15 3 / 2012
Armando Iannucci is a comedy genius
I really don’t say that lightly. Peter Cook’s probably smiling down on him.
I made a list for GQ about 10 of the best insults to come out of Iannucci’s oeuvre, which includes The Thick Of It, In The Loop*, The Day Today, and I’m Alan Partridge. I didn’t know he had his own show on the BBC, too. He’s very Scottish!
*Inside baseball, but it’s a shame In The Loop was released by the teensy IFC. Stupid economy! If a Fox Searchlight had got their hands on it, it would’ve gotten the Oscar noms it deserved, not just a token Best Screenplay. Arguably one of the best political satires ever.
Click on this and laugh in the most not safe for work way possible.
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24 1 / 2012
Remember when Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy had a plotline on an episode of Gilmore Girls that involved her character, Sookie St. James, getting super mad at Norman Mailer?
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19 7 / 2011
Pretty sure it’s time to just become a Breaking Bad blog. (It is, actually, one of the most unsatisfyingly “recapped” shows on the internet. Not that recapping is an art by any means - maybe? - but most people talking about Breaking Bad can’t contextualize it.) Don’t you love it when a work of art respects your intelligence?
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29 6 / 2011
Musings of an Inappropriate Woman: Mad Men: Meta-story of Women's Liberation or Patriarchy Porn?
Cassandra writes: Question for a bright feminist - why do so many women get upset that I find mad men depressing? If I say it looks like patriarchy porn men say fair enough but lots of women get upset and say it’s a metastory of womens liberation. no doubt you get many random pop culture…
Well, here’s the thing - I have tried to get my Mother into Mad Men. She’s seen a couple of episodes, but has said, “I really don’t want to relive that, honey.” In some ways, as a ginned-up soap opera that’s a record of a time where ideas were backward, it’s completely depressing, depending on your context. It feels like a lot of the Mad Men audience is at the age where it just seems exotic.
*Whether it ends up as a metastory about women’s liberation probably depends on how the show ends, is my guess. Is it Don Draper’s story, or is it Peggy Olsen’s?
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13 6 / 2011
logic vs. emotion
I just went through all five seasons of Friday Night Lights and it was glorious. The thing that I think is sort of funny about the show is that… logically, there were so many holes. How old was Tim Riggins, really? Characters switched classes and schools oh-so-easily. But I was okay with it because the emotional core of the show was so strong. I’m not quite sure how it got pulled off, maybe because the style was documentary hand-held, maybe because the actors were generally unfamiliar and worked with the scripts until the dialogue felt like riffing… I cared about the characters on this show in a way I don’t, generally, with TV. (It wasn’t just about “the moments,” which is a feint of an argument that justifies liking boring mumblecore films and Mad Men.) And Coach and Mrs. Coach, what a great, sexy, adult relationship. Seeing two smart people in a grown relationship is a valuable thing in these times.
Heather Havilresky’s piece in the New York Times Magazine nails some of the show’s greatness, cannily comparing it to the empty, emotionally bankrupt calories of Glee: “The real message of “Friday Night Lights” is a message about the joy of little things: the awkward thrills of a first kiss; the strange blessing of an unexpected rainstorm on a lonely walk home from a rough football practice; the startling surge of nostalgia incited by the illumination of football-stadium lights just as the autumn sun is setting; the rush of gratitude, in an otherwise mundane moment, that comes from realizing that this (admittedly flawed) human being that you’re squabbling with intends to have your back for the rest of your life. If “Glee” is about expressing yourself, believing in yourself and loving yourself all the way to a moment of pure adrenaline-fueled glory, then “Friday Night Lights” is about breathing in and appreciating the small, somewhat-imperfect moments that make up an average life.”
I’ve been working on something that I’m utterly frustrated with, and I think part of the reason things aren’t working out for it in a variety of ways is that it goes against some of the easy storytelling found in certain genres. It’s dark and weird, and it’s trying to be a response to some of the “you are the CHOSEN ONE” stories. The narrative of specialness. But if you do that, you need to nail every single emotional event and pain in someone’s life. I learned that from Friday Night Lights. We’ll see what happens.
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05 4 / 2011
Dating Jared Leto
There was a point in time where Jared Leto was dating a whole slew of twenty something actresses, and it made no sense. He was in his has-been phase, or he was pursuing his band or whatever (and they are inexplicably big, I believe). But seeing him squiring the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Lindsay Lohan confirmed one thing: the myth of Jordan Catalano lives on. These actresses are all younger than me, and my guess is they saw My So-Called Life in a tender, vulnerable time in their lives - and getting older, and hotter, they got to actually date Jordan Catalano and live the dream. Getting the chance to date Jared Leto must’ve been, for them, a moment in time where they were Angela Chase in the boiler room.
I saw Temple Grandin last year, kind of by accident, one of those movies that you settle on when you’re at a friend’s house and they have 500 channels on cable. If Temple Grandin had been released theatrically, mark my words, Claire Danes would’ve won the Oscar for best actress. Easily. (Which in itself is funny, because I bet she and Natalie Portman have been competing for parts since they were luminous teen actresses.) The movie was good, and it felt, somewhat, like a movie that would’ve been released theatrically even five years ago, as a passion project. Was Harvey Weinstein asleep at the wheel? It’s great that HBO put it out, but it would’ve been nice for the total media saturation that you would’ve gotten with a movie. Claire Danes won awards the whole season long, fifteen years after I thought that she was the best teenage actress I had ever seen.
I suppose Glee is filling the same role for kids that My So-Called Life did for me. I saw My So-Called Life when I was in seventh grade. It was aspirational. I looked up to Angela Chase as a friend and I knew that I would be her, in some form or fashion, in the future. My best friend dyed her hair kool-aid red and it washed out in a day. I’ve been rewatching the show with my boo recently; he never saw it, and letting him in on it feels like letting him in on secret teenage me. I wonder how Glee is affecting seventh graders these days. It has to be, in some ways, a really resonant time to be a gay teenager and to see some version of your life reflected in TV these days - and that’s what I think is important about Glee, which is just spottily entertaining - but ultimately, when it comes to realistic, well-written characters that you care about, it really can’t hold much of a candle up to My So-Called Life. It’s the rare show that gets that deeply inside someone’s specific human experience. But the echoes are kind of interesting.
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08 3 / 2011
The live action version of The Tick is now on Hulu. Patrick Warburton’s greatest performance ever. Comic gold. It may be my favorite superhero story, and I swear it’s etched onto my DNA - watching it, I realized that a giant project I was working on was very much Tick-inspired. Rushmore and Gilmore Girls, too. But they were all subconscious inspirations and that’s what made it spooky.
Internet research reveals some things: Colleen Atwood, Academy Award winning costume designer, made this iteration of The Tick’s costume. Ben Edlund calls the show “a superheroic portrait of genuine human lameness,” which is funny. (He works on Supernatural now, I guess?) After listening to Fresh Air’s replay of a 2002 interview with Tom Waits, I’m pretty convinced he is The Tick. But that is a whole other post. He at least talks in Tickisms.
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01 3 / 2011
Mad Men is not a TV show I watch for the stunning visuals, in a cinematography that works kind of way. (I think Breaking Bad is the best filmed show on TV, and they love to show off) Mad Men is beautiful in selected stills, but it’s often quite static.
That said, this still is basically a painting.
(From Molly Lambert’s latest This Recording Gender Breakdown. Particular points of interest - the Yoko Ono paragraph is pure truth, and I wish that she would write a dishy tell-all someday, but is it in Ono’s personality to “dish?” Also, her writing about male directors being nominated for Best Director at the Oscars… so good.)
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