. I get the feeling they’ve all been reading Joshua Ferris’ excellent novel, And Then We Came To The End, which is the tragic comedy to The Office‘s funny tragedy (or are they the other way around?). There has already been a plot about redundancy with the branch shutdown arc, but while that hung over the first couple of seasons like a dark cloud, there was no way the showrunners could go through with it without ending the show. This is a more viable way to address the uncertainty of the US job market and the stagnating economy, and again it shows how ambitious the show is. A simple sitcom about office politics this is not, but then if you watch the show you already know that.



Ugly Betty also dropped the Sword of Damocles on a relationship that appears to have been doomed from the start. Though the episode featured many hilarious moments (my favourite being Amanda’s declaration, “You were all at Studio 54 that night and I will find that Tweetie Bird if I have to search all of your asses!”), Henry finally found out that he was indeed the father of Charlie’s baby, which surely finishes that arc off, or at least deals the fatal blow. The final scene, with Henry and Betty trying to come to terms with this news, hit hard, possibly because it was coming off the back of Justin’s descent into inept machismo, and Wilhemina’s plotting to destroy Mode.

Man, writing that out makes it seem like a bunch of frothiness, but in fact it was a real downer. The events might seem trivial, but the tone of the show darkened considerably. We were not left with the usual post-Betty glow. This is not a criticism. It was still great stuff, and Oh My God! Victor Garber! +100000 points for finding a role for the long-missed Spy-Daddy.


Speaking of post-Alias TV, to a certain extent Chuck tried to get in on the miserablism with a subplot about Sarah grieving for her dead boyfriend as well as bemoaning her lost identity and spyness, but it’s not really a smart enough show to make it work (yet; it could still improve, after all). Yvonne Strahovski is possibly a better actress than it seems here; it’s not like she’s got good enough material to work with. Nevertheless, for the first time she was asked to do more than just kick women in the face while wearing a short skirt (though that did happen as well), and the moment fell flat, not because she’s not up to it, but because the show is asking us to care about a relationship between a hott female spy and an absent, dead, hott male spy partner. He’s not onscreen, and was only in the show for a couple of minutes in the first episode (mostly as a stuntman) and yet he looms over both Sarah and Chuck in a way that falls flat because we have no memory of him the way they do.


As a result, we don’t care that he upset Chuck, and we don’t care that Sarah still loves him. It’s asking us to care what the dead spy did, but to the audience he’s just that free-running guy who was nothing more than a very agile inciting incident. Perhaps the nerds in the audience can remember back to similar experiences of jock humiliation from their college days, and perhaps the female members of the audience can relate to Sarah because their boyfriend was similarly killed for trying to email secrets to someone outside the government, but that’s at a remove. The show is trying to run before it can walk. It’s a light, slightly entertaining spy show. It’s not drama. Maybe eventually, but not now. Again it made me pine for Alias, which did that stuff amazingly well, but it also made me pine for the first season of The O.C., because that also did pretty much everything right (for a while, at least). This is just landing with a dull thud every week. Thank God NBC have commissioned Bionical Woman as well. That saves it from the ignominy of being the season’s worst new show. I’ll get to that pile of crap later.

Sorry to keep comparing Chuck to Reaper, but they are vying for the same nerd audience, and while Chuck feels like the major label release by a band who have already had a critically lauded number one album on a smaller label, only to fall foul of sophomore slump, Reaper is the ambitious debut of a plucky indie band. Well, an indie band while making their first couple of singles who get signed up to release their album on a subsidiary of a different major label, like when Warner made that Sub-Pop-emulating mini-label that included Mudhoney on its roster for a while. Gah! You know what I mean!

Anyway, Reaper was, again, very entertaining, though signs of Andi becoming the show’s weak link are starting to show. What is her purpose again, other than to be the object of desire? They need to give her something to do other than be cute and unattainable. Missy Peregrym was nowhere near as dull as this when she was on Heroes. We need to see some of that fire again. Oh, and finally making The Devil more than just a trickster, and hinting at more depth to the central premise by introducing the battle between him and Sam over the contract? Excellent. Heart Ray Wise! How easy it is for that adorable smile to go very very bad.


CSI may not have had the melancholy air of the other shows, but with episode four there were set-ups for the season arc. At least I assume they were. CSI has been the classic example of how one-off procedural shows can still exist and work brilliantly in a long-form world that has seen many story-of-the-week shows deemed obsolete. Every week a new case is introduced, and at the end the case is solved (most of the time). Last season, however, saw the show bring in the excellent Miniature Killer arc, which popped in and out of the procedural, often to devastating effect (as I’ve said before, Monster in the Box might be the single best episode of CSI ever). This season, the producers have hinted that there would be something similar introduced, but if this episode is anything to go by, it won’t be a single criminal, but an ongoing case against a water-processing plant. I hope other fans are as excited about that as I am. It would be Erin Brockovich with less biker beards!

At least I hope that’s where they are going with this. The episode was filled with some really crappy deductive work by our heroes, for the first time in CSI history. They were investigating the death of a boy suffering from gynecomastia working at a water treatment plant hanging around with a scientist investigating large quantities of hermaphroditic fish swimming in a local lake, a death that could just as easily have been suicide as murder? The team don’t spot the connection straight away, and instead chase disgruntled co-workers for most of the episode. It was odd to see our heroes be inept for the first time ever. If this is the season arc, it at least explains why the show slowed down so much, and had so much exposition. If it’s set-up, then it was ponderous, but I understand. If not, then it was just a disappointing episode. Featuring an ugly and yet somewhat charming hat.


