Who Would've Thought Giant Robots Fighting Space Monsters Could Be Subtle?

While I haven't fully given up on this year's crop of summer's blockbusters (not with The Wolverine, Kick-Ass 2 and The World's End still to be seen), I do believe this is the most disappointing summer I can recall -- at least for the major studio flicks.  Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel both disappointed to degrees I just hadn't anticipated beforehand, as I discuss briefly here and here, respectively.  One of the few bright spots, discounting the better of the non-blockbuster movies I've seen, was the non-franchise, non-sequel, non-reboot Pacific Rim.  I'll admit that I had little to no hope in this film going into it, despite having had a good enough time with Guillermo del Toro's films in the past.  But after a year of so many overlong and overwrought (yet simultaneously small-minded) special effects blowouts, Pacific Rim was surprisingly streamlined and effective by comparison.

Superficially a single-premise film (i.e. Space Monsters vs. Giant Robots), the movie also delivered a stealth message that I was surprised to find afterward received almost no attention from film critics. I don't have much to say about the movie's artistic merits here, but I thought the reaction (or lack thereof) from so many critics to the movie's obvious subtext says something interesting about what contemporary moviegoers expect from a "message" movie, as opposed to a fun summer blockbuster.

While Pacific Rim has few spoilable moments, I will give you the standard issue "spoiler warning" regardless and continue this discussion below the fold.

Watching the Pot Boil: Reflections on Breaking Bad and Long-Form Ficton

The final eight episodes of Breaking Bad begin this week, bringing with them the promise of a massive payoff that's been five years in the making.  Series-creator Vince Gilligan has summed up the show as one simple concept, the transformation of Mr. Chips into Scarface (that is, the transformation of a over-the-hill chemist teacher into a meth-dealing kingpin). While it's true that Gilligan's meth-dealing epic is part of trend of hyper-masculine, antihero character studies that followed in the Sopranos' wake, Breaking Bad's singular focus, cohesion and discipline of storytelling is deserving of special attention.  So much of modern culture seems to play out like a reverse-"Stanford marshmallow experiment", promising maximum for those who refuse to wait.  At the risk of sounding like the kids are on my yard again, I have to give props to TV that fully realizes the potential of the medium -- long-form fiction that breathes, takes its time and pays off only when the time is right.

Of course, quality is quality and any style or genre done right is worth watching.  All that said, when a creative work bucks the trend in all the right ways, it's worth standing up and taking note.  It's a big world and there's room for instant gratification alongside the long, slow payoffs.  But Breaking Bad's narrative successes also say something about the ways so much of modern culture fails to nail the landing.  (Before I say anything more, here's your spoiler warning for Star Wars, the Iron Man movies, Man of Steel, Looper, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, True Blood, Treme, and - of course - Breaking Bad through the fourth season.)

No, The Seattle Audience Wasn't "Aggressively Displeased" By Big Freedia

I recently moved to Seattle from New York, and my new hometown gave me a great welcoming present -- a well-timed concert by The Postal Service at the KeyArena.  I was surprised to see that they were playing such a large venue, being a one-off side project of Ben Gibbard that had released only a single album a decade ago.  (It made a little more sense to me that they had played the Barclays Center in New York, where even small up-and-coming acts will often play large venues even if they're otherwise playing in dive bars when they tour cross-country.)  Unsurprisingly, much of the arena was empty the night of July 18th, and so the opening act carried the significant burden of trying to fill an 18-thousand capacity space with maybe 18 hundred attendees trickling in.  This is the context in which it seems many Seattlites (myself included, if I may adopt my new home town's moniker) were introduced to one particularly spunky opening act who goes by the drag personae Big Freedia.

For those of you who haven't heard of Big Freedia before either, the Wikipedia summary is that she's "an American musician known for work in New Orleans genre of hip hop called bounce music."  For those of you who haven't heard of "bounce music" before, here was my introduction to "bounce" (and, unbeknownst to me at the time, to the Queen Diva herself) from the HBO not-really-a-hit series Treme:

You might notice that the scene takes place in a loud, crowded bar packed with sweaty people getting their groove on -- i.e. not in a 18k-capacity arena that's 90% empty but for a few stragglers having their first sip of beer after getting off of work.  Some of those stragglers were less enthralled by Big Freedia and her three booty-shaking consorts on stage, and they took to Twitter to make their opinions known.  This sliver of a reaction proved to be the spark that set off a small firestorm of criticism from one Katie Ryder, who's brutal take-down of "the white audiences" that "aggressive[ly]" responded to Big Freedia allegedly because they felt "confront[ed]" by Big Freedia's "transgress[ion] into a physical room of whiteness" was recently published on Salon.com.

I'm here to say "balderdash!" Balderdash, I say! Aside from extrapolating to a ridiculous degree the reaction of a handful of the Twitterati to an entire audience, Ms. Ryder ignores entirely the delicate balance that goes into a successful concert experience, while at the same time sadly reducing Big Freedia to a "tolerance litmus test."  It's hard not to conclude that Ms. Ryder's article is a conclusion in search of an argument.  She clearly has something to say about the appropriation of black culture by white musicians (which may easily be said to summarize much of American music in general from the late 1800s to the present but in this case summarizes Miley Cyrus's foray into "twerking").  And perhaps the opportunity to package that message together with everybody's favorite hobby these days -- hispter-punching -- was just too tempting.  (I can't wait for the third season of Girls to start so that we can read another dozen articles about the blinding whiteness of Lena Dunham, a topic that just can't be explored enough!)

