Breaking the Fifth Wall

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Inside the Wall, Vol. 2 (7.1.12)

Here at the half-point for 2012, I'm ready to add Passion Pit's performance of "Sleepyhead" at the Governor's Ball to the short list of "best live performances of the year." It doesn't hurt that their visually arresting but often lackluster performance up to that point in the show had drained much of the energy of their studio cuts. It's hard to blame front man Michael Angelakos for cutting much of the falsetto intensity from his vocals; that kind of mania has to be impossible to maintain over an entire show. Still, it's the most striking feature on Passion Pit's otherwise standard-fair synth pop style that put them above tepidly enjoyable bands like Chromeo, who took the stage shortly before Passion Pit but generated barely half of their audience enthusiasm.

Coloring Outside the Franchise

(This is a spoiler heavy discussion, particularly with regard to Super 8, Cloverfield, (um) St. Elsewhere and Prometheus. You've been warned.)

There was a moment as I was watching Super 8 -- an enjoyable enough homage to Spielberg-style sci-fi adventures from the 1980s -- that I thought maybe J.J. Abrams had something up his sleeve, something that would have blown my mind if it was true. "Did Abrams make a Cloverfield prequel without telling anyone?!?" In today's age of a thousand websites devoted to dissecting the minutiae of every movie still, every comment by the director (or star, co-star or set caterer), every viral campaign launched (whether real or imaginary), could it be that Abrams slipped one past the goal keepers??? The sheer audacity of the idea excited me far more than the otherwise forgettable movie itself.

Inside the Wall, Vol. 1 (6.10.12)

(That name is tentative, as is the format. Basically, I'm going to try to post a semi-weekly round-up of what I'm checking out between the larger posts. )

It's been a solid summer so far across the board in entertainment.

Starting with music, Beach House put out a worthy follow-up to Teen Dream, which may have been my favorite album of 2010.

The new album Bloom doesn't measure up yet to that instant classic, but it's a solid offering that I expect I'll come to appreciate more with time.

Does Comedy Have To Be Funny? (part 2 of 2)

In the first part of this post (which it feels like I wrote forever ago), I ended with the question whether a "comedy" can be successful when the story takes precedence over the laughs. The question was inspired generally by my love of the so-called "anti-sitcom" Community and specifically by an epic (and private) rant by (anti-)cast member Chevy Chase. Here's a choice quote:

You've got two choices, one is storyline, the other is - you know, like everyone gives a [bleep] about the [bleep] story when they don't even know who the [bleep] characters are - or there is make people laugh.

Indeed, who does give a [bleep] about the story?

In the many weeks since that last post, both Community and Parks and Recreation seemed to embrace that question directly and forcefully, and in very different ways.

In Praise Of The "Semi-Sequel"

(The second part of my previous post will have to wait. My weekend got a little crowded and I have too much to say to do it justice for now, particularly given the latest episodes of Community and Parks and Recreation, which seemed tailor-made for that topic.)

Growing up, I can recall no criticism of Hollywood more common than the general disdain I and my friends had for sequels. They were the hallmark of creative bankruptcy, a cynical cash-in that was invariably little more than a pale retelling of the original (usually with one or two B-list replacements to substitute for whichever iconic actor refused to slum with whatever gun-for-hire director they found while the original director moved on to another "serious project"). Any movie aficionado who didn't want to get laughed out of the room knew by heart the movies that you could legitimately count as watchable in their own right -- Godfather II, Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Star Trek II and (with some small controversy) Superman II.

(For the advanced class, you could also discuss the certified short-list of acceptable remakes that improved on the original -- Maltese Falcon, Scarface, The Thing, The Fly, The Magnificent Seven and, perhaps ironically, Hitchcock's remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much.)

How times have changed.

Does Comedy Have To Be Funny? (part 1 of 2)

Fair warning upfront -- out of necessity, this post (and the blog in general) will focus heavily on the shows that take up the comparatively narrow sliver of time that I can give to watching any TV, let alone enough TV on a regular basis to form an opinion on any particular show.

This isn't out of principle, by the way, because I both love TV in general and also believe we're in a kind of Golden Age right now given all the high quality shows out there (see, e.g., Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Girls, 30 Rock, Bob's Burgers, to say nothing of the Christ-like return of Arrested Development from the grave), on top of the thousand-and-one different ways you can access content these days. I'm nowhere near the 2.7 hours a day average that most Americans watch TV, apparently, so I can't go all A.V Club TV Club or TV on the Internet about it - as much as I love those websites. Professional writers likes the kind that post on those websites can do detailed comparisons of dozens of shows, current and classic, because it is their day job. It's the dream, yes, but I have to work with the time I have.