To a certain extent, that is. It also featured some great material. CSI: Miami is notoriously stupid, featuring either stock plots or outrageous melodrama in the place of actual crime scene analysis. The original show, thankfully, is proud to have science as its main focus, and this episode featured a lot of it. What with the water treatment plant investigation, Hodges pioneering a new technique and vowing to write a paper about it, and Gil’s ongoing investigation into worldwide bee population decrease (something that only hit the mainstream media a couple of weeks ago), it’s plain that the show is not shying away from giving scientists their due. Read enough paranoid books and features on Dawkins and his atheist cohorts, and you fear that science and rationalism is on the outs. CSI made me feel safe that somewhere in the mainstream, a rational outlook is still treated as beneficial. It’s also edumacational; don’t pull bee stings out of your skin as it releases the venom. You should scrape them out instead.


Best of all this week was the totally out-of-the-blue marriage proposal scene, with Gil (hilariously wearing his old woman hat over the top of his bee mask) just dropping the question into normal conversation. Often in story-of-the-week shows, the characters are merely redundant exposition devices, but this show manages to tease out tiny bits of information about its cast of characters in the most subtle ways. We know they have a backstory only because we pay attention to the details. It’s very rare that an episode will focus on their personal lives; Catherine’s family being the only recurring instance of plots based around her, but they’re almost always fascinating, especially when her sadly-deceased dad Sam Braun is involved. Instead we get little windows into their lives, like the endearing revelation that Greg is writing a book on Las Vegas history. In CSI: Miami, if a character has a life outside their work, it usually involves sex or relationships. In the original and best, it involves little character details like that. Man, this show really does feature some of my favourite character writing.

The Gil-Sara romance is a case-in-point. They’ve been dating for ages, and now they’re getting married. While other shows would make a big deal about it, here it happened in the middle of the episode without any warning or fanfare. It made it all the more touching, and cheered us both up considerably, after the misery of the other shows. Shame she’s only in the show for a little while longer. It does not bode well for their future.

Beyond the sadness and the arc establishment, this week also saw Dirty Sexy Money finally not totally suck. It was by no means a triumph (God no), and Canyon couldn’t even brave it (I think she was wise to; I’m only sticking with it out of stubbornness), but while the plots are unoriginal (school bullying, marital strife, affairs, jealousy), at least the dialogue had improved massively since last week. I know I’m being partisan and forgiving because of the connection to an old favourite, especially as the episode had two writers credited and not just one, but when Veronica Mars ace Diane Ruggiero’s name appeared in the credits, hope sprang up. I was rewarded with two good scenes. The main one had Donald Sutherland acting the paint off the walls as he confronts the duplicitous Jill Clayburgh. Finally some life! Shame that the increase in emotional truth came at the expense of revelation. Instead of Clayburgh revealing which of the Darling children was fathered by Peter Krause’s dad, we got an exchange that went something like:

Sutherland: Will you tell me?
Clayburgh: I will tell you!
Sutherland: Will you?
Clayburgh: Yes, I will!
Sutherland: Really? Because I really want to know!
Clayburgh: Yes!
[Cut to commercial]

I get that not immediately revealing who is lacking Donald Sutherland’s DNA is a way of creating tension in the family, and leaves the room open for a big revelation later in the series, but it just sounded laboured and mechanical. Also good was Zoe McClellan (whose boobs made a startling return in several scenes) confronting Natalie Zea over her previous relationship with Krause.


As far as I’m concerned, the only interesting plot is between Nick and his wife, and the threat of his work and past coming between them. Again, it’s nothing new, but the Darlings are odious enough to give the marriage plot some heft. It would be horrible for their relationship to be broken up by such a bunch of poorly written, illogical caricatures. Plus, it’s much more intriguing than the endless and record-breakingly tedious rivalry between Samaire Armstrong and Seth Gabel’s girlfriend. I’m so uninterested I can’t be bothered to Google the name of the actress. Sorry, miscellaneous actress. I’m sure you’re a lovely person but life is short. Blame the show writers and your life-sappingly dull character, okay?


Seriously, this shit has been going on for three episodes and each week it feels like ten minutes of footage has been accidentally edited in from another show. This show is run by Craig Wright? Who worked on Lost and Six Feet Under? How is this kind of glaring mistake possible? Showrunners! It’s killing the show! Drop it now! You just got a week reprieve by adding a shout-out to Explosions in the Sky and hiring Erick Avari (this week playing an Italian. Or a British spy. I wasn’t paying much attention). Don’t blow this tiny bit of goodwill now.

Also very much improved was Pushing Daisies, which was not just tolerable (see above), but actively entertaining. A lot of the flaws are still there and are obviously never going to go away, and dear God, someone tell the showrunners that they don’t have to end their episodes with scenes as showy and silly as that ineptly staged sword fight, but my own personal bugbear (that damnable Sonnenfeld) was absent for much of the episode. While there was still the relentless dollying and repetitive compositions, a lot of the show was simply shot and worked very well. Amazing how distracting it is when a director is shouting, “This is one of my signature shots, bitches! I won’t stop until Sonnenfeldian is in the dictionary!!!”