But before we try to unpack just what the hell Miley Cyrus has to do with a dozen or so tweets from KeyArena and whether Big Freedia made sense as an opening act in The Postal Services' stadium tour, let me share a few thoughts on the strange alchemy of finding the perfect concert experience (and the many pitfalls that can turn an amazing show into a forgettable or even uncomfortable one).

What I Hear When I Hear People Defend "Man Of Steel" Based On Its Visuals ...

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Man of Steel, Episode One: The Phantom Menace Zone

(Quick programming note -- it's been almost two months since my last post, as I've spent the bulk of that time moving to a new city and finding a new job.  So if you begin to notice a distinctly "west coast" quality to my writing, as opposed to the "east coast" stylings of my previous posts, that would be the result of my recent relocation from Manhattan to Seattle.  And now back to your irregularly scheduled program ...)

Me: Hey, so did you hear that new symphony orchestra last night? What did you think?

Other Guy (OG):  Oh man, the trumpets!  They were so loud!  It was amazing!

 (continued below the fold ...)

Well, Which Iron Man Was I Watching?

Pop quiz ... which entry in the Iron Man series am I describing?

(This game necessarily involves spoilers, so follow me below the line to continue.)

On Ninja Angels And True TV Enlightenment

I'm a Midwesterner by upbringing as well as a Catholic, though I can't say I really identify with either identity now in my adulthood.  When it comes to the latter, I'm apparently in some very good company.  According to a recent Pew survey, while Catholics still constitution the single largest religious denomination in the United States at 23.9% of the population, a whopping one out of every ten adult Americans is a "lapsed Catholic."  (By way of comparison, the Catholics have lost more members than the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims and "Historically Black Churches" have acquired put together.)

For whatever theological qualms I came to develop with official church doctrine (which I needn't go into here), I quickly came to appreciate one thing in particular about Catholicism as it's practiced in America (and in my hometown of St. Louis in particular, a city known as the "Rome of the West" for its high Catholic population) when I traveled upstate for undergrad college in the sleepy rural town of Kirksville, Missouri.  In a few words, Catholics keep it in church.  I'm not talking about being a "Christmas/Easter Christian", or a "salad bar Christian".  I mean, Catholicism by and large doesn't busy itself with inserting itself into every moment and facet of life, or getting in the face of every passerby even when (particularly when) it's uninvited.

I'm looking at you, Bible Belt of America.

The first week of college was a real wake-up call to be suspicious of every friendly face that suddenly wanted to be my best bud on campus.  Give a Born Again Christian fifteen minutes and the conversation will quickly turn from "what classes do we have in common" to "have you invited Jesus Christ to be your personal savior?"  Midwestern politeness (and a deep urge to end the conversation as soon as possible) kept me from saying, "Yeah, after ten years of Catholic elementary and four years of Jesuit high school education ... me and the JC go back a few years, but I'm glad you had an epiphany last week and saw God in your cereal or whatever."

Outside of the classroom, I can easily say that the two biggest lessons I took from my undergraduate years is that (a) our culture is deeply awash in Christianity, and (b) many practicing Christians are convinced that, to the contrary, our culture is thoroughly godless in general and deeply anti-Christian in particular.  I've never quite figured out how these two things can be simultaneously true, how I could pass by dozens upon dozens of Christian-themed billboards on the four-hour drive to Kirksville, along with enough churches to give practically every Missouri resident their very own congregation of one, only to hear upon arrival that Christians are in fact a persecuted class of citizens in this heathen country.  This, of course, extends to our entertainment industry, which is widely disparaged as a wellspring of anti-Christian messages.

I still don't fully understand why the Christian Persecution Complex is so pervasive, but at least when it comes to the supposed "lack" of positive Christian entertainment, I think I know part of the answer.

Victory Has Defeated The Simpsons

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(Programming note -- my goal is to post at least once a week at the beginning of the week, and so far this year, my track record hasn't been horrible.  Recently, I've been devoting a lot of my non-work-hours to planning a move from New York to Seattle, and this blog has suffered as a result.  I can't promise anything, but tune in on Mondays and I'll do my best to stick to a weekly schedule.)

I had a near perfect New York weekend a few weeks back, starting with a Louis CK benefit show for PS3 Elementary on Friday (minus the fifteen minutes he had to spend lecturing rambunctious PS3 teachers to stop heckling him), the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts at the best cinema house in all the five boroughs -- the Nitehawk -- on Saturday, and unstoppable party machine FM Belfast at The Studio at Webster Hall on Sunday.  It was an embarrassment of riches and left me with far more to contemplate than I had time to write about ... the fine art of heckler confrontation, the spinelessness of the Academy awarding the Oscar to the flavorless Pepsi-commercial that was Paperman instead of Adam And Dog, the challenge of convincing friends to take a chance on a new band they haven't heard before ...

Instead of all that, the winner this week is The Simpsons, and specifically the question that stuck with me now weeks later (now that my schedule has opened up enough to type this post out): Why can't they make a modern-day TV episode of The Simpsons as simple and clever as "The Longest Daycare"? Maybe they were angling for the Oscar and, thus, needed to release the short in theaters to qualify. Maybe they were brushing up their animation chops as a trial run for the next Simpsons Movie (which is apparently not going to happen any time soon)? Or maybe it was just too experimental -- a dialogue-free segment without B- and C-plots or celebrity stunt casting to keep things "zany." But ... why does it have to be zany? If I'm right, if it's the latter explanation, then I'd like to spend a minute lamenting this staple of my childhood before casting it off the iceberg of Great TV Shows That Were.