Everything that has almost been working (notably the tone and a lot of the humour) finally came off once the distracting frippery went down a notch, and as a result I could relax and enjoy (Canyon is yet to be convinced, I think). Also great was the resolution of some plots much earlier than expected. Chuck knows about the deadly ramifications of her resurrection, and Olive and her Cleavage of Mass Distraction (seriously, the camera won’t stop staring) suspects something is up with Chuck’s appearance at the Pie-Hole. I thought that stuff would come up later, once more one-off mysteries were solved, but we’re rattling through plot options at a faster pace that expected. This either means there is more to the central premise and Ned’s powers than expected, or they’re going to have O.C. Syndrome, with all of their good ideas burnt out after one season. Fingers crossed it’s the former.

I’m afraid to say that while pretty much every show we watched this week shook up their game after a start-of-season warm-up, Bionical Woman remains the low point of the TV week. There are new writers coming in, and NBC are obviously committed to the show, but will they bother to make it good and popular instead of lazy and popular-enough-to-get-by? I’ll stick with it in case it does suddenly improve in quality, like, a thousand-fold, but until then we’re forced to put up with writing, acting and directing that would have shamed the silly 70s original. Though at least this version did feature Jaime kicking the homophobe across the room a couple of times.


That was kinda fun. Apologies for linking to the AV Club again, but Sean O’Neal skewers everything that is wrong with the show much more succinctly than I can. The only interesting thing brought up by this episode was the curious moment where the brat sister sleeps through a car alarm outside. The pilot originally featured Mae “AnnHog from Arrested Development” Whitman as Jaime’s deaf sister, but it was changed after testing badly (dammit!). Does this scene hint that her sister is going deaf? It would make sense after the comments about the possibility of congenital disease in the Summers family tree last week. Perhaps the showrunners had an arc about deafness and bionical implants in mind. That would be interesting. Other than that, only counting Katee Sackhoff’s use of the following expression is keeping us diverted during the show.


As for the other shows this week, Friday Night Lights is still the highlight, even with the horrid muder plotline, but that has been subsumed, at least for now. 30 Rock was not as good as last week, but that is no criticism, considering how good that episode was. The funniest moment of the week came during The Peter Serafinowicz Show, but I’ll leave that for Canyon to talk about. Also on BBC was the new series of Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, featuring everyone’s favourite baby-faced cooking savant, which I had been looking forward to. Just to be really annoying, our Sky+ box decided to delete it after it had recorded. If anyone reading this has a Sky+ box, I strongly suggest you renew the warranty after a year. These damnable things fall apart quickly.

Angered by this, we decided to give the BBC’s much vaunted iPlayer a try, seeing as how it allows you to watch certain shows up to a week after they have aired. It’s supposed to be easy to use, but it took forever to install the player (for a long time we couldn’t as there were “technical difficulties” on their end), and when we finally had, and had downloaded the episode (which took ages), it played for about 4 minutes and then offered up a series of randomly selected freeze-frames with a voice over. Okay, we have a crappy laptop that sometimes freezes up when we’re using Winamp, but yesterday it was working fine. Only iPlayer malfunctioned. So I don’t get to see the damn show. If the BBC is going to have to show more repeats now, can it hurry up? I’m sick of missing stuff.

Other shows we didn’t watch but will eventually; Dexter, Journeyman (apparently saved from cancellation for a little while), Viva Laughlin (the worst show ever made, from what I’ve heard. Can’t wait!), and Mad Men. We’re very behind on that, and will get around to catching up, especially as the season finale appears to have blown everyone’s mind. It didn’t appeal to us much early on (we get that things were different back then, so please stop showing lots and lots and lots of smoking), but we’re willing to give it another try. It may have improved. Tell Me You Have Suddenly Started To Love Me is a case in point. The show format did not appeal to us at all, but slowly we’ve come to look forward to it every week. Not much has changed, but with enough care and attention to character growth and gentle, Lost-paced revelation, it has snagged us. That’s not to say it’s amazing, but we’ve still turned a corner on it, and if anyone asks for a recommendation we will give it (though stressing how long it takes to grab the imagination). That said, what did they do to Ronny Cox?


My heart sank a little when I saw him. He looks like a 900-year old hobo! Let’s hope it’s his character and not something more serious. Here is where I would put a sad-faced emoticon, if I were so inclined.

Holding Out For Some Heroics

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If you’ve had a look at the Heroes talkbacks on pretty much most blogs and nerdsites throughout the internet, massive concern is being expressed about the second season. For my part, I think this season started off from a bad position, continued that lacklustreness, added some really really bad plots (Peter Petrelli and The Hoirish Ghangsterrs of Ineptitude is this show’s menacing mountain cougar plot, though sadly it’s been going on much longer than that memorable misstep) and has seemingly settled into a not very exciting groove. This week was okay, in that it’s neither getting better or worse, though the odd moment struck a nerve. Nathan’s SuperPhantom of the Opera moment with his mirror was great, but otherwise things were set to Uninspiring. (Man, Pasdar really should have kept the Beard of Depression. This shit is just wack.)


I’ve figured out part of what bugs me about the second season. In the first, even when the show was bumbling along with scene after scene of set up, there was some little moment each episode that was fricking cool. Nathan eluding Noah and The Haitian by rocketing into the sky, Peter and Matt’s telepathy setting up a painful feedback loop, Claire’s autopsy, Niki and DL fighting in Jessica’s bedroom; all of it was TV gold. This season, hardly anything has happened that has grabbed the audience by the genitalia like that. West flying a lot? Seen it. What else you got? A painting featuring a major character lying dead on the ground? Yawn! The only thing I can think of is Ma Petrelli putting the shouty brain zap on Matt. That made me laugh. Other than that, nothing.

Another thing has been bugging me, but it’s as much a criticism of all superhero movies and TV shows as it is about Heroes specifically. Tim Kring said he started this series thinking about making something about people who are heroes, and using the superhero genre to explore that made sense. But what heroic things are they doing? It’s all a bunch of internecine squabbling and assassinations between ill-defined factions within the superpowered community. Last year they saved New York, and I gather this year will be about saving New York from Maya’s DoomGoop, but other than that, these chumps are the opposite of heroic. By the way, Kring? Your Not-Wonder Twins? Brian Michael Bendis called. He wants the plot from Ultimate X-Men #41 back, thanks.

There were a few little heroic moments last year: Hiro and DL teaming up to save a car crash victim from an explosion; Hiro pulling someone out of the way of a crashing car; Claire saving someone from a burning train (in the first episode; you’d have thought that would have been part of the show template). Now it’s a bunch of secretive stuff about shadowy organisations, with the odd burst of power-usage. I get that it might be due to budgetary restraints, not just because of the effects stuff but just because having the heroes outed would lead to bigger stories involving a larger cast of non-heroes, but it still chafes.

It’s the same with other superhero shows or films. Some of them get it right, most notably Spidey’s nerve-wracking battle to save the train in Spider-Man 2, but also, for example, the Fantastic Four saving the London Eye (good work, Fantastic Four!) in Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Superman vs. the San Andreas Fault in Superman (or Superman vs. an underwater earthquake threatening to destroy Metropolis in Superman Returns). Superhero stories should revolve around more than just heroes battling villains. I mean, I love that, but if all you’ve done in creating an superhero world is have a hero/villain dynamic (because that’s the classic antagonist/protagonist struggle taught in writing classes), then the whole thing seems pointless, even if the villain has a plan to endanger the populace. It’s insular and dull, even if you occasionally have someone flying his girlfriend around the Hollywood sign (a pointless scene, but nicely done).


Daredevil, Elektra and Ghost Rider are all about the hero battling the villains, and you rarely, if ever, see them helping the common man. Even Batman Begins skimps on that. It’s not disastrous for the movie to lack this; Batman Begins and the first two X-Men movies are still great despite that flaw. It’s just something that seems to get ignored when writing superhero tales, perhaps because McKee says we’re supposed to focus on the antagonist and not extraneous miscellaneous characters. Sadly, those extraneous characters serve a specific purpose in superhero stories, and losing them because you’ve decided to slavishly follow the detail of a manual and not the spirit, (or you have no time left in your script to add this important detail) will just damage your movie.

As much as we like watching the uber-mensch beating the shit out of each other, it’s also nice to see heroes doing heroic things for others. The Spider-Man 2 scene is one of my all-time favourite film moments precisely because it does two things really well. It has Doc Ock and Spidey kicking the crap out of each other and using their powers creatively, and Spidey doing everything in his power to save the bystanders. Man, I choke up thinking about that scene.


Heroes, however, has totally lost sight of that. I’m sure the season arc will involve a threat so large that thwarting it will save many many people, but other than that the show is mostly about the plague threatening the heroes. I like some of the characters, and yes, a threat to the next stage of evolution is serious, but I’m more concerned with humanity. The masterstroke of X-Men 2 (possibly my favourite superhero movie, along with Batman Begins and The Incredibles) is that for the majority of the movie the threat is against the mutants, and a lot of energy is spent explaining what a bad thing that would be. Then, right at the end, the plot twist kicks in, and Magneto grabs the opportunity to try to wipe out humanity. It just comes out of nowhere and yet is totally in character. Awesome. I <3 Magneto.

The main arc in Heroes is about the heroes being threatened, and while that’s engaging, it’s not enough (see also X-Men 3, until the added-on peril of Dark Phoenix kicks in). We need to see more than just an arc where a minority of humans are in trouble, or a season-long arc where humanity is tangentially in peril due to out of control powers such as Peter’s, Ted Sprague’s, or Maya’s; we need our heroes to be heroes on a regular basis. Right now they’re just superheroes sitting around fretting about themselves and moping. That doesn’t sound like what Kring had in mind, and though it’s absolutely not a showkilling problem now, it will be eventually. And no, I’m not one of those people who complains that post-Watchmen superheroes are too dark. If they’re dark, let them be dark. That’s fine by me, but at least let them do some good while they’re feeling all Emo.


Still, I’m not going anywhere yet. Even a malfunctioning Heroes has its charms. Plus, this week did introduce the most entertaining new hero yet; Micah’s cousin Monica, plagued by Katrina montages and looked after by Uhuru, who has a seriously crappy family if the whiny nonsense she has to put up with in this episode is anything to go by. “Grandma, you’re stupid!” “Grandma, give me money!” “Grandma, open a com-channel to the Romulan vessel!” Poor Nichelle Nichols. Nevertheless, I remain psyched to see a living nerd legend onscreen again, just as I was when George Takei was on, and hey, it’s better than being stuck on Babylon 5, eh, Walter Koenig?

Remy the Rat PWNs Puppet Angel and Cleveland Heep

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Pull that fine thick hair of his, Remy, you adorable rodent, you! Make him dance! And cook! Preferably something without garlic. The smell of burning vampire flesh can put off the diners.

On Saturday we caught Ratatouille, a movie released in the US so long ago that the Region 1 DVD release is in a couple of weeks. That this made my summer movie viewing a bittersweet experience is a statement as accurate as it is devoid of the shouty fury I unleashed upon learning about the outrageously long wait I had ahead of me. Even if Disney’s reason for delaying the release that much was that an orphanage was saved from being pulled down, I’d still be pissed beyond reason. How many ratless months? How much suffering Chez Canyoneck? And why, so some megacorp can make a few extra bucks? Don’t care! Orphans saved from begging on the streets? Don’t care! Me want rat movie pronto. Stupid Buena Vista. Me smash megacorp for tardy release, and hold grudge for rest of year. That show them!

Thankfully, it was worth the wait. Actually, that doesn’t even cover our reaction. My eyelids were peeled back for the length of the movie, blinking only when tears poured forth, which they did with increasing frequency as the movie progressed. As a result, I have a bone to pick with genius director Brad Bird. I was already pointlessly annoyed that I would not be able to pick my favourite film of the year from the double whammy of excellence that was Zodiac and The Bourne Ultimatum, and now this comes along. Three totally different movies, but all of them absolutely perfect. Ratatouille is the pinnacle of computer animation, filled with remarkably fluid movement, beautiful colours, believable textures, and to top it all, it provides more food for thought than almost every other movie I’ve seen this year.


Damn, I’m so late to the party. All of this has already been said, but I have to chime in, because my love for this movie is so overwhelming. Technically, it is as good as movies get. I felt like the silver screen was kissing my eyeballs, and just to rub it in, the pitch-perfect voicework and Michael Giacchino’s adorable soundtrack were nuzzling my ears. If a movie could hug you, that’s what Ratatouille would do from the first frame to the last.

If that was all the movie did, it would be enough to put it high up on any self-respecting film watcher’s top ten list for the year (if list-making is your bag; certain other contributors to this site are not so keen), but Brad Bird expands and clarifies some of the themes introduced in his masterpiece, The Incredibles. Though I’m more than a little unsure about some of the potential Objectivist, Ayn-Randian philosophies suggested by that film, I find the idea of celebrating excellence very appealing. When I heard that Ratatouille featured a similarly controversial message to that of The Incredibles, I was worried that a trend was developing that might retrospectively make the lesson of the earlier movie seem less endearing. Was Bird going to use all of his movies to espouse some awful, selfish, right-wing nonsense I would find it hard to get behind?


Thankfully, I’m convinced the movie is less about promoting devotion to the all-powerful uber-mensch, and more about celebrating excellence and intelligence. I took from it a message about having faith in yourself and doing everything you can to do what you do best, even in the face of indifference or lack of support. Early on in the film Remy’s talent and curiosity and yearning for knowledge are treated by his family as a waste of time and energy. His rat brethren might come around by the end of the film (without ever being able to see the big picture the way Remy does), but at the start of the movie they are an ignorant mob who distrust intelligence. I could hate the movie for making them step into line at the end, but it’s not presented as the actions of an automaton army governed by the confidence of a Objectivist right-wing control-freak, but as an expression of trust in a natural leader. Arguments can rage for years about whether Disney just funded a fun, vibrant, colourful, kid-friendly adaptation of The Fountainhead, but I thought it was about trusting someone you love to do what they need to do to be happy, and encouraging and helping them in achieving their goal. It’s one of the most uplifting endings I’ve been lucky enough to see.


Even better than that is the arc of Anton Ego, the curmudgeonly critic who haunts the movie as a passive antagonist until the final few minutes of the movie. I don’t wish to ruin the end of the movie for those of you who have yet to see it (and if you read this and have any sense, you will rush to a cinema immediately), but there is a scene involving him that is filled with such simple, honest beauty that I blarted hot tears all over Canyon, who was in a similar situation, from what she told me later. My heart, it melted.

The see-sawing negative and positive treatment of Anton Ego and the art of criticism sadly reminded me of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, which is one of the bitterest films I’ve ever seen. Stung by the reviews of The Village, Shyamalan and his very thin skin went all out to get his own back on critics. In the middle of his preposterous, badly-thought out, dreary tale of Scrunts (dog/lawn hybrids), Narfs (Bryce Dallas Howard after an injection of creepy), Tartutics (angry monkey warriors, and no, they’re not as cool as that sounds), and Great Eatlons (just a really big eagle), Shyamalan introduces Harry Farber, a film critic (played by Bob Balaban), who thinks there is no originality left, and as a result is incapable of joy or empathy or anything. He treats everyone like dirt (including adorable semi-hero Cleveland Heep, played with typical intensity and commitment by Paul Giamatti), and his confidence in his own ability to parse the mechanics of story-telling nearly dooms Bryce Dallas Howard to death by LawnDog when he inaccurately interprets some unnecessarily complex rules of Narfdom conveyed in obnoxiously grandiose and slow-moving scenes of ear-tugging and, and, and… Ugh! It’s too complicated, contrived, and stupid to go into in full detail. Just believe me, it’s horrible horrible storytelling.

If anyone here has the DVD and has seen the deleted scenes, please tell me if there are any featuring Farber throwing kittens off his balcony, or making baby stew. He’s practically that villainous and unpleasant in the movie. It’s an even worse directorial decision than basing the plot around a writer who will save the world by writing the most important book ever, and then deciding that the only person qualified to play that part is, well, M. Night Shyamalan himself. Actually, it’s a toss-up. Both decisions are monumentally wrongheaded.


The worst scene in the film (or in any film that year except for certain unsavoury scenes in Neil LaBute’s ode to woman-hating, The Wicker Man) comes when Farber gets killed by Shyamalan’s instrument of justice, the Rogue Scrunt. Farber is cornered as in the photo above, and has watched so many dull and uninspiring movies (unlike Shyamalan’s, of course), that he now see everything through a Robert-McKee-Story prism. This is his external monologue prior to being eaten:

Farber: Hello? Is the bathroom on this level working? [Scrunt walks into view and menaces Farber] A dog inside the building! Go! Shoo! Why you’re not a dog at all. My god, this is like a moment from a horror movie. This is precisely the moment where the mutation or beast will attempt to kill an unlikable side character. But, in stories where there has been no prior cursing, violence, nudity or death, such as in a family film, the unlikable character will escape his encounter, and be referenced later in the story, having learned valuable lessons. He may even be given a humorous moment to allow the audience to feel good about him. This is where I turn to run. You will leap for me, I will shut the door, and you will land a fraction of a second too late. [turns to walk away]
Scrunt: [Leaps onto Farber and starts eating him] Growl! This is for saying the twist in The Village was obvious! Rend! Tear! Signs was a masterpiece, you nasty hurtful meanies, and not an hour and a half of genius followed by twenty minutes of potentially career-killing stupidity! Chomp! I’m the best director in the world, and not the patron saint of arrogance and hubris like what you said! Slurp! You taste like poo, you poo man! And you smell like poo! Glurp! Who’s laughing now? I just made a movie about how poo you are! [finishes eating, runs off into the night, sobbing]

It’s literally jaw-dropping. I know executives told him he would never get away with filming that scene, but to still go ahead with it takes brass balls. (Confession; I might have added the Scrunt dialogue. Or I might not. You’ll have to rent the movie and find out, won’t you?) In case I come across as someone harbouring a grudge against Shyamalan, I will add a disclaimer. His style is one of the most distinctive in Hollywood, and though he could stand to speed his movies up just a bit, that style can work amazingly well. He has a directorial eye that is second to none. The Farber death scene might be monumentally dumb, but it’s framed in such an original way and shot with such ravishing style and precision that the stupidity of it seems even worse in comparison. As for his other films, I liked The Sixth Sense a lot, and absolutely adored Unbreakable, which I think is his best movie. Even his dreck hasn’t put me off his next movie, The Happening, which sounds fantastic.

Sadly, Signs was good, up to a point, and after that, he’s disappointed me repeatedly. His style may be distinctive and his films may be beautiful, but only when he reins himself in. As soon as he goes too far with his stylistic tics, it falls apart. Critics who said The Village was nothing more than a Twilight Zone episode were not wrong. It’s a 45 minute story padded out to over twice that length with lots of slow walking and ponderous dialogue scenes, albeit shot with typical beauty by the wondrous Roger Deakins, and performed with immense conviction by a talented cast.

Lady in the Water too has glorious, award-worthy photography by Christopher Doyle, and features some great performances, but takes forever to tell an absurd and badly worked out story, featuring fantasy characters forced to adhere to nonsensical behavioural rules that serve only to drag a thin story out to feature length. Why can’t Narfs talk about their world and their relationship with Scrunts? Because Shyamalan says fairy tales are like that, so shut up and deal with the fact that that little arbitrary rule just added 20 very slow scenes to a movie that otherwise would have been over in half an hour. Why do all the Korean and Italian characters spend the movie shrieking and freaking out like a bunch of lazily written caricatures? Just say no to racial stereotyping, Shyamalan. And what was with Freddy Rodriquez’s pointless rubber arm?


That just made me laugh every time it turned up. Small comfort, though. It broke my heart to see Lady in the Water, not just because it’s an overlong and dreary vanity piece that’s as technically perfect and beautiful as it is moronic, but because it’s so so nasty, and confirmed reports of Shyamalan losing the plot while pitching the movie to Disney production president Nina Jacobson. I mean, I can kind of see why he reacted so badly. I’ve got a thin skin too, and I know if I got reviews that are half as severe as those received by Shyamalan (a notoriously criticism averse perfectionist), I’d cry for months. What I wouldn’t do, though, is build an entire movie around that anger and upset. That’s a hell of a complicated and expensive rattle to throw out of the pram.

Compare that to Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava’s creation, Anton Ego. At first I thought Bird was also demonising critics with many unsubtle directorial choices: making Ego look like a cross between a vampire and an undertaker; hinting that he is somehow accidentally responsible for the death of Gusteau; designing a study for him that is shaped like a coffin; making his motivation a desire to destroy the restaurant for no other reason than that he enjoys giving bad reviews. I was seriously beginning to flash back to Harry Farber being mauled by a Rogue ShyamaScrunt. If Bird had gone that way for the entire film, it would have ruined Ratatouille for me completely. Remember I said I didn’t want to ruin the film if you haven’t seen it? Let’s just leave it like this; bearing in mind what I think the worst finale of the film could have been, and how unsubtly the character was set up earlier, I was surprised at the direction Bird went in. Deliriously, joyously, tear-inducingly surprised. Shyamalan should be dragged from the set of The Happening and made to watch Ratatouille. Hopefully he will learn something about what criticism is, or can be. You never know, his heart might even melt.

Things I learnt today (Oct 16th 2007)

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1. Michael Clayton opened in the US last Friday, and box office pundits are shocked and horrified to find that it failed to secure the number one spot. IMDb said:

Michael Clayton, which had been the odds-on favorite among movie pundits to win the weekend box-office crown, not only didn’t finish in first place — it didn’t even make third place, as studio estimates had initially indicated. Clayton, it turns out, earned $10.37 million, putting it slightly behind the crime drama We Own the Night, which took in $10.83 million. Equally surprising to some writers was that the film that did top the box office charts was the low-budget Why Did I Get Married, from writer-producer-director Tyler Perry. The film raked in $21.35 million, about twice the earnings of The Game Plan, which placed second with $11.04 million.

Really? This is surprising? I’m psyched that Gorgeous George is committed to making challenging, intelligent, adulty films (not counting Danny Ocean’s European Vacation and Danny Ocean and the Amazing Xeroxed Plot From Two Films Ago), and grateful to him for having that ambition, even when it doesn’t quite work out: Good Night, and Good Luck was a terrific hour of cinema with an extra pointless 20 minutes bolted onto it. Wow, making even the mildest criticism of Clooney makes me feel like I’m kicking a handsome and debonair puppy. I’m sorry, George! Good Night looked beautiful! And it was really well cast! Please don’t hate me! Anyway, Syriana was good enough for two films, so it evens up.

Sadly, his smart, liberal, humanist movies tend to make very little money, and even taking into account the often limited release, the audience for these films is large enough to make the odd small profit, but not big enough to make waves in the turbulent box office waters. Solaris only made $14,973,382 in the domestic market, and $30,002,758 overall. It would have to sell a shitload of DVDs to make up the rest of the budget. Syriana did a lot better, with a worldwide gross of $93,974,620, but it had an opening weekend of $11,737,143. Not earth-shattering. That said, it only opened on about 1500 screens, and Michael Clayton opened on 1000 screens more, but the fallacy is that the relative, small-scale success of his smart movies can be expanded when released on a larger scale remains.

I remember noticing this error years ago, when big and successful action movies (usually those produced by Joel Silver), would often gross around £100-120m, domestic box office. No matter what the budget, the final figure was often the same (and significantly less for the failures). No-brainer jokey action movies would often top out at the same number, but budgets were busted chasing a finite audience. Sure, there were variations from that; Lethal Weapon 2, 3 and 4 could top that (by about $30m), as could the Die Hard movies, and Terminator 2 broke that barrier and then some, but they had a wider appeal. Bog-standard action movies had a fixed audience, and trying to get bigger box office by spending more money was foolish.


You had to appeal to people outside that box to do it. It wasn’t just spectacle that made Terminator 2 such a hit; it was the message of hope within it (and the CGI, which drew oohs and ahhs of amazement from the audience when I saw it. Ah, the 90s!). In today’s money, the same holds true; Bad Boys II and The Rock, for example, both stopped at about $140m, and Con Air and Gone In Sixty Seconds made $100m each. In the end they’re profitable, but the larger the budget, the smaller that profit. It’s science. Or maths. Whatever.

So yeah, putting Michael Clayton on more screens and pushing it with more publicity was not going to work. SmartClooney has a fanbase, and they came out this weekend, probably grateful for the release of something meatier than family comedies starring a wasted The Rock. But that’s the ceiling for these movies. So why did pundits miss this? And why the hell did they think the new Tyler Perry movie would make less money?


I know very very very little about these things, but right now that guy guarantees boffo box office (yeah, I went there). His films cost a few cents and make around $50-60m each time out. His opening weekends are between $20-30m. His last film opened bigger than this one, in fact, so why would this one not be a big hit? Did they really think the Tyler Perry bubble had burst? He’s not going anywhere any time soon. So anyway, I have learnt that box office pundits can often make terrible gaffes, and I have also learnt that the international gross of Diary of a Mad Black Woman was $19,104. I doubt the new film will be appearing in our local Vue any time soon. I’m sure the studio would love to up their take by releasing his films internationally, but I get the feeling they have no idea what the hell Perry’s appeal is, so how would they be able to market it? Best to just let it make the modest money it is, rather than admit his unusual shtick perplexes them. (Almost all of the figures here are from Box Office Mojo.)

2. I may love Institutionalised by Suicidal Tendencies (which I first heard on the stunning Repo Man soundtrack many years ago), but playing that shit on a plastic guitar while sleep-deprived like I did this morning can actually cause you to get so addled you might actually end up actually literally instititutionalised, for realsies. It may have snapped my brain right down the middle. Now all I can see when I close my eyes are the coloured dots of Guitar Hero II, relentlessly descending, forever falling, like day-glo blobs of concentrated hand-cramp juice dropping into my eyes. It’s a miracle I can type anything other than “Bzzzzt”, because of all the rhythm-game induced mind-static. But I cannot stop until I better my score. Is crack this addictive? I doubt it’s as entertaining.

3. Two reports on immigration were published yesterday, and while the left wing press focussed on the positive, the right wing press, predictably, concentrated on the negative. This is, of course, nothing new, but yesterday I found out that the reason the paper prints such skewed garbage is that Paul Dacre and his vile minions know for a fact that the core readership of the Mail is obsessed with Anti-Logic. This letter is, I promise you, absolutely real.


I have it on good authority that the majority of letters sent to the Mail offices are even more insane than the ones that make it into the paper, but this one must have slipped through. Oddly, there is no evidence of this mountain of work on the internet. Someone should tell this guy that he can publish his staggering, world-changing work on the internet, where it will be lauded and coveted for the rest of time. I mean, what did Einstein ever do for us, other than pull that funny face they keep putting on posters? Screw you, Einstein. Go back to the patent office and shuffle your papers. Did you ever make all of life’s intrinsic paradoxes perfectly rational? No, you made them worse! Overrated big-haired jerk.

4. ZOMG NEW LOST PHOTO!!!


What’s going on? What does it mean? Is that the cockpit of Oceanic 815? Desmond has resurfaced? How did they get so far into the island since the season 3 finale? Where’s Hurley and Jin? Is that writing above the windows of the plane? Why does the clapperboard guy look so pissed? Is he working for The Dharma Initiative? If not, why doesn’t he realise he’s a lucky son of a bitch to be working on the best show currently on TV, even though it’s not actually on TV right now? And what’s going to happen with new cast member Andrea “Rescue Me” Roth? She’s just been hired to play a therapist, according to TV Guide. I guess she’s situated off-island. If she was on the island she’d have been dealing with multiple daddy issues, which would be even less fun than being repeatedly slammed into the ground by Ol’ Smokey.

5. Viggo Mortensen is a fascinating son of a bitch, and I can’t wait to see Eastern Promises.

Mortensen plays a mobster working for a Russian gang in London, and to hone his portrayal he travelled to Moscow, St Petersburg and the mountain villages of the Urals.

He refused to take an interpreter, relying on gestures and his own facility for languages – he speaks Danish and Spanish fluently and can get by in four other languages.

“I know everyone was a little bit worried because I disappeared for two weeks,” he said. “They said I should have someone go with me into the underworld, but the whole point was not to get a filtered version of what Russians do and what they’re like.

“I just wanted to draw my own conclusions. I met a lot of people and talked to them. I met people who had experiences in prisons and understood more about street slang. They helped me tweak some of the dialogue.

“Then I found someone who had a car and he took me into the countryside and to these villages. There I saw how these mobsters looked at each other and how they lived. I also drank a lot of vodka.”

It was not until the last day of his trip that his cover was blown. “A little boy started staring at me, then he pointed and whispered, ‘Aragorn?’”

All this and his Amazing Flying Balls of Doom. Counting the days until it comes out.

6. The cook in the canteen where I work is the worst cook in the world. I ended up with a piece of peri-peri chicken that oozed blood when cut into, and after taking it back and having it cooked for a while longer (15 minutes), it had brown skin but pink flesh. I’m amazed I’m not doubled over in agony right now. A colleague bought some scrambled eggs, and they were off. Yesterday this guy made baguette halves with oily, droopy roast vegetables and nuclear-orange cheese. Just thinking about it is making me woozy. Time to start bringing sandwiches in again.

7. Studio 60 just arrived on UK terrestrial Channel 4, and I see that the oleaginous praise has continued. As we’ve said before, it’s not so much the praise that bothers us (everyone is, of course, entitled to their own opinion) [Hold on there -- the praise definitely bothers me, and if you like the show, your opinion is wrong -- Canyon], it’s the relentless carping that it failed because the audience (i.e. everyone who watches TV who isn’t a fan of the show) killed it. They mean you, if you’re not watching it. And if you are watching it, you’re not watching it enough! You should be transformed by it like someone rising from their wheelchair at Lourdes, and then you should badger all of your friends and families into watching it. If you’re not walking down the high street wearing a sandwich board showing a picture of Danny and Matt treating their womenfolk like teeny tiny toy people who should just damn well shut up and worship their glorious alpha male genitalia, then you are scum! SCUM!!! Much to our amusement/horror, we saw that Andrew Mueller was up to his old tricks at the weekend:

West Wing auteur Aaron Sorkin’s series set in the milieu of a late-night chat show is possibly the greatest example of a show out-clevering itself. As well as being a superior soap opera, an intelligent comedy and a brilliantly acted ensemble piece, Studio 60 functions as an insidious critique of a televisual culture in which anything intelligent is hunted down and killed by the agents of mediocrity – as Studio 60 indeed was, cancelled by its network inside its debut season. These first two episodes, which have finally landed on terrestrial, are a tantalizing hint of what’s to come.

If he thinks TV is so bad now, how about this 70s gem, from The Laurence Welk Show:

In comparison, I think we’re doing okay nowadays. Yes, there is a lot of crap on TV now, and networks are run by craven cowards with no understanding of counter-cultural ideas. We get that. However, there’s good stuff too. Someone please hand Mueller (and several other UK TV critics) a few boxsets. Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Arrested Development, everything by Whedon. Then you have the shows on cable: Battlestar Galactica; The Daily Show; The Colbert Report; all of the shows on the HBO roster. There is a point to be made that there isn’t enough biting satire on US (or UK) TV, or enough investigative journalism, but it’s not like there is no important, worthy work on TV, and besides, Sorkin making obvious points in his risible Studio 60 sketches is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Plus, it was often as emptily jingoistic as a Fox News broadcast, which was either Sorkin speaking from the heart or an attempt to placate his network masters in order to get more “subversive” stuff into the show. Like Crazy Christians. So much for Sorkin’s supposed moral courage.

Mueller and his ilk are right; the medium that is TV has an enormous hole in it, and Studio 60 tried to fill it. We will always need intelligent daring comedy and brave satire. But Studio 60 was. not. that. show. Which is why it was such a painful, frustrating, upsetting failure. Dear God, I have to let this go or I’ll go crazy. It never seems to end!

ETA: I can’t stop watching that Laurence Welk clip. Flap those arms in the xenon-rich air like you and your robot helper just don’t care! Then kick, Bobby and Cissy! Kick! Kick! Spin! Flap! Kick! Interpretive brilliance. Why was Spielberg so eager to get an Oscar for all those years when this superb tribute was out there? That’s just ungrateful.